Your guide to Cryptogate, Trump’s $4 billion corruption scandal that’s 10 times bigger than Watergate

Since Donald Trump became the 47th president on Jan. 20, the White House has been up for sale to the highest bidder. And like most big-city real estate these days, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. has an astronomical price tag.

You might have seen the report a couple of weeks ago that in 2025, the net worth of Trump has increased by a whopping $2.9 billion, thanks to his recent plunge into cryptocurrency. That’s a shocking number, but it doesn’t capture the full extent of the worst presidential corruption in U.S. history.

The only thing more stunning than the size of the Trump corruption scandal is the relative silence this has generated.

It doesn’t include the $400 million jumbo jet from Qatar that Trump hopes to take home in 2029 as property of his presidential library, after a short stint as Air Force One.

It doesn’t include what, for a corrupt and contented Trump, must seem like the change under his couch cushions, like the $28 million Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is paying Melania Trump for a documentary no one is asking to see.

It doesn’t include the new “deals” that just keep coming, like a scheme for Trump Media to get into crypto.

The only thing more stunning than the size of the Trump corruption scandal is the relative silence this has generated. I don’t want to diminish Richard Nixon’s 1970s Watergate scandal, in which the 37th president greatly abused the power of his office through illegal break-ins and bugging, politicizing agencies from the CIA to the IRS, and more. But the Trump family’s drive to cash in on the power of the presidency feels worse than Watergate by at least a factor of 10, arguably more.

And yet, there is no chance of public hearings in a Trumpified MAGA zombie Congress, let alone impeachment. Big chunks of a cowed elite media aren’t focused on the scandal because they’ve been sucked into it themselves. The institutions that held strong in Watergate are greatly diminished, and it’s up in the air whether the Trump regime will even obey judicial rulings.

Trump’s corruption is so extensive, so out in the open, and yet so tied in many cases to complex financial instruments that the average voter doesn’t understand that our weakened system has been swamped like a Pacific tsunami. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In 2020s America, branding is everything. So let’s help voters by giving the Trump scandal a simple, easy-to-remember name. I’m going with Cryptogate. If folks have a better idea, I’m open to suggestions, but let’s get this thing on a bumper sticker.

Next: Knowledge is power. The goal of this piece is to put all of Trump’s financial corruption — all of Cryptogate — in one fairly compact guide, because to see it all in one place compels us as citizens to do something to stop it.

Here is an A-Z (OK, A-W) guide to Cryptogate:

Air Force One: The president’s obsession with luxury travel found a willing trading partner in the oil dictators of Qatar, which hosts a U.S. military base and wants a good relationship with Washington after a rocky first term with Trump. Its $400 million “gift” of a 13-year-old 747 — not quite finalized — could saddle taxpayers with the $1 billion bill of meeting the specs for Air Force One, and then give an ex-president a posh free ride when the just-established Trump presidential library would take the keys in 2029.

Dinner with Trump: Several leading news organizations have reported that top business leaders are being solicited, and in some cases agreeing to pay, $5 million for one-on-one dinners at Mar-a-Lago with Trump. This is money that gets deposited into a political action committee called MAGA Inc. The same MAGA group hosted a $1 million-a-person candlelight dinner with the president at the Florida resort back in March. Remember, Trump is barred from running for a third term, so where is this money going? It’s reported it will eventually be steered to a Trump library project with huge slush fund potential (see next item).

Donald J. Trump Presidential Library: No one yet knows when or where (maybe Florida?) this proposed edifice will be built, if ever. But the nonprofit just established by Eric Trump and Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos, is emerging as a major cash conduit for Trump Inc. It’s already been promised $37 million in legal settlements from two giant companies — Facebook parent Meta ($22 million) and Disney/ABC News ($15 million) — that want to be on the White House’s good side. There’s more to come, including a proposed megadeal with Paramount (CBS News) as it seeks federal approval for a merger. Did I mention the library will have a 747 jet?

Executive Branch: True, it feels like the entire executive branch is for sale, but this refers to a new Georgetown members-only social club recently announced by Donald Trump Jr. and his rogues’ gallery of business partners, including Alex and Zach Witkoff, sons of the president’s Middle East and Ukraine envoy (more on them later). The membership fee is a whopping $500,000, and yet the junior Trump claims there’s already a waiting list — presumably from crypto dude-bros and other billionaire types seeking a luxury spot shielded from the public to cut even more corrupt deals.

Inaugural fund: Don’t forget that last month, the Trump inaugural fund announced a record haul of $237 million from a who’s who of large U.S. corporations, but especially Big Tech, as well as firms with government regulatory issues, mega-rich people seeking ambassadorships, and Big Oil, among others. It’s believed very little was spent on a low-key inauguration back in January, so where did this money go? Stay tuned.

» READ MORE: The stunning grift of Trump’s inaugural fund | Will Bunch Newsletter

Justin Sun: This 34-year-old Chinese-born Wharton grad (of course) — yes, the guy who famously paid $6.2 million for a banana — and crypto billionaire is intertwined with a couple of the crypto ventures below, but he merits his own entry because of the brazenness of his scheme. Last fall, Sun purchased some $75 million in tokens from the Trump family crypto start-up, World Liberty Financial, which investigative reporter Zeke Faux says amounts to a $56 million cash payout to the president and his family. And he wasn’t done: This year, Sun bought $20 million of Trump’s meme coin, $TRUMP, which earned him a front-row seat at the president’s private Virginia dinner for coin investors, a White House tour, even a Trump watch — but those weren’t the perks that matter. Trump’s appointees to the Securities and Exchange Commission have paused a fraud and market manipulation lawsuit against Sun that was brought in 2023 during the Biden administration.

Melania Trump: There’s been far too little focus on how the rarely seen first lady has cashed in on her husband’s return to the White House. After a postelection dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Amazon’s Bezos — desperate to curry favor with POTUS 47 — the online retail giant announced it was buying the rights to a not-at-all-anticipated Melania documentary in a deal that hands her $28 million in cash. On inauguration weekend, she launched a $MELANIA meme coin that — even more dramatically than her husband’s $TRUMP — soared, then crashed. Fortune reported last month that unknown insiders bought before the public announcement and cashed out at the peak, netting some $99.6 million.

Pardongate: Like the many tentacles of Nixon’s Watergate, Trump’s spree of some 230 pardons of friends and political allies, including Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists, is a separate but overlapping scandal because the potential for financial grift is huge. This month, Trump pardoned a just-convicted tax cheat, Paul Walczak, and thus freed him from paying $4 million back to the government after his mom spent $1 million to attend a MAGA Inc. political fundraiser with the president. Trump’s willingness to wield his pardon pen suggests there could be much more to come.

$TRUMP: The launching of a Trump meme coin — a token that has no inherent value beyond the brand of the seller, which in this case is the power and prestige of the American presidency — just three days before taking office, is arguably the president’s most outlandish corrupt play. Trump has pumped up its value with various ploys, like the recent Virginia golf club dinner that offered direct access to the president for the biggest $TRUMP buyers. These included Sun (above) and a Mexican trucking logistics mogul who announced he was buying $20 million worth to lobby the president on tariffs.

Trump is, or can, profit directly in two ways. The journalist Faux estimated he’s made some $300 million in transaction fees. What’s more, Trump owns 80% of the coins, with an estimated current value of $10 billion … but only on paper. If Trump tried to sell it all at once for hard cash, the value of $TRUMP would crash to nearly nothing. But he can still likely net hundreds of millions of dollars, if not a couple of billion, by selling them over time.

Trump Organization real estate deals: The Trump family’s OG business of real estate development had slowed in recent years — until the Trump Organization’s founder won a second term as president. As many as 20 international deals are now in the works. Here are some of the more troubling ones: A partnership for Trump-branded developments in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates with a company tied to the Saudi government, which Trump favored with his first overseas visit. A proposed $500 million luxury high-rise in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, on land donated — controversially — by a right-wing government eager to win U.S. favor. A $1.5 billion golf resort now under construction in Vietnam, seeking a U.S. trade deal after the president tried to impose high tariffs on the Asian nation. A $200 million Trump Tower in the Syrian capital of Damascus, announced around the same time Trump lifted economic sanctions there.

Trump Media: Remember Trump’s between-presidencies launch of the company that owns the Truth Social website? Trump’s stake in the publicly traded firm is worth roughly $2.7 billion, even though the low-traffic site lost $400 million last year with little hope of ever becoming profitable. Like Trump’s crypto ventures, its value seems to hinge largely on its founder’s prestige as president. You probably won’t be shocked to learn that Trump Media is also moving heavily into crypto, with a plan this week to sell bonds to purchase $2.5 billion in Bitcoin.

World Liberty Financial: This is the linchpin of the Trump family plan to join the world’s richest people. It was launched during the homestretch of the 2024 campaign, with Trump himself calling the new cryptocurrency venture the future of finance. In addition to Trump and his sons, WLF partners include Chase Herro, previous seller of marijuana and weight-loss colon cleansers, Zachary Folkman, who ran the site Date Hotter Girls, and Zach Witkoff, whose dad would become Trump’s Middle East envoy.

Its initial coin offering delivered a healthy profit to the Trumps and their partners, thanks in good measure to Sun’s investment, but there are bigger days to come. A government-backed fund in oil-rich Abu Dhabi — part of the United Arab Emirates — is using $2 billion in WLF “stablecoins” to invest in troubled crypto giant Binance. That means the Trump-tied firm can make hundreds of millions by investing the large cache. It’s important to note that as president, Trump has broad power to regulate (or not regulate) crypto, and sign or veto legislation like the pending GENIUS Act, while his agencies decide which bad actors to investigate. It’s arguably the most blatant conflict in White House history.

There’s more, of course — like the money Trump’s hotels and resorts get from the Secret Service, Saudi-backed golf tournaments, and foreign potentates — but the bottomless nature of his corruption is the point.

We don’t have to stand for this.

Call your member of Congress and demand hearings like the ones that exposed Watergate. Since the U.S. Justice Department won’t do anything, urge state prosecutors in New York and elsewhere to look at the president’s partners. Take it to the streets, starting with the “No Kings” protest on June 14.

If we live in a world that tolerates this level of corruption, then we need to forge a new world.

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