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javier milei
The Far-Right and the Crypto Scam
How Trump and his far-right allies are using these digital currencies as a strategy to rig the rules of the game in their favor.
Mar 16, 2025
Back in 2021, Donald Trump called cryptocurrency “a disaster waiting to happen” and a “scam.” Takes one to know one, right?
As he got closer to regaining the White House, however, Trump changed his mind about this “scam,” probably as a result of the millions of dollars that flowed into his campaign coffers from industry donors. To the delight of these donors, Trump promised to make the United States the cryptocurrency capital of the world. He also talked about creating a strategic reserve of Bitcoin.
After he won the election, Trump received over $11 million in contributions to his inaugural committee from the crypto industry. It’s a hallmark of pyramid scams that only the people at the top reap the benefits, and Trump has put himself at the very apex of the ziggurat in order to rake in millions for his posse and for himself.
Consider the saga of $TRUMP.
When the inmates take over the asylum, the currency becomes a way of consolidating power in the hands of oligarchs.
Three days before his inauguration, the $TRUMP meme coin debuted. Meme coins are usually based on an internet meme and are “typically characterized by their volatile nature.” Well, that sounds like a good fit for Trump! Indeed, after he promoted the coin on his social media accounts, its value surged astronomically.
Some of the biggest winners in this naked money grab were the firms that launched the coin and profited from the transaction fees, which netted them as much as $100 million in the first two weeks. One of those firms was CIC Digital, which is owned by…Trump himself.
Like all financial operations characterized by irrational exuberance, the value of $TRUMP soon plummeted. Indeed, over 800,000 investor accounts lost a total of $2 billion. Of course, they’re not the only Trump supporters who are suffering from buyer’s remorse. Even the stock market, which initially cheered Trump’s election, is having a serious hangover, a swing in mood not very different from $TRUMP’s trajectory.
$TRUMP’s deep dive notwithstanding—or perhaps because of the success of this scam—crypto remains an essential part of Trump’s economic plans. And Trump is not the only far-right leader who has dabbled in scamming the population with crypto. Argentina’s Javier Milei is now dealing with the aftermath of a corruption scandal associated with $LIBRA, a meme coin he initially supported and which left 10,000 investors over $250 million poorer. El Salvador is still reeling from Nayib Bukele’s crypto obsession, which cost his country $60 million when Bitcoin tanked a couple years ago—not to mention all the Salvadoran energy and natural resources that Bitcoin mining has absorbed.
Two years ago, I explained how cryptocurrencies function like pyramid scams. Last year, I discussed the environmental consequences of crypto.
Now I want to dig a little deeper into the politics of crypto: how Trump and his far-right allies are using these digital currencies as a strategy to rig the rules of the game in their favor.
The Mechanisms of Theft
To understand how crypto scams work, you need to know about “sniping” and “rug-pulling.”
When a new crypto product is launched, whether it’s a meme coin or a non-fungible token, a select group of speculators place a big buy to push the value higher. If enough of these “snipers” exit at the same time, the value drops, providing the snipers with short-term profits and leaving a lot of other investors holding the (empty) bag.
Of course, it helps to know in advance about a new product launch so that you can line up your bots and your AI to execute high-volume and high-speed trades—and your coordinated exit from the stage. In another context, you might call this “insider trading.”
The orchestrated sale of the crypto product is known as the “rug pull.” It can be sudden, as was the case with $TRUMP. Or it can take place over a longer period of time in what used to be known as the “long con.”
The rug pull sometimes relies on the services of a celebrity. Let’s take a brief look at the case of Javier Milei in Argentina to understand how this works.
Enter Milei
Argentine President Javier Milei is, to say the least, a heterodox economist. He pledged to cut government spending as a way of reining in inflation. He fired 30,000 government workers, eliminated government subsidies, and halted many public works projects. No surprise that Milei and his infamous chainsaw served as the inspiration for Musk and DOGE.
Inflation in Argentina has indeed fallen, from nearly 300% to around 85% in January. But the costs have been immense to the poor. More than half of Argentines now live below the poverty line, and they are dealing with increased costs for food and basic services. The economy has contracted as a not-very-surprising result of Milei’s chainsaw approach to government.
Among his many economic enthusiasms, Milei has relentlessly attacked the country’s central bank and advocated for the adoption of the U.S. dollar as the national currency. During his first year in office, he didn’t put crypto at the heart of his economic platform. But his efforts to displace the central bank has been accompanied by a push to lift restrictions on currency exchange, which would give cryptocurrencies a big boost. Argentinians are already leading adopters of crypto, largely as a hedge against the volatility of the Argentine peso (frankly, they might as well buy lottery tickets or play slots at the casino).
As for Milei, the real purpose of his economic program has been starkly revealed by this scandal: a transfer of money from the poor to the rich.
But that’s changing as a result of the $LIBRA scandal.
At the instigation of several fast-talking meme coin boosters, Milei endorsed $LIBRA when it was released on Valentine’s Day this year. But the value of the meme coin tanked within mere hours as top investors pulled the rug out from under it. As “Cryptogate” spread, Milei scrambled to deny any connection to the fiasco.
But that was hard to do given the evidence of several tweets showing Milei, with his trademark glower and two thumbs up, posing with those boosters, including an American named Hayden Davis.
Davis runs Kelsier Ventures, which was part of the sniping and rug-pulling around $MELANIA, the spousal counterpart to $TRUMP, which followed a similar trajectory of jumping high off the diving board and then plunging into the empty pool below. Davis did the same thing with $LIBRA, making off with around $100 million. He has promised to refund some of that money to the people who lost big. Don’t hold your breath.
“This is an insider’s game,” Davis has said about these meme coins. “This is like an unregulated casino.”
As for Milei, the real purpose of his economic program has been starkly revealed by this scandal: a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. His popularity was already on a downward trajectory in early February before the scandal, with 53% of the population disapproving of his policies (compared to 43% in favor). Cryptogate could be an anchor that pulls Milei down to the bottom of the sea.
Trump Also Goes Big
It’s no accident that the administration’s government-cutting initiative, DOGE, shares a name with a leading cryptocurrency. Cutting government oversight, eliminating regulations, and empowering the already-powerful private sector all benefit the crypto industry. But Trump is not just cutting government—he is putting his own people into positions of power.
That includes right-wing financier David Sacks, who’s in charge of both crypto and AI in the Trump administration. Sacks comes out of the same political milieu as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (with whom he led PayPal). As with so many of Trump’s appointees, the opportunities for corruption abound. As MSNBCreported at the end of last year, “Sacks launched an artificial intelligence company called Glue this year and is known to be a major investor in cryptocurrencies, which would seem likely to create some conflicts of interest if he’s steering the administration’s AI and crypto policies.”
Trump is also staffing the Securities and Exchange Commission with crypto loyalists who have already begun to deconstruct the oversight of the crypto sector. As The New York Timesnotes:
Federal officials declared that so-called memecoins would not be subject to strict oversight. A series of investigations into major cryptocurrency firms were halted. And the Securities and Exchange Commission agreed to pause a fraud case against a top crypto entrepreneur. Just over a month since President Trump’s inauguration, U.S. regulators have almost entirely dismantled a yearslong government crackdown on the crypto industry, a volatile sector rife with fraud, scams and theft.
Meme coins, of course, are the $TRUMP and $MELANIA scams that have already bilked thousands of investors. The reduction of oversight on crypto, meanwhile, is likely to increase the pool of victims. Burwick Law is the firm trying to claw back money for those who were scammed by $HAWK (promoted by influencer Haliey Welch) and also 200 clients from various countries who lost money in the $LIBRA scandal. Dubbed the “ambulance chaser of crypto,” Max Burwick is going to face a deregulatory headwind coming from the Trump administration.
But the biggest crypto project of the Trump administration is its crypto strategic reserve, an idea promoted hard by the crypto industry. It’s the culmination of the right-wing’s push for U.S. businesses to invest in crypto and also state governments buy up the currency. A strategic reserve of crypto makes no sense. Such reserves are meant for valuable assets like oil and gold. Why doesn’t Trump consider a strategic reserve of Amway products or Tupperware?
For the time being, the two reserves (one for Bitcoin, the second for other digital assets) will contain only crypto seized in criminal or civil forfeitures. The crypto industry was disappointed that Trump didn’t mandate federal purchases of the currencies. But that will probably happen in the future. The new initiative calls on federal agencies to come up with strategies to buy more Bitcoin. And there’s now a bill in Congress calling on the government to buy a million Bitcoin.
So, basically, such a reserve is just a gift to all the crypto loyalists who have supported Trump. Let’s call it what it is: a first step toward state capture by crypto oligarchs.
Why Does the Far-Right Love Crypto?
Crypto appeals to the far-right for several reasons. It promises to undermine the state’s central authority. It offers a degree of anonymity, which can facilitate tax evasion, asset parking overseas, and plain old money laundering. And its volatility allows for the profiteering that sometimes goes by the name of entrepreneurialism.
Meanwhile, for extremist organizations that need to stay under the radar to evade surveillance, crypto is the monetary equivalent of an encrypted messaging service. According to the Anti-Defamation League, “15 white supremacist and antisemitic groups and individuals, as well as their donors, that collectively moved $142,546 worth of cryptocurrency to and/or from 22 different cryptocurrency service providers.” The European far-right is also beginning to trade in these currencies.
In countries with conventional governance—that is, not lunatics like Trump and locos like Milei—crypto functions as a right-wing weapon against the state. But when the inmates take over the asylum, the currency becomes a way of consolidating power in the hands of oligarchs.
Meme coins like $TRUMP and $LIBRA are just the side hustles by opportunists who want some of the crumbs that fall off the oligarchs’ tables. The real money is in the “legitimate” trade in crypto, the speculation in Bitcoin and Dogecoin. This is where far-right politicians create “positive synergies” between government deregulation on one side and campaign contributions on the other.
This institutional corruption is at the center of the Trump-Milei enterprise: the wholesale looting of the public sector and the grotesque enrichment of the already rich.
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Trump Ally Milei Threatened With Impeachment Over Crypto Stunt
"Look where you brought us with your madness! You turned Argentina into a casino where the croupier is the president himself," one opposition politician said.
Feb 17, 2025
Argentina's far-right libertarian President Javier Milei faces legal challenges and calls for impeachment after a cryptocurrency he touted on social media over the weekend rapidly rose and then tanked in value.
Milei first promoted the $LIBRA coin from his personal account on X Friday night, which then skyrocketed in value to $5 apiece, according to Reuters. Within hours, however, the coin's value plummeted to under $1. Milei deleted his initial tweet five hours after he first posted it, The New York Timesreported, writing in a new post that he was "not familiar with the details of the project."
"We just witnessed one of the fastest and largest destructions of wealth in retail trading history," noted The Kobeissi Letter, which tracks capital markets, in a social media post. "Argentina's memecoin, $LIBRA, erased -$4.5 billion of retail capital in seven hours. Truly destructive."
In the first 40 minutes after Milei first tweeted boosting the coin, its value rose by more than 2,000%, CoinDesk reported. However, it then began to fall as early investors sold their shares, eventually plummeting 95% from a maximum value of $4.4 billion.
Crypto experts warned the $LIBRA coin, which was developed by KIP Protocol and Hayden Davis, could be a "rug pull," a scam in which a crypto developer launches and inflates a coin only to pull out and leave investors hanging.
"Milei's participation in the crime of crypto fraud is extremely serious," the Lower House bloc of the Peronist Unión por la Patria, a center-left opposition group, wrote on social media Saturday. "It's a scandal without precedent. Our bloc of national deputies has decided to move forward with presenting an impeachment request against the president of the nation."
Opposition lawmaker Leandro Santoro further called Milei's actions a "scandal, which embarrasses us on an international scale" and "requires us to launch an impeachment request against the president."
On Sunday, Socialist Party lawmaker Esteban Paulón also called for impeachment proceedings.
"If as a president of a country you propose something for private benefit there is an obvious conflict of interest."
On Monday, Argentina's benchmark S&P Merval had fallen by 4%, according toReuters. The incident sparked more than 100 legal complaints, which were assigned to Federal Judge Maria Servini on Monday.
One case was brought by a coalition of lawyers involved in the Right to the City Observatory think tank as well as economist and former Argentine Central Bank President Claudio Lozano. The group accused Milei of fraud, dereliction of duty, and criminal association, according totheBuenos Aires Herald.
An official statement from the president's office on Saturday said that Milei had met twice with the developers of $LIBRA and had decided to promote the coin "as he does daily with many entrepreneurs who want to launch a project in Argentina to create jobs and obtain investments."
"Not having been part of any instance of the development of the cryptocurrency, after the repercussions that the launch of the project had and to avoid any speculation and not give it further dissemination, he decided to delete the post," the statement continued, adding that the president had asked the Anti-Corruption Office to investigate whether he or anyone else in the government engaged in "improper conduct."
However, the lawyers challenged Milei's account, according to the Buenos Aires Herald:
In their report, the lawyers dispute Milei's subsequent claims that he was not aware of the project's details. They highlight that the president made his post just three minutes after $LIBRA was launched, timing that indicates he knew it was coming before it was announced. They also argue that, as an economist, it is unlikely that he did not understand the details of the project he was sharing.
In a post addressed to Milei directly, former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner heavily criticized the current president for painting himself as an expert yet claiming innocence of the scheme.
"Weren't you the 'best president in history'? Weren't you the 'genius of the economy'? From self-proclaimed 'global leader' to CRYPTO SCAMMER," de Kirchner wrote.
"Look where you brought us with your madness! You turned Argentina into a casino where the croupier is the president himself," she continued. "THAT IS YOUR MARKET FREEDOM… that of the casino. Your mask has fallen off."
While experts say impeachment efforts are unlikely to succeed, the incident could harm Milei in the upcoming midterm elections.
"It is extremely serious if confirmed, especially in terms of a president's powers to promote something private," left-wing Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum toldReuters. "If as a president of a country you propose something for private benefit there is an obvious conflict of interest."
The scandal drew comparisons to U.S. President Donald Trump, who also launched a meme coin shortly before taking office, the value of which also first rose and then fell dramatically. Milei has expressed support for Trump in the past, while Elon Musk has taken inspiration from Milei's chainsaw-wielding approach to government for his ideologically-driven anti-government effort Department of Government Efficiency.
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Musk and Ramaswamy Outline Plan for Mass Firings, Cuts to Antipoverty Programs
"The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is poised to make far-reaching recommendations that could have a devastating impact on Americans and enormously benefit insiders, starting with Musk himself."
Nov 21, 2024
The two right-wing billionaires President-elect Donald Trump has tasked with spearheading a new "government efficiency" commission outlined their vision Wednesday for the mass firing of federal employees, large-scale deregulation, and major spending cuts that could impact antipoverty programs, drug research and development, and more.
For the first time since Trump announced plans to create the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—which, despite its name, would be an advisory commission rather than an actual federal department—Tesla CEO Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy offered a detailed look at how they plan to achieve their stated objective of taking a "chainsaw" to federal operations.
"We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America," the pair wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. "The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws."
Decrying rules crafted by "unelected bureaucrats," Musk and Ramaswamy—unelected outside advisers—wrote that they intend to present to Trump "a list of regulations" they believe should be eliminated. The culling of regulations would, they argued, provide the justification for "mass headcount reductions"—corporate-speak for sweeping firings—across federal agencies, a plan the two wrote would not be deterred by civil service protections.
Watchdogs have noted that the regulatory cuts envisioned by the commission's co-leaders would likely benefit Musk's companies, at least three of which are currently under scrutiny from nine federal agencies.
"Based on Elon Musk's comments, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is poised to make far-reaching recommendations that could have a devastating impact on Americans and enormously benefit insiders, starting with Musk himself," Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman said Wednesday.
"A second Trump term will undoubtedly see a multipronged attack on any institution that seeks to constrain big business, and DOGE will lead the charge."
Musk and Ramaswamy also laid out a plan under which Trump would evade existing federal statutes such as the Impoundment Control Act to cut spending already allocated by Congress.
"DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion-plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood," they wrote.
As The Washington Post's Jacob Bogage recently observed, the federal programs "without separate spending authorization" that Musk and Ramaswamy are targeting "represent more than $516 billion" and encompass key areas including veterans' healthcare, education spending, housing assistance, childcare aid, student loan programs, Head Start, opioid addiction treatment, and NASA.
Musk, a megadonor to Trump's 2024 presidential bid, claimed on the campaign trail that he would be able to identify "at least $2 trillion" in possible cuts to federal spending.
Casey Wetherbee, an Argentina-based writer, warned Wednesday that "Musk and Ramaswamy's admiration of Argentine president Javier Milei offers us a glimpse into their ideal end state."
"Ramaswamy tweeted on November 18: 'A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids,'" Wetherbee wrote for Jacobin. "When Milei assumed office last year, he declared that conditions would worsen before things would get better; Musk similarly warned that DOGE’s recommendations may cause 'temporary hardship.' Meanwhile, in Argentina, Milei's austerity measures have targeted the country's social safety net, causing the poverty rate to skyrocket while only lowering taxes for the country's wealthiest citizens, a troubling outlook for a second Trump administration if DOGE's advice is ever implemented."
"A second Trump term will undoubtedly see a multipronged attack on any institution that seeks to constrain big business, and DOGE will lead the charge," Wetherbee added. "After all, in DOGE's public call for collaborators, it seeks 'super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries'; that's how they see themselves. We can only hope that, by virtue of how evidently insufferable they are, DOGE's relationship with the Trump administration flames out spectacularly."
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