Trump promotes family's new crypto platform, 'The Defiant Ones'

vegeta@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 345 points –
Trump promotes family's new crypto platform, 'The Defiant Ones'
cnbc.com
113

“I think there has been a lot of inequality in that only certain people can get financing [...] so this notion of decentralized finance is obviously very appealing to guys like me who have been debanked,” Donald Trump Jr. said in the interview on Locals.

Ha. "I'm toxic to banks so we are going to try and grift our idiot followers" is fun.

So is he trying to say that he wants to build a crowd source lending institution that uses crypto? Or is this a Mt. Gox situation where they get people to buy their fake coins (a really good look for a son of a former President) and then are "hacked" and think nobody will be able to trace the coins back to them? And you know the whole reason they want to go crypto is so they can do money laundering/bribes and be "untraceable".

“... guys like me who have been debanked,” Donald Trump Jr. said

I had to look up "debanked". Admitting to it has to be the financial equivalent of telling people you are a registered sex offender.

What he means is he's trying to funnel his wealth into assets that aren't regulated and may be difficult to seize.

You know, to hide his money from the victims that he owes hundreds of millions to for his criminal behavior.

No no no, he didn't say "debanked" he said "Deutsch Banked." As in, "I'm such a liability that the only financial institution that will work with me is shady Russian money laundering Deutsch Bank."

Oh, now I should get into crypto. I've just been waiting for someone publicly convicted of multiple counts of fraud to start up a platform so I can pour all my money into that.

Hate to break it to you but this is not remotely close to being the first example of that happening.

Yeah! They missed investing with several known fraudsters already. Sure is lucky that yet another one is here to fill the gap!

And with Trump's stellar success rate with new ventures and all.

You mean you didn't get your Trump trading card set, Bible or Golden sneakers?

I wouldn't get into crypto, but have you heard about this newfangled thing with the NFTs?

We all know how this is going to end, right?

He'll get his fans to buy his shitty token, and maybe even keep custody on his platform. Then if he loses the election, he's gonna flee to Russia via Venezuela, while pulling the rug out from under all those "investors" and taking it all. Then he will publically state that Harris must have directed the NSA to hack his site. He can live out his remaining time in Russia as a wanna-be oligarch, and Putin will treat him like a leader-in-exile.

We all know how this is going to end, right? He’ll get his fans to buy his shitty token, and maybe even keep custody on his platform. Then if he loses the election, he’s gonna flee to Russia via Venezuela, while pulling the rug out from under all those “investors” and taking it all. Then he will publically state that Harris must have directed the NSA to hack his site. He can live out his remaining time in Russia as a wanna-be oligarch, and Putin will treat him like a leader-in-exile.

Stonks meme but its trump

He can live out his remaining time in Russia as a wanna-be oligarch, and Putin will treat him like a leader-in-exile

Yep. Except that's only until he runs his mouth and has a tragic fall from a window.

If I where to place a bet, I would say 3 months, tops.

The fucked up thing is he’ll never leave the US, and he’ll never face consequences.

He can live out his remaining time in Russia as a wanna-be oligarch, and Putin will treat him like a leader-in-exile.

Honestly think he'd be safer in North Korea. Kim Jong Un could at least see him as an ally of "the world is against us."

Putin already views Trump as a puppy that makes messes on the carpet... while running a dog fighting ring.

“For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites,” Trump wrote. “It’s time we take a stand — together.”

Do people actually believe for a fraction of a second that Donald Trump of all people is on the side of the average American? And that the way to "take a stand" is with a crypto pump and dump scheme?

I was going to invest myself, but I already lost $20,000 investing in the NFTs. Best purchase ever.

People will 100% kill for him. I’ve heard it from my own ears from people around me where I live. We in Canada.

I know this is a crazy ask, but could we maybe have a presidential candidate not openly telling us he's committing fraud while he's on the campaign trail?

Jimmy Carter gave up his peanut farm when he became president. After his presidency, Rosalynn and Jimmy spent their time building affordable housing. Rosalynn passed away last year on November 19. at the age of 96. They were married for 77 years.

Crazy how some people view what a good leader is now...

Goddamn it would be so fucking easy to scam maga shitheads if I didn't have morals

Right? I'd just sell them N-Word Passes and claim "Naw bro, Trump signed them and everything, these are real."

Hell, I think my biggest problem is I can't think of anything dumb enough before they've already got it

I used to think I was a pessimist. But now after multiple "There's no way people are that dumb" and being wrong I must be an absolute optimist.

I can use my degree from Trump University and make a boatload of money

It is a significant departure from Trump’s previous stance on cryptocurrencies during his stint in the White House when he called bitcoin a scam.

Is it a departure? Trump running a scam seems perfectly in line with his previous stance.

ikr as if scamming isn't his favorite pastime

He got paid by crypto bros, now he is pro crypto.

He was anti-EV until Elon paid him to care.

If he gets elected Putin will pay him to pull US support from Ukraine.

That’s how he works

People are presuming he used the word "scam" as most people do - with negative connotations - when, Trump being Trump it's likely that the only negative thing he sees in a "scam" is him not making money from it.

only a scammer would do something like thi-

oh right.

Next test of the cult... are you fucking people actually about to line up to trust your financial future to dumb dumb eric trump and sniff sniff don Jr?

Personally I hope so. They're burning the world, it'll at least be fun to watch them flounder in the process.

Except the Trumps get rich off of it. I don't know if the stupid people losing out so the rich assholes can gain is ideal for me. I'd rather the stupid people keep their money.

Maybe trump is beginning to think he might not win the presidency so he's got to grift as much as possible while he can.

There's likely some outright criminals who can't easily send their dirty traceable money into politics directly to buy favors. Seems to me that this helps "solve" that.

I, personally, imagine high odds of a combination of:

  • overt intentional crime happening in un-subtle ways
  • disallusioned operational staff with no real reason for loyalty
  • failure to stop at various "don't do this or we will get caught" lines

If I were any kind of federal investigator, I would look into this with great interest.

The president should not have their own clothing line and currency.

But what if the clothing line was selling custom versions of high quality labels like Hugo Boss?

Your shirt can be any color as long as it's black. Something-something honor and loyalty.

What about black, red, and white? Maybe the black part is a catchy symbol? We can turn it a bit so it’s not copyright infringement.

Can just replace it with an S rune, it's not copyrighted. With another rune, so it will be "US" and "undefeatable" shortened at the same time. In white circle, on red background.

What's wrong with owning a clothing line as president? As long as they're not using their office to impact their business in any meaningful way, I have no issues at all with it. So before taking the oath of President, you should be required to demonstrate that you have removed yourself from any obligations or loyalties you may have (so appoint someone to take care of your company(s) and whatnot).

As long as decisions made by the company have zero relationship to the actions of the President, I'm fine with it. And Congress and the Supreme Court should have some checks against that (i.e. Congress should be able to set rules for the President through legislation, and the Supreme Court should be able to review executive actions and force divestment if there's evidence of bias).

I despise Trump, but let's not be hasty.

Ok and the currency? That undermines the currency of the country he is serving. What if Biden came out with Biden Bucks you think he wouldn't be attacked from every angle?

He'd be attacked, but not by me. Likewise for Harris or anyone else running for President. I'd call it stupid and probably scammy, but I wouldn't suggest that it somehow undermines the US.

If Trump's crypto platform or "Biden Bucks" or whatever takes off enough that it threatens the national currency, then perhaps we should be using it instead of the national currency. Competition is good, and we shouldn't be using a currency just because the government wants control, we should be using it because it provides value. In the case of the dollar, that value is stability and ubiquity, and if Trump, Harris, or anyone else can do it better than the Federal Reserve, perhaps we should all be using that instead of the dollar. I highly doubt that's the case, but it certainly doesn't affect someone's eligibility to run for President.

That said, they should divest themselves of any controlling interest in anything that could impact their role as President. That means handing off control to someone else, and ensuring that someone else doesn't have any way to impact your decisions.

A politician should not be allowed to own something they have the explicit power to artificially inflate the value of. For the president, that's all businesses.

As for currency, again, the president has the ability to crash the value of the American currency and drive people to his currency in order to artificially inflate it. Sacrificing an entire global economy for personal gain should not be possible.

But not only is it possible, now with the recent Supreme Court ruling, he'd be immune to prosecution for doing it, so why wouldn't he do it?

artificially inflate the value of

That's where there should be a requirement to demonstrate that you have removed yourself from any conflicts of interest. Trump didn't do that (at least not in a way that's satisfactory to me), and I think there should be a change to the qualifications for President that includes some level of divestiture.

the president has the ability to crash the value of the American currency

But the President doesn't really have the power to do that. The Federal Reserve does (and there's a lot of legal barriers between the President and the Fed) and Congress does, but the President can't directly crash the value of the dollar. Look at Trump's campaign, he says he should have direct control over the Fed, not that he does. Making that change would be a big deal that would piss a lot of people off.

The Supreme Court immunity ruling is absolutely dangerous and Congress should fix that ASAP, but that doesn't mean the President can go devalue the currency on their own. That's just not how things work. The closest they can do is attempt to fire board members of the Federal Reserve and appoint new ones that would hopefully listen to them, and that would be challenged by the Supreme Court. According to the ruling, they'd be immune from making the attempt, but that doesn't mean the attempt can just go through w/o review.

But Trump believes that all executive branch employees are directly reportable to him and he forced out and refused to replace many employees. Also, there is Schedule F. Trump didn't have enough time to fully implement it the first time. This removed employees are n "confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating" positions from the General Schedule. Meaning they were political appointees going forward. Biden rescinded it immediately so it never got used, but it will be reimplemented.

With that, he has the power to implement almost anything without oversight. When he implements his tariffs for example, and other countries retaliate with their own, the value of American goods will plummet since they'll be way more expensive. This will reduce trade and thus the value of the currency. And no amount of tweaks to interest rates will stop that.

Sure he can't print money, but the reliability ratings of US debt are already declining due to the fights over the debt ceiling, and Trump supports that fight and doesn't believe that the US should have to pay those debts because of the investments we've made. Simply blocking those payments could tank the currency. There are tons of ways if there's no legal consequences and most employees are replaced with his loyalists.

Trump believes that all executive branch employees are directly reportable to him

Sort of, he believes they should be, not that they are. He wants to replace merit-based positions with appointments, which means he can more easily replace them as needed.

When he implements his tariffs for example, and other countries retaliate with their own, the value of American goods will plummet

The value of American goods is irrelevant. We're not a net exporter, and our most valuable trade partners (Canada, Mexico, EU) would likely get exceptions.

Tariffs would hurt imports and result in more purchases of local goods, which increases demand for labor while decreasing purchasing power (i.e. inflation), but then we'd respond with higher borrowing rates, which decreases labor demand and fewer total purchases of goods, etc. The short-term impact is a spike in labor demand, but the longer term impact is slower growth. It's a bad policy, but it's not so inflationary that the dollar would lose value, the average American would just become worse off. We need the dollar to be stable because we need it to remain the main international reserve currency, and we're absolutely willing to let the average consumer suffer to keep that status.

Simply blocking those payments could tank the currency

I guess he could theoretically veto a budget, but Congress would likely pass it anyway. He doesn't have that much control over his own party, and doing that would piss off voters enough that they'd likely lose in the midterms. It's not going to happen, the fight over the debt ceiling is for concessions, and politicians will concede to prevent default.

if there’s no legal consequences

There has pretty much never been legal consequences for the President, the only thing the Supreme Court decision does is say the quiet part out loud. We'll put on a show for things like Clinton's affair or whatever, but not for anything of consequence. The law is scary, but Presidents have largely been immune from legal consequences for pretty much the entire history of the US.

They could have some fucking dignity for one thing. Respect the office.

Sure, that's another thing I hate about Trump, but I don't see what that has to do with what they own.

I can't wait to see the level of grifts that will come when they really start to get desperate.

Not sure it can be called grift if he's literally saying they will be funding him.

There's no deceit involved in this case.

I mean, there's no deceit involved in modern UI\UX in social platforms either, but the paradigms are taken from gambling machines.

With Trump the grift is usually that the people who buy in think they are funding his campagn whereas he uses much of the money for other stuff like his personal lawsuits for business fraud and the like.

That guy has been milking every cow on the planet, you gotta appreciate the efforts. I'm just surprised there's no NFT collection out there, that'd be befitting of a supreme con artist.

Probably because he already did an nft collection apparently, according to the article.

1 more...

Will it become as successful as Trust Social?

Up next, an innovative new sales technique. Get this, it is called Multi-level Marketing. Brand new, never been done before!

I bet the same morons that got his NFTs fall for this....the SAME PEOPLE (the ones that still have money left).

I wonder how the ethics here work. If I enter the pump phase, leave before the dump, I'm effectively stealing money from the MAGA cult. Is that a good deed?

But if you lose money you've effectively funded the maga cult!

So politics aside, would you really put any money into a financial system run by someone with a proven track record of driving businesses into bankruptcy?

So he did NFTs and his own coin, but where's his Metaverse tho? His grifting is lacking.

Now this is just comedy-level grifting. This can't be real life, this has got to be a simulator to find the stupid ones

After Trump's NFT and silly sneakers, this just seems par for the course.

In before Logan Paul is attached and Coffeezilla exposes it all as a rug pull

It seems they're missing out on a memorable marketing campaign: Deploracoin! 100 Deploracoins = 1 Deplorabill.

This feels like a scam just like those Elon Musk crypto scams you see everywhere.

Now they're defiant? I thought the whole thing was that they were the silent majority or some bullshit.

I knew serial conman Trump couldn't resist getting involved in crypto which is one of the biggest cons of all time.

I would say the fiat money system is the biggest con, at least by volume. What with all the quantitative easing and fractional reserve banking.

Yeah you're right an ecosystem that produces things like peepee coin isn't full up with con jobs. /s

https://www.livecoinwatch.com/price/Peepee-PEE

The PEE market is far less liquid than I would have expected

I think I didn't make myself clear. When I said "by volume" I meant was the amount of value the different systems hold and the amount of if not outright fraud, negative aspects of the systems. The fiat money systems' money supply has a fundamental weakness, it can be created out of thin air so is constantly loosing value. Think of all the investment vehicles or other assets that tie themselves to this loosing value asset. Trillions in USD. And what's it all backed by? Ultimately guns. Well most crypto currency is backed by maths and no matter how many guns you point at it, you cannot make 2+2= anything other than 4.

Well most crypto currency is backed by maths and no matter how many guns you point at it, you cannot make 2+2= anything other than 4.

Sure, you can make one type of coin or other rare or rate limited or whatever, but you can also just make up a different shit coin and give yourself a metric shit ton of that new coin, and then eventually try to move to either a more stable coin or back into fiat once you've gotten enough suckers holding the bag to exit.

That makes crypto ultimately not based on maths at all, but based on hype, stupidity, and scams alone.

The main difference between these "shit coins" and fiat is once the shit coin scammers eventually pull the rug, they cannot just print more of that coin. Fiat scammers can just print more of that currency.

But in both situations one does need to look at the economics of the coins, and the priors of the people in control.

"Once they've completed the scam they have to move onto other scams."

Are you even thinking at all when constructing these arguments?

What I am trying to get through to you is, just like how the LIBOR scandal doesn't implicate fiat, scammy crypto projects doesn't implicate crypto. My criticism of fiat is it's fundamental systemic weaknesses. It seems your criticism of crypto is it's used by scammers. A criticism that, incidentally can also be levied at fiat.

Sure both can be used *by" scammers, but in fiat the currency itself isn't usually the scam.

Maybe after the rug-pull he'll finally have something so he can stop with that ridiculous hair-style.

While I support crypto you gotta pick your asset. And, boy this is a dud.