ART OF THE $TEAL

Trump and Melania’s Crypto Grifts Suffer Catastrophic Plunge

The $TRUMP and $MELANIA tokens have cratered since their January peaks.

The man who promised to be the first “crypto president” has seen the value of his own crypto coin collapse faster than his approval ratings.

Days before his inauguration, President Donald Trump announced that he was launching a meme coin—a type of cryptocurrency that relies on online hype and digital branding.

The token, traded as $TRUMP and inspired by the president’s “Fight! Fight! Fight!” chant after his assassination attempt, has fallen in value from almost $75 per token in January to barely $8 today (an 88 percent drop).

The token surged in value immediately after its launch, dropped to $40 a token on the day Trump became president, and has continued to decline precipitously since then.

First lady Melania Trump followed her husband into the famously volatile cryptocurrency industry, and her token has fared even worse.

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Her $MELANIA coin has lost more than 98 percent of its value since its mid-January peak, and it is now trading at about 20 cents per token.

Notably, the meteoric fall of the Trumps’ crypto assets doesn’t mean that he and his family haven’t made money off of the gambit.

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A Reuters investigation from February found that in the initial frenzy to buy $TRUMP tokens after the coin’s launch, the creators of the coin made nearly $100 million in trading fees.

One of those creators, a company called CIC Digital, is owned by Trump and is estimated to control some 800 million coins as of February.

In May, a blockchain intelligence firm that assisted in the Reuters investigation estimated that the Trump Organization made $320 million in trading fees from the coin.

That estimate came a few weeks before Trump hosted a dinner at his Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, where attendance was limited to the top 220 holders of $TRUMP.

At that event, billed as “the most exclusive invitation in the world,” attendees said Trump appeared for 23 minutes then left in a helicopter.

“The food sucked,” one attendee told CNBC.

Outside of the Trump clan, a small group of the largest investors in the coin made a killing on the coin’s initial surge, with at least 50 large crypto wallets making profits in excess of $10 million each. However, another 200,000 crypto wallets, which held mostly small holdings, lost money on the coin.

Since Trump entered office for the second time, the most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, has gained almost 10 percent in value. The White House has eased regulations on digital finance and issued an executive order seeking to usher in the “Golden Age of Crypto.”

Senate Democrats have asked the Office of Government Ethics to investigate the president’s investments in digital assets, which they allege could violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.

The Trump Organization did not respond to an immediate request for comment.

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