At President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell took the stage to pray for the incoming administration, peppering his remarks with ham-fisted allusions to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech from some six decades earlier. That same day, Sewell—a longtime Trump booster who spoke at the Republican National Convention and hosted the candidate at his church in June—took the logical next step in his quest for conservative influencer superstardom: launch a meme coin and watch rubes throw their hard-earned money at it.
“I need you to do me a favor right now. I need you to go buy the official Lorenzo Sewell coin,” he said in a video posted on X, promising to “never sell on the community but rather just earn fees as our token continues to flourish.” After reaching a peak market value of $4.5 million, $LORENZO—prepare to be shocked—lost 93% of its value in a matter of hours, leaving some traders with five- and six-figure losses. I am guessing Sewell’s congregants will not be hearing a sermon on the cleansing of the Temple anytime soon.
Sewell, though, is only doing what everyone in Trump’s orbit, including Trump himself, is doing right now: cashing in as quickly and as often as possible. Days before taking the oath of office, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency meme coin, inviting prospective buyers to join his “very special Trump Community” and urging them to “Have Fun!” His eponymous meme coin, $TRUMP, should not be confused with $MELANIA, a separate meme coin launched around the same time by his wife, shortly before she once again became first lady of the United States.
The terms and conditions on—I swear I am not making this up—gettrumpmemes.com warn prospective $TRUMP buyers that they could incur “substantial losses,” and require anyone who buys to first agree to waive their rights to a jury trial or to participate in any hypothetical future class-action lawsuit, which are generally not signs that you are dealing with blue-chip investment opportunities. When asked by reporters, Trump did not do much to inspire additional confidence in the venture: “I don’t know much about it, other than I launched it,” he said, but noted he did understand that it had been “very successful.”
For now, he is right, and especially compared to $LORENZO: At the time of the inauguration, $TRUMP was the world’s third-largest meme coin, behind only Dogecoin and Shina Ibu. As of Thursday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal estimated the $TRUMP market cap at $7 billion and valued Trump’s stake at $28 billion, which would be between three and four times his estimated pre-meme coin net worth all by itself.
The ethical challenges of a chief executive with the power to shape cryptocurrency policy engaging in a little light eponymous cryptocurrency profiteering do not require a detailed explanation. But this episode is a mere preview of an administration that will function as a glorified cash cube, where everyone in the White House (and everyone who is sufficiently adjacent to it) will have a chance to grab as much as they can hold before the clock runs out.
The political dynamics of Trump’s second term are unlike anything that anyone alive has experienced: a term-limited president who is interested in ruling but not governing, who ran for office more or less to avoid the possibility of prison time, and whose position on any given issue depends largely on whichever well-dressed man with a firm handshake pitched him last. Unlike most presidents, Trump does not care about setting up his party for future success, because he has never cared about the GOP beyond its utility to his political ambitions. Nor does he care about using a second term to secure his legacy, because in his mind, exacting electoral revenge on Joe Biden was the only thing he needed to do to accomplish that task.
For the next four years, then, all Trump really wants is to bask in the glow of winning an election that the haters insisted he would lose, and enjoy the spoils of victory that come with the office. In previous decades, these perks would have consisted largely of lengthier-than-usual stays at Camp David during the high season. In 2025, they include the right to slap your name (and your wife’s name) across a digital token and sell it to anyone who will pay for it.
The heads of some of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations, too, realize that the regulatory environment might never be as friendly as it is right now, when a president who is as unapologetically profit-driven as they are is calling the shots.
Luminaries of the artificial intelligence industry, who understand that their companies will need staggering amounts of cash to have any hope of delivering on their lofty promises, are flocking to Trump, eager to exploit his disinterest in regulating an industry that needs it badly. Billionaires like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sundar Pichai similarly understand that showing up in person to kiss the ring is both the cheapest and surest way to protect their bloated monopolies from federal oversight.
The quarter-billion that Elon Musk spent to back Trump’s reelection campaign is pennies on the dollar next to the value of the government contracts for which his companies now enjoy the inside track. A month ago, TikTok was facing a ban in the U.S.; now that Trump is in power, a few well-placed compliments were enough to keep the lights on and the bottom line intact, for the moment.
No industry is going as hard in Washington as the crypto industry, which threw a star-studded celebratory ball the night before Trump’s inauguration, complete with performances from Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, and Soulja Boy. David Sacks, a member of the Silicon Valley reactionary clique, who Trump recently named as his AI and crypto czar, told cheering attendees that Washington’s “reign of terror against crypto” had at last come to a close.
Yes, some industry leaders have criticized Trump for his $TRUMP stunt, but on the whole they have little to complain about: At the very least, a president who is willing to launch his own meme coin right before moving into the White House is unlikely to be a thorn in the side of the crypto industry anytime soon.
The cashing-in presidency slows down only—and even then, only slightly—when one person’s big score threatens that of another. On Tuesday, Trump announced a new AI joint venture, Stargate, billed as a collaboration among OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle that would invest up to half a trillion dollars in OpenAI’s work. (Like many things for which Trump takes credit, Stargate was in the works months before his press conference, and since the money is coming from the private sector, his administration does not have to fund it.)
But just hours after Trump declared Stargate a “resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential,” Musk, who has been feuding with Altman since breaking with OpenAI in 2018—and whose xAI product is a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT—publicly undercut Trump’s grand pronouncements. “They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on X. “I have that on good authority.” As it turns out, Musk’s purportedly close relationship with the president started fraying the moment he perceived that as enthusiastically as he might be cashing in these days, one of his Silicon Valley rivals was cashing in even harder.
The other tech oligarchs with front-row inauguration seats will probably have their loyalties tested soon, too. Zuckerberg, whose company lobbied aggressively for the TikTok ban and stands to gain billions in ad dollars from its enforcement, cannot be happy about Trump’s decision to stay the app’s execution; Google and Pichai, whose YouTube Shorts product aspires to compete with TikTok, also must have felt the sting of defeat.
Earlier this week, Trump expressed interest in the idea of Musk or Oracle’s Larry Ellison saving TikTok by acquiring the platform from ByteDance. The more Trump picks winners and losers among those competing for his favor, the less valuable these alliances of convenience with the White House will be.
Trump is often described as a grifter, or a con man, or some variation thereof, which is in my view a fair characterization of a man who is unable to cite his favorite Bible verses but nevertheless sells officially licensed Trump Bibles for $59.99 and autographed copies for $1,000, a price that somehow does not include shipping. The difference between his first administration and this one is that this time, many of the business leaders who previously distanced themselves from Trump have figured out that ingratiating themselves is the most lucrative path of least resistance in recent memory. When the president is chasing a payday this hard, no one has to be shy about following his lead.
