One of the recurring jokes of my now-defunct Donald Drumpf parody account on Twitter was that Drumpf never expected to win in 2016 and ran for President only to build an email list big enough to compete with long-established right-wing grifters such as Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee.
Because if there was one thing Trump knew for certain when picking his party, it was that conservative voters were easier marks than liberals when it came to selling them shit.
Mike Huckabee, for example, has long peddled a ridiculous line of cartoon history books.
Huckabee's whitewashed version of history has been such a success it's now being integrated into the Texas school curriculum. Huckabee has also maintained his visibility with a corny variety show featuring monologues, nutjob guests, and some guitar playing. The "Huckabee" show debuted on Fox News in 2015 and has played weekly on TBN since 2017.
This is the kind of life that Trump would have been happy to live for the past eight years if only, in a sliding doors world, Hillary had simply visited Wisconsin.
The ability to sell merch to MAGA poorly educateds has been the gift that keeps on giving for the man whose previous short-term cash grabs involved putting his name on everything from steaks to Chinese-made shirts to urine tests.
Even during his 2024 run, Trump frequently interrupted his campaign to peddle priced-to-sell products such as Bibles, sneakers, coins, and watches. (In case any foreign governments wanted to slip him a bribe, he also priced one of his watches at $100,000.)
But when you’re selling fungible items, the retail price has to have some connection to reality.
That's why, by 2024, Trump was more than ready to move beyond his Huckabee-level grifting.
Trump leapt into the easiest grift of all: cryptocurrencies
Trump and Melania had already dabbled in the NFT craze. But after that bubble burst, they discovered no one really wants to pay $100 for a JPEG. (Even one in which Trump is cosplaying as a superhero.)
In the MAGA-Musk Multiverse, the real hustle is in cryptocurrencies.
As a mere single-digit billionaire, Trump was happy to be welcomed into the back rooms where the crypto whales were cooking up the next phase of their scam. In exchange for them "plowing tens of millions of dollars" into his campaign, he promised to be their "Crypto President."
Now they just need to crash the dollar
During the "crypto winter" of 2022-23, Bitcoin spent several months at or below $20,000. But, even in those dark days, those promoting the currency never wavered from their "one day it will hit $1 million" promises.
Even today, with Bitcoin's price soaring above $90,000 since Trump's election, the "inevitable" $1 million price would "guarantee" today's buyers what Fidelity's Peter Lynch used to call a tenbagger. (Or for those who got in at $20K, a fiftybagger.)
Lynch, of course, was famous for telling people to "kick the tires" before they put money into any investment. In the case of Bitcoin kicking the tires reveals that, in addition to crypto evangelists/scammers like the Winklevoss twins, you'll also be getting into a windowless van filled with organized crime gangs and money launderers.
The Winklevosses are clearly hoping that Trump's election will garner them more than the $65 million they got for creating Facebook (and help them recoup the $1.1 billion they were forced to refund investors who were defrauded in their failed Gemini crypto exchange).
The Bitcoin hustlers have a dream that their "decentralized" funny money will one day replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
Until then, because Venmo's not always an option, Trump's AG pick Matt Gaetz thinks people should be allowed to pay their taxes with Bitcoin. That move came after his sex trafficking partner Joel Greenberg tried to buy himself a pardon with $250,000 in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin aside, the opportunities for manipulating other meme currencies will be enormous in the years ahead.
Musk has already dodged one lawsuit accusing him and Tesla of "pumping and dumping" DOGE when it was just a memecoin. Steve Bannon and Boris Epshteyn not only fleeced crypto rubes with a scam currency—they also failed to donate to the charities they claimed to be supporting.
Trump, of course, has launched his own crypto Ponzi scheme with the help of Barron and other offspring, some small time criminals, and his close friend, real estate investor (and new Middle East envoy) Steve Witkoff.
Cash isn't king, Trump is
In his second term, Trump—our now-immune-from-prosecution fascist king—will be at the center of an unprecedented grifting operation, bathing in a golden shower of emoluments.
Meanwhile, his inner circle will be seeking to fulfill their own agendas.
Mike Huckabee will be trying to bring an end to all Earthly history as our Rapture-ready Ambassador to Israel.
Steve Bannon and Erik Prince will be seeking to destroy NATO and Social Security while simultaneously crashing the dollar.
A shift from the dollar as a global reserve currency would cause "wrenching shock in America," (said Erik Prince). But it would at least force America to bring its spending back in line with the actual capacity of our production. This would mean wrecking our Social Security system or our defense apparatus, or possibly both, but according to his view our spending is so disconnected from our material reality that it would still be "entirely a good thing."
And, as Gil Duran writes, Elon Musk and associates will be leading "the tech takeover of the US government."
Trump has always been lazy and stupid. As he grows increasingly demented over the next four years, he'll be the mad king everyone's trying to manipulate.
His economic incompetence may soon cause severe tariff inflation—and his mass deportations may spark riots and food shortages.
Meanwhile, as America's "temporary hardship" becomes harder and less temporary, the tech billionaires will continue to promise a world of future abundance while Trump strives to reassure MAGA voters that the wealth will trickle down... eventually.
But that's where we are.
Half the country voted for fascism.
One third of Americans are already on the crypto roller coaster.
All of us will need to HODL.
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P.S. This really is the time to get off X once and for all. Please find me on Bluesky and these other places.
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