The Trump family is taking crypto payoffs in the middle of Fifth Avenue. Who will stop them?

A trucking logistics magnate from Monterrey, Mexico, named Javier Selgas didn’t need to direct a rig laden with crypto cash toward Trump Tower on New York’s gilded Fifth Avenue to make a politically strategic investment in the family of America’s 47th president — but he might as well have.

Selgas, the CEO of Freight Technologies Inc, a cross-border trucking concern, said his firm recently purchased $20 million worth of the $TRUMP memecoin — a faddish type of cryptocurrency with no inherent value other than its ownership by Donald Trump, his family and close allies — for the explicit purpose of lobbying the White House on tariffs.

How do we know this? Because Selgas said so himself, both in a public news release and in a related filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, needed to sell bonds for this international company to invest in the Trump family coin. The CEO said its $20 million purchase would be “an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced and free trade between Mexico and the U.S.”

It sure could be. The Mexican entrepreneur’s large investment in the $TRUMP coin, which features his famous “fight” gesture after last July’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., would seem to guarantee an invitation for Selgas to an unprecedented — and I mean that in the worst possible way — event. The president recently announced that the top 220 holders of the $TRUMP meme coin are invited to dine with him at his Virginia golf course on May 22, while the top 25 will get exclusive facetime with POTUS 47.

So a foreign multimillionaire with $20 million to burn on a meme coin will get to personally plead his case for relief from the 25% tariff that the Trump regime imposed on Mexican goods earlier this year. An everyday American schlub who can’t afford a $25 margarita or find a doll for their daughter on a barren store shelf could never dream of such access.

This shockingly brazen case of the Selling of the President 2025 (as watchdogged by the group Accountable.us and HuffPo’s S.V. Date) probably should have been a huge breakthrough national story but it hasn’t been, for arguably a couple of reasons.

On one hand, the $20 million windfall wasn’t the largest or most dubious foreign investment in “Trump Inc.” this week — not by a longshot. In Dubai, the Trump family cryptocurrency venture called World Liberty Financial — a separate operation from the meme coin — announced that a concern backed by the oil dictatorship of Abu Dhabi is buying $2 billion of its digital coins to complete a deal with a troubled top crypto firm that is regulated by the Trump administration.

The cofounder of World Liberty Financial — Zach Witkoff, who perhaps not so coincidentally is also the son of Trump’s surprising and inexperienced pick for Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who deals regularly with the oligarchs of the United Arab Emirates — promised a Gulf crypto conference, “This is only the beginning.”

But on the other hand, a massive scandal involving the web of conflict between the growing array of Trump family business ventures and his government’s dealings on tariffs, or ending the bloodshed in the Middle East, is so brazen, so public, and so large that the institutions tasked with stopping this level of graft seem overwhelmed, when not corrupted themselves. What ought to be a larger scandal than Watergate has instead been met with one large “American shrug.”

Why?

This is the president who famously bragged during his 2016 campaign that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” At least metaphorically speaking, this has proved to be the truest thing Trump has ever uttered from a campaign podium. But why deal with messy bloodstains on the asphalt of Manhattan’s main shopping artery when there’s millions and possibly billions of dollars in graft to be pocketed instead.

The corruption of Trump’s first presidency — foreign lobbyists, out-of-town favor seekers and government-backed Secret Service agents keeping his hotels and resorts above water — was both without precedent, yet also a mild kind of spring training for what was to come with Trump 47.

The foreshadowing came early — with that $2 billion Saudi investment in son-in-law Jared Kushner’s (a key Middle East envoy during Trump 45) vague new hedge fund, and the billion-dollar rise of Trump Media, a stock that soared and confirmed Trump’s billionaire status despite the firm’s huge losses and unlikely future prospects.

All that before Trump discovered crypto, which he quite rightly nailed in 2021 when he told Fox Business Channel that products like Bitcoin looked to him like “a scam,” but who in 2024 seemed to wonder why he wasn’t in on it. Running for a second term, he promised crypto’s mega-campaign donors he’d deregulate their industry, then gobsmacked good-government watchdogs with his own crypto ventures.

Last Tuesday, the 100th day of Trump’s new presidency, the New York Times published a stunning investigation of one of these schemes, World Liberty Financial, and its brazen efforts to seek multimillion-dollar payments that would guarantee access or endorsements from Trump World.

In reporting on World Liberty Financial’s $550 million in sales, so far, for a firm largely owned by a Trump family corporation, the Times wrote the company is “eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history. Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker.”

The tangled web of corruption around Trump and crypto includes the ability of foreign actors to buy influence in Washington through digital coins, and Trump regime actions like a plan for a national Bitcoin reserve that have boosted the value of these assets, as well as dropped federal investigations into the industry’s more dubious actors, including some who have openly purchased Trump crypto products.

The world that Trump derided as “a scam” four years ago has offered a cover for arguably the worst financial graft in White House history, not fully grasped by regular folks struggling to understand a confusing playing field of meme coins, “stablecoins,” and more, and also to keep up with the Trump family’s multiple ventures.

World Liberty Financial is separate from the $TRUMP meme coin, which the incoming president announced just three nights before his January inauguration and initially soared in value, making billions — on paper, anyway — for Trump and his allies. The $TRUMP coin also brought in a cool $100 million in transaction fees, and the president hasn’t been shy about using the power of his office to pump up its value, with the promise of a huge future payday. Trump’s recent announcement about the Virginia dinner caused the meme coin to surge by more than 50% in value.

“Let’s be explicit about what’s happening here: Trump appears to be auctioning off access to the presidency,” Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, wrote for MSNBC. “The more of his cryptocurrency that people buy, the higher their chances of meeting Trump at his club. And there’s no ambiguity about who is profiting.”

I’m old enough to remember when a sitting vice president, Spiro Agnew, was investigated by the Justice Department and pleaded no contest to a felony for taking small-bore bribes of cash in white envelopes, including $17,500 inside the White House. But now it’s ok for the president and his heirs to make potentially hundreds of millions of dollars by selling the office? Make it make sense.

It’s not that investigative journalists like the Times team that delved into World Liberty Financial aren’t doing their job, and yet their reporting doesn’t seem to break through in a broader media environment and even an electorate that seems cynically numbed to the rank corruption of oligarchy. The Supreme Court — itself a thoroughly corrupted body — has done much to make political graft appear to be legal in America.

This was before Trump named an attorney general in Pam Bondi who has ensured that the Justice Department is loyal to the president, and not to the American people, the rule of law, or the greater good. That leaves the opposition Democrats in Congress — yet when it comes to cryptocurrency, top Dems like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are almost as deeply in the tank as the Trump regime.

» READ MORE: How scammy, polluting cryptocurrency hijacked the 2024 election

This coming week, Axios reported, the Senate is racing toward a vote on a bipartisan regulatory bill that is supported by the crypto industry and lacks rules that a few progressive Democrats are seeking that would block corrupt deals like the Abu Dhabi investment in World Liberty Financial. That’s not shocking, giving the millions the crypto industry gave to both parties last fall, but it’s profoundly disappointing.

America is never going to return to a functioning — let alone thriving — democracy as long as we pretend that it’s not a crime to sell access and influence in the White House for coins that go straight into the pocket of the president or his children.

There’s nothing to stop the talking heads on your TV or the protesters in the streets from raising holy hell about this, right now. There is nothing that would stop a Democratic House majority in 2027 from impeaching Trump, yet again, for so blatantly defying the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution. And there is nothing that would, or should, stop the next U.S. attorney general in 2029 from investigating the brazen crime of bribery that this appears to be.

We don’t really need a murder on Fifth Avenue before we can agree that paying off the sitting president is wrong, do we?

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter