Bulwark Takes - A Conservative Finally Says It: Trump Is Incredibly Corrupt

Episode Date: February 8, 2026

Tim Miller takes on a stunning National Review series that details the scale of Trump’s crypto corruption—dwarfing anything ever alleged about Biden—and explains how Trump’s crypto business operated as a pay-to-play system for foreign money, why Republican oversight collapsed, and why it matters that conservatives are finally starting to say it out loud.

Hey, everybody, Tim Mow from the Bullwark here. Andy McCarthy at the National Review is working on what I think is a pretty important series, laying at the scale of Trump's crypto corruption and how it dwarfs anything that the right alleged about Joe Biden. I think it's important for this reason. I look at me, never Trumper has a long backstory, maybe some bitterness towards the people at the National Review. If you guys don't know, the National Review, it is a longtime traditional conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley. In 2016, they published what we thought would be influential at the time a magazine cover called Against Trump. It was a series of essays from conservatives talking why they would be against Trump.

If we pull up that cover here, we scroll in, you might see a couple names you recognize. Mona Sharon, William Crystal. So it's a primary war on. The election against Hillary war on. And the National Review realized that many of their readers and the vast swath of Republican voters did not share their. opposition to Donald Trump, they started to get in line. And, you know, there are a handful of those, as mentioned, who ventured off into other spaces, created new outlets, created things like this, the bulwark, where we actually met what we said about Donald Trump. The National Review,

that's not really been the case. You know, they have had an editor for most of the Trump era named Rich Lowry, who is a kind of pocket protector guy that really is trying to overcompensate for his own issues about his masculinity. He tries to do talk about tough guy, Trump stuff and traditional values. And he doesn't really care none too much about some of the old mores around, you know, the American idea. And thinks now we should be more of a blood and soil, tough guy thing. He was a guy that wrote that Trump was a big middle finger to all of the people

that he was jealous of because they achieved more than he did from his elite universities. So, you know, it's tough to have to hand it to him. After 2016, folks in National Review never showed a ton of backbone when it came to fighting Trump.

One of their other editors, he mostly wrote the Trump Maybe column, which I think represents really most of the national. Or if maybe. Maybe Trump. We don't like some of this stuff. Every once in a while, it gets a little too crude. We didn't like that racist video where he made the Obama's monkeys. But, you know, also, the Libs really overreacted to it.

And everybody could just chill out a little bit. I mean, the president posting a video that makes a wildly racist depiction of one of his predecessors. And also talks about how American democracy is fake. Like, that's not great. We don't love it. We'd rather they didn't do that. but like the real issue is like the pearl clutchings among the liberal class. And that's your general national review stance.

And for that reason, I think this is pretty noteworthy, this series. And I give a lot of plot to Stanley McCarthy because I think he knows that the readership, a lot of them, not everybody, it's not a monolith. But broadly, you know, MAGA readers or even non-Mega Republican readers don't really love to hear that the person they voted for three times is a scam artist. and he's corrupt and he's worse than anything that they, you know, convinced themselves was so terrible about the Clintons or the Bidens. Like that's a tough thing to process, you know, if you're a consumer of right-wing media

and you've convinced yourself that the Clintons are the devil and the Biden's ring a crime family, it is a narrative violation. It hurts your brain to try to process some new information, which is that no, actually Trump is doing all the things you accuse the Bidens and the Clintons of, but on a scale far, far greater than you even could have imagined. So I want to go through some of the Andy's article. It is behind a paywall, which I think is funny. I don't think the Nashville is trying to maximize the number of people who could see this,

but they published it. So shout out to them for publishing it. We try to put as little behind a paywall as possible at the Bullwork, and we appreciate you guys that support us. You can do that right here on YouTube as a Bullet Plus member or at thebork.com, and we do have some secret podcasts and stuff. But we want people to see our material. Here's the series. There are only two articles in, but I thought it was worth it to talk about it because, you know, the significance, we can kind of tell where he's going.

First article begins the sort of Trump, the Trump-Wick-Koff family business, and the UAE. And McCarthy begins this way. It's a long story, but let's cut to the chase. In October, six weeks before he's about to win back the White House, Trump and his friend Steve Wickoff founded a crypto business. And that crypto business is an ideal deal vehicle for leveraging political power in search of financial gain. It goes a little bit into the nature of the crypto business. And then he talks about how Trump gets in, how the Trump and Whitkoff children end up running this business so that it's like ostensibly separate. And so then Trump can, you know,

send his Middle East envoy, Whitkoff over to talk to leaders of these countries in a formal role representing the United States of America, representing all of us, but actually cutting deals that will make money for their families. Here's the prime case that he gets into more an article, too, but you have this Chinese-born billionaire felon named Changpang Zhao or CZ. He ran a corrupt international crypto exchange called Binance. He was seeking a pardon.

He was close associates with Sheikh Tanoon, the top intelligence operative and second-highest-ranking royal family member in the UAE. The UAE, as part of this whole situation, was also thinking about how they could become an AI powerhouse, but they were being blocked by Washington from access to our cutting edge chip technology. And they also wanted a pardon for Jal because he lives in Dubai and creates some geopolitical complications. So four days before Trump is inaugurated, the UAE begins pouring in at least two and a half billion into the Trump crypto enterprise. And what they get? Well, exactly what they want. CZ got his pardon.

UA.E got their chips. And on top of that, they were, this is in McCarthy's words, fatted at the White House, inflated into a nation of real consequence in Middle East geopolitics, included in the Trump's Stargate project to build a global artificial intelligence and supercomputing capacity. And, and this doesn't get mentioned as much, given an ownership slice of TikTok when the president just unilaterally broke the law and overturned the law that had been passed by Congress and signed by a president and affirmed by the Supreme Court

that China had to divest altogether. Instead of just having TikTok go belly up as the law required, Trump delayed that and cut a deal where his buddies in the UAE as well as Larry Ellison and Mark Andreessen and other big supporters of his gut in on the action. So that's basically the intro. And Andy says over the course of the next few installments in this series, he's going to into some of the details. We have the second one. I'll get to that in a second. But here's where he does something that I think is really important. This is the portion of any negative article

in a conservative outlet where the author always gets to, but the Democrats are worse, right? So like, here's this thing. We have to write about it. Trump's forced our hands. It's just so out in the open. But on the other hand, you should know this parade of things that Hunter Biden did or whatever. They call that a to be sure graph. And so that to be sure in right wing outlets usually would go something like Trump did something that we don't really approve of. But to be sure, it's not any worse than whatever some liberal that on the San Francisco school board or Elon Omar or Hunter Biden's laptop. That's suggest to how these articles go.

So in this article, Andy McCarthy gets to his to be sure graph. I started to like get that feeling inside where I was like, oh, this is why I can't read the National Review. There's always this to be sure the Democrats are awful graph. And, well, I got to tell you, this is where I got a little smile on my face. The to be sure graph reads like that. Before we get into the gory details, it's worth observing that at National Review, we extensively covered the Biden family business of corruptly profiteering off his political power and influence. So do the congressional Republicans, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm getting the hebie-jeebies. I'm not really enjoying this. We fast forward a few sentences. And then McCarthy says this. The sum generated, I'm going to add allegedly, over several years of Biden's self-dealing is over $27 million. That flashed in neon throughout the House Republican reports in the 291 pages. Republicans were especially incensed because Biden practiced their heartletry. You just got to bear with me here.

On foreigners, in particular agents of China. family adverse other than national interest drove the United States government policy, the House impeachment report thundered. And now we get to the knife into the gut of his readers from Andy McCarthy. You know what the difference is between the Biden family business and the Trump family business? You'd have to add two digits to the sum of Biden abuses of power foreign entanglements and corruption alleged in this report to get near what Trump has raked in just from the UAE.

And then he goes on to insult James Comer for not doing any congressional oversight of Trump like he did of Biden because of his fake investigation into Bill Clinton. I just got to tell you kudos. Cudos to you, Andy, for just putting it that bluntly for the readers. It is true. We've all been desperate for this. I mean, like, you know, you just, it's something that bugs me is, is right-wing hypocrisy just becomes table stakes. and nobody talks about it anymore because it's just like they're all hypocrites. They've demonstrated themselves to be hypocrites.

So like why talk about it? I feel like mainstream media feels this way. The handful of good conservatives or conservatives that see Trump's flaws at least feel this way, even like we sometimes will skip over it. Just because it's like how many times can you tell the same story about the fact that these guys are hypocrites? And they pretended to care about something when a Democrat was a president. it and now they overlook it when Trump does something a thousand times worse than that in the same category.

And so shout out to Andy McCarthy for just calling it exactly like it is on that. In Article 2, he goes more into the corrupt part in particular with CZ. And I think the key part of the CZ article here is that Andy puts his finger on something, which is like Trump's original crypto business idea was shit coins. it was something that he knew a lot about. It was from Trump stakes and Trump University and Trump wines and everything else, like all of the other scams that he ran over years. He knew how to take a fake product, put his name on it, and get dupes to pay him for it.

And that's like basically what a meme coin is, right? Like you're getting dumb people to pay you for like the Trump muscle man coin. And then, you know, you do a rugpole and you take money for you and your buddies. There's probably a corrupt insider game there. and you move on to the Monia coin next, right? Like, he knew how to do shit coins. But, like, and by the way, he's made ungodly sums of money on shit coins. So it's not nothing.

But it's not the level of money that you can make from stable coins. Like, stable coins is ostensibly more of a serious business, right? The UAE is not, you know, maybe there'll be some paper bag work into the shit coin and there'll be a little bit of money. you know nobody can put in you can't about put in billions of dollars into the malania coin right you've got to at least pretend to offer them something legit uh if you know major bona fide foreign interests are going to pay off and so they had to move from those meme coins into these stable coins which are you know pegged currency and are meant to you know be have be more legitimate because they're not as volatile and their pricing. You know, people can use them to trade after hours on weekends with criminals, you know, like all the reasons you'd want to have stable coin. But they didn't really have the expertise for this.

And so the pardon of CZ was critical not just because CZ gave them money, but because he helped them move into the more profitable stable coin business. Here's how the Wall Street Journal puts it. CZ's Binance platform, quote, deployed a team of, over a dozen engineers to build the technology behind the USD-1 stable-coin currency. The team that helped them included Binance's Hong Kong-based stable-coin chief to build the blockchain technology. So the corrupt guy, Chinese National, that was pardoned, put money directly into Trump's crypto company. And then he had his Hong Kong-based experts help them create a new

type of cryptocurrency, they would allow them to make even more money. And CZ's friends at the UAE put resources into that stable coin. And in exchange for that, they got access to these chips,

which is now going back to China. And this is a truly mind-blowing level of corruption that we are seeing. which basically has the Trump family enriching themselves by doing favors for Chinese national criminals, the UAE, and with one degree of separation, China itself. So as Andy McCarthy ends a segment two of his series, as you'll see in the next post, that isn't even half of it, or more accurately, even half of the half. So there you go. It's behind a paywall on national review, so I wanted to bring it out for you all.

And it's something we're going to keep monitoring because, you know, as we saw with the against Trump article at Nashville review, you don't want to overstate this. This is the end of Trump. I mean, Trump's already succeeded without having the intellectual class of, you know, the old school Reagan, Thatcher conservatives along for the ride. But it is a notable difference from where we've been for a while and where we were certainly last year in 2025 where everybody was scared of Trump. now you have more and more people, even within his own coalition, willing to dip their toe into the water. And I think that's important progress. And I think that we should highlight it when it's happening.

So appreciate you guys, subscribe to the feed. And we'll be talking to you again soon. Enjoy the Super Bowl.