Experts fume as Trump's 'sleaziest' grift explodes to 'gargantuan' problem

President Donald Trump reacts, as he attends a ceremony held to dedicate a 4-mile stretch of road from West Palm Beach Airport to his Mar-a-Lago estate. (REUTERS)

Multiple experts sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump and his family's "sleaziest" second-term grift, warning a New York Times writer that it is exploding into a "blatant and gargantuan" problem.

In a new piece published Tuesday morning, Thomas Edsall dove into Trump and his family's much-discussed cryptocurrency dealings, which have been widely derided as the most disastrously and obviously corrupt facet of his many post-reelection grifts. They are certainly his most profitable, with recent financial disclosures revealing that crypto business alone netted Trump at least over $1 billion in 2025.

Edsall, for his part, wrote that this crypto business "exemplifies all of the sleaziest aspects of the president’s code of conduct."

"It is almost certainly unconstitutional and may well be illegal," Edsall argued. "Estimates vary, but according to a cryptocurrency analytics firm reported on in The Times, the Trumps made at least $1.4 billion, and their investors, lost nearly $4 billion from purchases of Trump-linked crypto. These purchases have — let’s say — coincided with pardons, dropped investigations and favorable regulatory decisions. This crypto scheme is central to President Trump’s personal agenda: to use his office to vastly increase his and his family’s fortune."

Edsall also spoke to various experts well-versed in the modern cryptocurrency landscape who raised serious alarms about the dangers of Trump's dealings. Molly White, an independent analyst behind the "Citation Needed" newsletter, was among the first names most people suggested to him.

"I do think Trump’s dealings are both illegal and unconstitutional," White explained. "While it’s challenging to definitively prove a quid pro quo, the sheer number of times an individual or company has supported Trump’s campaign or invested in his crypto businesses and then quickly enjoyed favorable policy treatment or regulatory relief is so long it’s hard to believe it’s all coincidence. The deals with the U.A.E. and the business with Justin Sun are particularly fishy. There should be serious investigations into all of this, whether under the foreign emoluments clause or 18 USC §201, and Trump should face both impeachment and criminal consequences."

Eswar Prasad, a professor of International Trade Policy at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, also spoke to Edsall for the piece, and called Trump's crypto ventures "a blatant and gargantuan conflict of interest."

"Trump’s explicit boosterism of the crypto industry, which has given the industry greater legitimacy along with lax regulation, has gone hand in hand with the Trump family’s extensive financial entanglements with the cryptocurrency ecosystem," Prasad said. "Trump and his family have hardly been shy about cozying up to crypto tycoons and have been quite brazen in their pay-for-play approach to this sector. Crypto executives willing to provide financial support to the Trump family’s crypto-related ventures have received access to the president and top officials, favorable regulatory rulings and even pardons when convicted of crimes.

"It is surreal," he added, "to have the Trump family not only profiting off a financial venture that features glaring conflicts of interest but doing so in a way that blocks other investors from sharing in the gains. The extensive conflicts of interest and the asymmetric treatment of other investors make this a staggering violation of basic norms that ought to govern the actions of holders of any public office, let alone the presidency of the United States."

Nicholas Weaver, a senior research scientist at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, succinctly summed up why Trump's crypto dealings are explicitly harmful to other investors in the space.

"Everything in cryptocurrency is zero-sum at best and negative-sum in most of the cases, so every $ ‘made’ by someone comes at someone else’s expense," he wrote.

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