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On Sunday night, John Oliver returned to the desk of “Last Week Tonight” from his summer hiatus, and there was, naturally, plenty to discuss.
The HBO host, whose contract is up at the end of 2026 — and whose parent company
is facing a probable acquisition by Paramount Skydance, putting the lefty comedian directly in the crosshairs of a pro-Trump owner who’s already implemented a number of administration-friendly changes to CBS News — focused nearly the entirety of the show on President Trump, who’d previously called crypto “a disaster waiting to happen” that “may be fake” on Fox Business, but now refers to himself as “the first crypto president.”
“Trump realized just how much money he personally could end up making from dealing with a speculative asset because it’s turned out to be a lot,” offered Oliver. “His recent financial filings show that in just his first year back in office, his personal income surged to more than $2.2 billion, most of which came from his family’s crypto businesses, which brought in about $1.4 billion. In fact, crypto has become the family’s dominant business interest, overshadowing their real estate empire and every other business they have ever had.”
As Virginia Canter, a prominent ethics attorney, stated, “This is like a perfect vehicle to funnel money to [Trump] and his family to enrich them.”
Oliver then broke down two of the Trump family’s main crypto ventures: his meme coins (or jokes converted into crypto that purely have novelty value) and World Liberty Financial.
“Most meme coins, seemingly by design, basically follow the trajectory of pump-and-dump schemes. They spike in value when they first come out and then immediately crash with insiders selling at the peak,” explained Oliver.
You see, Trump and Melania launched meme coins just prior to his second inauguration, which skyrocketed in value and then plummeted. By the following December, Trump’s meme coin was down 92% in value while Melania’s was down 99%, but Trump walked away with $636 million. Trump even went as far as hosting an intimate private dinner for the 220 top holders of the Trump meme coin, thus offering “access to the White House in exchange for an investment in one of [Trump’s] crypto ventures,” reported The New York Times. Meanwhile, nearly 1 million people lost money in the Trump meme coin with their losses totaling $3.8 billion, according to the Times.
“But Trump’s meme coin is just the tip of the iceberg here,” said Oliver, before segueing to the Trump family’s biggest crypto venture, World Liberty Financial.
One way you can buy into World Liberty Financial is by purchasing a governance token, $WLFI, which merely allows you to vote on how the token is run, with 75% of purchases flowing to the company as a fee. And a number of sketchy deals have ensued involving World Liberty Financial. For one, Justin Sun invested $45 million in World Liberty Financial and then the SEC settled a fraud case being brought against him for $10 million with no wrongdoing admitted.
If that weren’t enough, an Emirati investment fund pledged to invest $2 billion in World Liberty Financial. At minimum, Trump’s company netted $187 million from the deal. And two weeks later, Trump traveled to the UAE and announced they’d be able to buy hundreds of thousands of advanced AI chips from Nvidia (whereas the Biden administration had issued restrictions on the export of advanced AI chips to the UAE over security concerns).
“It sure seems like Trump is exploiting crypto sketchiness for maximum profit,” declared Oliver.
Trump is now pushing the CLARITY Act, which will shift crypto regulation from the SEC to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a small federal agency with little to no enforcement power.
“If these conflicts of interest were as easy to understand as Jimmy Carter and his peanut farm I think there would be a lot more alarm about just how flagrantly corrupt and compromised Trump looks here,” Oliver maintained. “That is why we badly need proper guardrails going forward.”
