Trump’s fans got 'trash' while Trump got rich: WSJ report

A person attends the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) USA 2026 at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center, in Grapevine, Texas, U.S., March 27, 2026. REUTERS Daniel Cole

The Wall Street Journal reports that not only did President Donald Trump make a cool $1 billion off his connections to the White House, he managed to do it in a way that made his MAGA fans and supporters catch the short end of the grifting stick.

Morten Christensen made a big bet on digital tokens sold by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial (WLF) last year, hoping that a surge in value might be enough to help him retire. But the WSJ reports the value of those tokens instead tanked.

“While Christensen and many like him lost big, the president made a fortune, netting $800 million from that crypto project, according to a financial disclosure he filed this week.

“In crypto, people say a game is a game,” said Christensen, a digital-asset entrepreneur. “He played a better game than I did.”

Others were much less generous over their losses.

“My investment is trash now,” one user said of their WLF tokens.

"People backed Trump because they believed he would fight for them and were hoodwinked into thinking he cared about the working classes who brought him into power,” said a longtime Republican activist familiar with grassroots sentiment among Trump's MAGA base. “Seeing billions tied to crypto makes some loyal supporters uncomfortable and most of them have no idea what crypto is, let alone have the resources to invest in it. They feel this isn't public service anymore."

“The president raked in cash by issuing new assets — World Liberty tokens and memecoins. But those who bought them at high prices had to suffer as their value went belly up, part of a wider crash in crypto,” reports WSJ. “Political followers and crypto true believers who bought into the Trump brand were left holding the bag. A crypto summer for the president was a crypto winter for them.”

All told, roughly two-thirds of investors in Trump’s memecoin are currently in the red, according to crypto data provider Nansen, which tracks 1.48 million crypto wallets that bought the token since its January 2025 launch. Many fans spent thousands of dollars on Trump coins while the biggest spenders shelled out millions for the token.

Nansen’s analysis of 26,663 wallets shows a whopping 85 percent of World Liberty’s $WLFI token buyers in the secondary market are underwater.

This, said WSJ, was a big step away for a president who in 2021 described bitcoin as a “scam” that threatened the U.S. dollar. Now, however, Trump leads a White House that has pledged to make America the “crypto capital of the world.”

“As his administration lightened regulation of the notoriously boom-and-bust sector, the Trump family’s sprawling crypto business reached into nearly every corner of the industry, drawing conflict-of-interest concerns from ethics watchdogs,” reports WSJ. “Bitcoin prices also plunged.”

The White House, meanwhile, has sworn to unleash "an unrelenting, full-scale assault on the fraudsters, scammers, and corrupt operators who have looted billions from American taxpayers," with the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud moving "at unprecedented speed and ferocity to root out the waste, abuse, and criminal exploitation ... "that have drained billions from hardworking taxpayers."

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