Politics - News Analysis

Melania Laughs All the Way to The Bank With Brand New Grift Literally DESIGNED to Steal Money

It's just brazen.

Donald Trump and his wife Melania know a thing or two about grifting. They’ve been doing it for a long time, and they’ve got it down to an art. There are people, of course, who defend the president and first lady’s many “business ventures,” but the difference between what they do and a legitimate business couldn’t be more plain.

With a real business, an entrepreneur finds or develops a product or service that holds value for consumers. If you invent a “widget” and it’s good enough for the purpose it’s intended for, your business will take off. If you become so good at the service you offer, you’ll become “in-demand” and people will flock to you when they need that service. It’s the American dream.

With a grift, you need no such value. You just need to be famous. In fact, with a grift, the less a thing is worth, the more money you make when you inflate the value with fame.

So Melania followed the old man and launched her own memecoin cryptocurrency, complete with a picture on it of her laughing at anyone stupid enough to buy it.

I know, I know. Crypto is a hard subject for a lot of people, including me. What I do know is that “memecoins” are basically throwaway collector’s items. If you know in advance about their launch, and the timing is just right, you can make a tremendous amount of money immediately, then sell it at its highest value, making it worthless (since there’s so much more of it available after you dump all yours).

I couldn’t even pretend to explain cryptocurrency to you, or why the traditional stuff like Bitcoin is any better than worthless memecoins like $MELANIA. I just know that the people who buy them seem pretty dumb. After all, the “Hawk Tuah” girl who was famous for five seconds launched a memecoin and turned it into a $400 million asset in hours.

Then she didn’t know what she was doing, it crashed, and was worthless.

Melania’s memecoin actually comes after the launch of Trump’s own memecoin, of course called $TRUMP. When he launched his a few days before the inauguration, he was at the height of his popularity, and it immediately soared through the roof. In hours, Trump went from being worth less than $5 billion to being worth nearly $60 billion, at least on paper.

Unfortunately for him, Trump is also an idiot, and it’s worth much, much less as of this writing. Much of the value, in fact, dropped the minute the couple launched $MELANIA. “Investors” swiftly realized that this was just Donnie’s latest get rich quick scheme and they dropped like flies.

Even more people, however, realized that it was bald-faced corruption:

It was reminiscent of when he began using his Washington, D.C. hotel to allow foreign dignitaries access to him during his first administration. Only, you know, WAY bigger. He’s literally selling direct access to him and using the equivalent of a trading card as the thing people are “buying” with their money (wink wink, nudge nudge).

And how about the tweet that’s being quoted there! Sure, Trump’s bilked his rubes supporters out of $25 billion with his memecoin, but he did a little old school grifting on the side when he raised over $200 million for an inauguration that barely anyone even got to see in person. Guess who keeps THAT money, too.

Axios actually summed up the memecoin pretty well, even if you don’t speak geek:

Why it matters: The coin (technically a token that’s issued on the Solana blockchain) has massively enriched Trump personally, enabled a mechanism for the crypto industry to funnel cash to him, and created a volatile financial asset that allows anyone in the world to financially speculate on Trump’s political fortunes.

That sounds like some Trump-level grift right there.

I actually hate that they’re called memecoins. I think it’s disrespectful to actual memes, which can be worth a lot even after they’ve been in use for a very long time. Memes definitely hold their value longer than the “coins” named after them.

meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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