Fool’s gold: Trump’s crypto scam – a U.S. trademark
By António Santos
The author often covers developments in the U.S. for Avante, the weekly newspaper of the Portuguese Communist Party, this one from the May 29 issue. Translation: John Catalinotto.
Trump’s cryptocoin is a stark symbol of U.S. imperialism’s degeneration. At protest outside ‘investor’s’ meeting at his private country club in Virginia, May 22, 2025.
The U.S. is the most advanced and developed capitalist country in the world: historically speaking, it is ahead of all others — considered as one would a cancer that advances and develops. This means that, from our moribund and subordinate Europe, we can see in imperial paroxysm what — if we do nothing to stop them — similar advances and developments would have in store for us.
And at a time when there is so much talk here about the interconnection of private business with the management of public interests, it is perhaps worth learning what is already being done in the United States, which is always leading us Europeans when it comes to such advances and developments.
Last Thursday [May 22], Trump organized a bizarre dinner at his golf club in Virginia. To attend it, 220 diners spent $394 million to buy a bizarre invitation to an orgy of corruption: U.S. presidential meme coins — a kind of cryptocurrency that makes no attempt to disguise its Ponzi scheme. According to the $Trump website, Trump’s personal meme cryptocurrency business, the 220 biggest buyers receive an invitation to dinner with Trump, while the first 25 bidders get “a cocktail with access to the president.”
[Crypto billionaire] Justin Sun came in first place, having invested $19 million, which got him “a private conversation with Trump after the cocktail.”
Trump owns about 300 companies valued at about $8 billion, but the White House assures us that there is no conflict of interest, because “management is handled solely by his children.”
Of all Trump’s businesses, however, none is more illustrative than the cryptocurrency business. Trump has made the U.S. the world’s leading country in crypto “mining.” The activity already accounts for 3 percent of national electricity consumption and represents more than 40 percent of the world’s total production of this strange mineral. Without exaggeration, Trump announced his desire to “make America the crypto capital of the world.”
This says a lot about the development and progress of a country: cryptocurrency “mining” produces nothing; it adds no value, invents nothing, creates nothing useful. It does not even employ miners. It is just supercomputers performing complex mathematical operations that consume energy and waste water, while virtual money generates more virtual money and the speculative bubble grows.
The historical decline of the U.S. is not only evident in its growing inability to invent, innovate, produce or add useful value; it is also visible in the economic activities in which it still leads the world: cryptocurrencies, weapons, blackmail, corruption and, ultimately, everything that is sterile, unnecessary or destructive.
