Is this Trump's biggest corruption yet?

Connect the dots.

Last week, Trump’s social media corporation — Trump Media and Technology Group, in which Trump personally owns a majority of shares — announced plans to sell financial products, including a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), aimed at what Trump calls the “patriotic economy.” Its shares jumped 6 percent on the news.

Devin Nunes, Trump Media’s CEO, said the Trump ETFs give investors a chance to put money into “American energy, manufacturing and other firms that provide a competitive alternative to the woke funds and debanking problems that you find throughout the market.”

Woke funds? Debanking problems?

Two weeks ago, Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to direct the FBI, was given 25,946 shares in Trump Media, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. They are now worth about $840,000. What was this a payoff for?

Last weekend, the Trump-Musk regime shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The federal government is no longer protecting consumers of financial products. Trump-Musk ordered all work to stop at the CFPB. Its X account was deleted and its homepage unplugged. CFPB employees who went to the building Sunday to retrieve things they needed to work remotely were turned away by security.

Keep connecting the dots.

The shutting of the CFPB was welcomed by the crypto crowd, including Musk, and by those issuing Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, such as Trump.

Besides his financial interest in crypto, Musk has stated publicly he’s seeking to create an “everything app” that could be used for all financial transactions. Mark Zuckerberg and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen are aiming for the same thing.

The CFPB had proposed that such apps be supervised the same way banks are supervised. Well, scratch that now. No supervision. And no insurance by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Brace yourselves for fraud and bank runs.

Musk, Zuckerberg, and Andreessen — all Trump backers and lapdogs — had claimed that the CFPB was trying to “debank” or remove them and other Trumpers from the banking system. In fact, the CFPB proposed the first-ever rule to block debanking.

Andreessen is invested in companies like Synapse, which have cost many people’s life savings. Some firms in his portfolio were shut down by the CFPB for scamming people. Zuckerberg says Meta is not a bank, although it has a payments business and Zuck wants to start a currency.

Now, connect all the dots and what do you see? An oligarchy unleashed and in the open. Their extraordinary wealth is buying the power to make them even wealthier.

It’s bad enough that Trump and Musk are making room for their own personal financial products and those of their major backers.

Trump’s financial products also invite people and corporations seeking to curry favor with him to invest in his products. Outright bribery.

Who will be left holding the bag? Surely anyone gullible enough to put their savings into one of these initiatives. Worst case, all of us if the stock market crashes and pulls the economy down with it.

This, my friends, is pure corruption. Mark my words: It will blow up in Trump’s and Musk’s faces. I just hope it doesn’t blow up in ours.

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Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.