He Will Steal As Much As You Let Him

President Donald Trump cashes in.

[with apologies/credit to Harry Benson]

Today The Nation published my article about Aqua 1 Foundation, a supposed UAE-based crypto company, buying $100 million worth of $WLFI, a crypto token created by World Liberty Financial, the crypto company closely tied to President Donald Trump and his sons. In short, this previously unknown crypto company was putting tens of millions of dollars in Trump’s pocket. (*According to the published terms of the deal between Trump’s LLC and WLF.)

I couldn’t find any evidence that Aqua 1 Foundation exists. Its sparse website was registered on May 28, 2025 — two weeks after Trump visited the UAE — and its social media and data trail are similarly nonexistent. The only person associated with Aqua 1 is this guy:

He won’t respond to my tweets. Last week, a PR firm representing World Liberty Financial acknowledged receiving my questions (like who is funding this and can you show me any evidence that this is a real company) and promised to get back to me. They did not get back to me.

I have no idea who this is or where this money came from. As I write in my article, according to public blockchain data, someone with the wallet aqua1.eth sent at least $80m worth of Tether’s USDT stablecoins to World Liberty Financial across three separate transactions in June. It could be an Emirati company (though likely a state-backed one), or it could be any billionaire or state actor looking to influence Trump. A more adept blockchain analyst should investigate the transactions, which went through wallets on Bybit and OKX.

It doesn’t matter if you understand crypto or not, if you support it or not. Trump has taken in hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions, from crypto deals like this, a level of graft that’s unprecedented in the history of the United States. He’s done it before and he will keep doing it.

As I’ve written repeatedly, Trump is not only the country’s leading crypto entrepreneur. He’s in business with the industry’s sketchiest players, an array of criminals, hucksters, and fraudsters with ties to global cybercrime, money laundering networks, and leading American adversaries like China and Russia. I am no defense hawk, but this seems bad and unsustainable.

Since my article was published, I was alerted to the existence of the Aqua 0 Foundation, which seems to have been created around the same time as the Aqua 1 Foundation.

It’s the same people, whoever they are.

Like Aqua 1 Foundation, Aqua 0 Foundation’s X account seems to have been suspended or deleted.

Anyway, if you’ve made it past the screenshots, perhaps you share some concern about the largest financial scandal in presidential history. Donald Trump has found a magic money machine and will make billions of real and fake dollars while becoming ever more in hock to the rogues’ gallery subsidizing his crypto empire. There is potentially no bottom to the corruption.

Yes, the last decade has given us a sumptuous buffet of Trumpian scandals. He’s a bigoted sundowning psycopath with the office’s traditional affinity for America’s partners in war crimes — Israel and Saudi Arabia. In a “normal country,” the 25th Amendment, impeachment, or prison would have led to his removal from the political scene long ago. But this not a normal country. It’s a reality TV freakshow in which a crypto outlaw can announce he’s buying $100 million worth of the president’s shitcoin and nothing happens. Except the price goes up and the bad guys get to cash out on the backs of hapless MAGA speculators.

With a feckless Democratic minority having already blessed Trump’s behavior by helping pass the GENIUS Act (Trump’s getting into the stablecoin business), there’s little to stop him. Truthing from his Qatari Air Force One, the most compromised of presidents will drag us all into the muck of his corruption.