The Indicator from Planet Money - How Trump is making coin from $TRUMP coin

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Just before Trump began his second administration in January, he and his business partners launched the $TRUMP coin. It's a meme coin that quickly raked in hundreds of millions of dollars. And there's a lot of earning potential still left on the table. Is any of this legal? Today on the show, we examine how the $TRUMP coin works and talk to an expert about how the president's meme coin gambit interacts with the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Related episodes: How the memecoin game is played Did Trump enable insider trading? For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR Well and if you were trying to make as much money as you could from being the president What would you do? I would turn the situation room into an escape room and rent it out for birthday parties and corporate team building

I was thinking cameo videos would make a nice birthday present for somebody Yeah What if they just set up a big shady carnival on the south lawn Be like, here, try this ring toss There are no bad ideas Carry out

What about selling a meme coin with my name on it, and the top meme coin buyers get to join me for dinner. Now you're on to something, President Wong, and that is exactly what President Trump is doing. Well, tonight, in fact, if you're among the top 220 holders of the Trump coin, this cryptocurrency, you can join the president for a gala dinner. I can taste that dry chicken now. This is the kind of shenanigans that has me asking, is this legal?

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Darren Woods. Today on the show, the Trump coin. We explain what it is, how the real Donald Trump profits from it, and yes, whether this whole crypto scheme is within the law. Donald Trump is associated with a few cryptocurrency ventures, the Melania meme coin, the World Liberty Financial Crypto Company.

Today, we're focusing on the Trump meme coin. The Trump coin is similar to any other meme coin, which is to say it's basically digital monopoly money based on some kind of in-joke or meme or famous person. In this case, they set up a new type of coin on the Solana blockchain. That blockchain is a record of all the buying and selling that happens. The first 200 million coins were released by selling them to the public a few days before the presidential inauguration. In the first few weeks after the launch, the Trump crew got more than 300. million dollars from this, according to the Financial Times. And several million dollars more from transaction fees as well. But who's counting? The Trump Associated companies running the coin have

promised never to release more than a billion coins. So there is 800 million more to go. That means a lot more money that Trump and his partners could get. Yeah, and there's a specific schedule of when these extra coins will get released. Now, we don't know what the demand for Trump coins will be then. But if the team behind the Trump coin were to sell their 800 million coins today, they would get more than $10 billion. Yeah, that is not just talking about monopoly money now. No, this is like a warehouse full of actual money. People might buy these coins for speculation, just thinking that someone else is going to be

more foolish than them and buy what is basically a made-up currency at a higher price. Or they might just buy them for fun or for symbolic support of Trump. or, as we've heard from some coin holders, they might also buy the coins hoping for access to the president. Yeah, so who exactly is paying for these meme coins is of real public interest. Nikolai Sunigor is exactly the kind of crypto enthusiast who tried to figure out as many of these Trump meme coin buyers as he could. It really does feel like detective work.

Nikolai works as a research analyst at the cryptocurrency research firm Nansen. How do you keep track of it all? presumably not with strings and pins on a board behind you. I actually consider it getting a board. The first step for Nikolai is to look at the blockchain. That's where Nikolai can see each purchase tied to a wallet, as in a digital wallet that allows someone to access and trade their cryptocurrencies. Sometimes you find these small breadcrumbs,

so they transacted with some specific wallet. and that wallet happened to have a specific domain name. And that name has been mentioned somewhere online. And based on that person who mentioned it, you can find another wallet. And then you're suddenly in this whole loop of an entire web of evidence. Of the top 20 crypto buyers eligible for Trump's gala dinner, Nikolai could only trace the names of about five identifiable people. He managed to find more details on 30 to 40 more buyers,

but these were connected to online accounts that use pseudonyms. Nikolai says that among the identifiable people in the race to 220 was Chinese-born crypto-billionaire Justin Sun. The crypto magnate is currently trying to reach a settlement with federal regulators over fraud charges. This week, he announced himself as a top Trump coin buyer. There was also Javier Salgas, who's based in Montere, Mexico, and is a chief executive at a transportation logistics company. And he said it out loud in a press release.

He wanted to advocate for lower tariffs between Mexico and the U.S. Okay, this whole enterprise is starting to sound questionably legal. If it wasn't already. So is it legal for a president to launch a meme coin? Elizabeth Weidre is the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center. That's a nonpartisan nonprofit that promotes the Constitution for progressive outcomes. So there's no explicit law against. it. But, you know, certainly there are laws that are implicated by launching a meme coin like this. And

they range from the foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution to federal campaign laws. Oh, hello emoluments, our old friend from the first Trump administration. Elizabeth knows this intimately. She was actually part of a lawsuit around Trump's DC Hotel. She claimed they breached the constitutional clause around emoluments. It says that a person person who holds an office like the president in the United States cannot accept any gifts, titles, profits from any foreign state without the consent of Congress. Elizabeth says an emolument can mean profits, like a lawmaker receiving a consulting fee to advise a foreign student.

Or, you know, the conversation about the plane from the government of Qatar has been discussed as a foreign emolument. Elizabeth says the meme coin purchases are emoluments. Of course, this would be fiercely argued in any legal proceedings. But the thing is, if the president wants to receive any emoluments, he can get permission from Congress. He just needs to ask. Congress is currently controlled by Republicans. And yet, President Trump hasn't ever done that.

He doesn't really seem to care that much about that. But it is something that's important. The other laws that the Trump coin might implicate, Elizabeth says, are election financing laws. So we try to have a system in the United States that prevents pay-to-play politics. And one of the ways in which we try to enforce that is by having federal election laws.

These laws limit the amount someone can give to a campaign, and they restrict foreigners from donating to a candidate. Obviously, the meme coins are a way to get around all of those restrictions. Even if we could only identify the names of a few Trump coin holders, According to Bloomberg, we can see that over half are using crypto exchanges like ByBit, which people in the U.S. can't use. It seems very likely that federal election laws are going to be violated in spirit, even if not in letter, through this meme coin transaction. We try to avoid pay to play politics, but there is large fundraising dinners where you pay a lot of money, and then you can have some face time with a politician, Democratic or rights.

Republican. Why is this different? Oh, right. And so I think it's interesting that it is a dinner, because that is kind of like, you know, the traditional, what we're used to seeing in, you know, something you get for a campaign contribution. You get to go to a fancy dinner. You maybe get a picture with the candidate you're supporting. And so the fact that the normal federal campaign contributions limits don't apply to this instance is really relevant. Here, there are none of those limits. And I think in particular, when you worry about foreign corruption and foreign influence, that's extremely concerning. There's a distinct threat that certainly the drafters of the Constitution saw with respect to foreign influence. We sent an email and a courier letter to the

Trump organization seeking comment. We didn't receive a response. When asked similar questions, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt has said, The President acts with only the interests of the American public in mind, putting our country first in doing what's best for our country, full stop. Okay, well, and I thought of another way to make money. What about just a giant tip jar in front of the White House? People can just throw money in. No need for this fancy technology.

Please and thank you. Don't forget to tip your president. This episode was produced by Corey Bridges with engineering by Robert Rodriguez. It was fact-jacked by Sierra Juarez. Cake and Canon edits the show and The Indicators and Production of NPR.