Trump family is making billions on crypto. Their investors are losing money

0:00Michelle Conlin:Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. You know, they all felt like he's the president. He's putting his name on these things. His family is connected. These things have got to go up.

0:31Michelle Conlin:The Trump family gains more wealth from cryptocurrencies as investors lose.

0:47Michelle Conlin:It's Thursday, July 9th, and this is Here and Now, Anytime, from NPR and WBUR Boston. I'm Ashley Locke. Today on the show, artist and activist Ai Weiwei reflects on the state of free speech in China and the West. And grandparents are a quiet safety net for the American economy as housing prices spike. We find more and more families moving in together, either temporarily or permanently. And grandparents are really playing that role. But first, we now know that President Trump made a lot of money during his first year back in office, more than half of which came from cryptocurrency ventures. That's according to financial disclosures released last week.

1:36Michelle Conlin:Investigative reporters at Reuters have also reported something else. While the Trumps have netted$2.3 billion from their crypto businesses since 2024, two in three of their customers lost money. Michelle Conlon co-wrote a deep dive on the topic. She shares more details with Indira Lakshmanan. So Donald Trump called crypto a scam back in 2021. So let me just ask you the simple question. Is it a scam? Ah, that's a question for the ages. That's, of course, widely debated. And you're right. Donald Trump did call crypto a scam. fairly recently, in fact. And that all changed in the summer before the 2024 election, when the crypto industry really set its sights on Trump as a possible benefit to them if they could help reelect him.

2:31Michelle Conlin:And a few months later, shortly before the US election, he launched his own crypto company, a crypto exchange called World Liberty Financial that you can kind of think of as the bank of Trump, so to speak, for crypto. Right. So he and his sons created this business together in 2024. Explain to us how they could possibly make so much money,$2.3 billion in less than two years with so little investment and almost no risk of failing. You're right. For our examination, we examined four of their largest crypto connected holdings. And the playbook was the same all four times. Basically, the Trumps invested little, if any, money, probably none.

3:17Michelle Conlin:We couldn't find any evidence that they had invested any of their own money. And retail buyers flooded in, you know, many of them supporters of the president. And at the end, ended up losing$2.3 billion on these ventures as the four assets all tanked. Right. So you report that two-thirds of Trump's crypto investors, or maybe buyers is the better word for it, lost money. And the total amount lost was as much as the Trump family made. They were making money on transaction fees, on buying and selling cryptocurrency, regardless of whether the cryptocurrency itself rose in value. Explain to us who are these investors and what did they think they were buying?

4:01Oh, good question.

4:03Michelle Conlin:There are people who bought Trump's crypto token, World Liberty Financial. There's another crypto venture, a meme coin known as Trump. They bought the meme coin. And then there's two Trump connected publicly traded companies where investors also bought shares. And, you know, I think almost to a person, you know, they all felt like he's the president. He's putting his name on these things. His family is connected. These things have got to go up. Well, Trump's company, World Liberty Financial, discloses on its website that its token is not an investment and that people shouldn't expect to earn money from them, that they're more like souvenirs.

4:46Michelle Conlin:You're right. There's fine print on Trump's crypto exchange, World Liberty, and there's also fine print on the Trump meme coin website, very fine print, that makes it clear that, you know, people shouldn't view these as traditional investments. However, you know, three days before Trump's inauguration, when the news popped all over the world on social media that Trump had launched a meme coin, people didn't necessarily read that fine print. And they thought, huh, this thing's got to pop. He's about to take office. If you're a sophisticated crypto investor, you kind of know meme coins can kind of go up and then dump very quickly.

5:26Michelle Conlin:But this was the president and this was just regular everyday retail investors who weren't perhaps as sophisticated. And for some, it was the first time they had ever bought a crypto asset. So in other words, those who knew what they were doing might buy the meme coin, a lot of it, and offload it very quickly, make money. Whereas an ordinary investor on the street doesn't know that. They put their life savings into it and then they lose money because it goes down to pennies per coin. Is that what you're saying? That's right. Exactly. All right. So aside from the Trump family making billions, who else is investing in Trump crypto and what kind of influence do they have because of it?

6:08Michelle Conlin:Well, the other founders of World Liberty, which is the Trump crypto exchange, include Steve Witkoff and his sons, Steve Witkoff being the president's special envoy to the Middle East. And very interestingly, four days before the inauguration, an Abu Dhabi royal secretly at the time bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial that was worth about evaluated about five hundred million dollars. And it was all occurring at the same time as Abu Dhabi was interested in the U.S.'s chips for AI endeavors. And that has, of course, raised a boatload of questions, including national security concerns.

6:53Michelle Conlin:Michelle Conlon is an enterprise correspondent for Reuters. Michelle, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Coming up next, a reflection on censorship.

7:11Michelle Conlin:Artist and activist Ai Weiwei knows firsthand the dangers of censorship and surveillance. He joins Scott Tong to talk about what he's been observing in the West compared to what he's experienced in China.

7:24Ai Weiwei:In 2008, you know, I was based in Shanghai and I remember the deadly earthquake, you know, the one-time earthquake in Sichuan province where my dad was born. and you went there to document the schools that collapsed and the children who died in those schools. What happened to you? Well, censorship in China is very sophisticated. Chairman Mao always thinks that it's the most important tool to control the public opinion. So by 2008, China has always quickly transformed this kind of natural disaster or non-natural disaster into some kind of patriotic propaganda about the party, how party responded, how heroic they were, right?

8:14Ai Weiwei:Yeah. So that time I was active on the Internet. I said, hey, let's find out what is the cause of those deaths rather than just glamorize how party rescues those people. Of course, that kind of voice in China is never popular because the official narrative is very strong. Television, every newspaper. So I'm a singular voice questioning what is the cause of this kind of disaster. And you were looking into the buildings, right? There was criticism that the buildings are very poorly made. Yes, school buildings built by state should not collapse. Even the building next to it, apartment is not collapsing.

9:03You know, the hospital is not collapsing.

9:07Ai Weiwei:That means those school buildings are built under corruption. So that means if you have$5 ,000 for, say, the next one gets the job, they give to another one, only have$3 ,000 left. Then the one gave to the bottom, maybe only have$1 ,000 left. Oh, right. So the people at the top are taking the money and then just using really cheap materials to... Yeah, it's not really properly built. We call it tofu, jha gong cheng. That means if you shake it, it definitely will collapse. Made of tofu. Yeah, made of tofu. Were you stopped when you were trying to film? First, I promised online, I said I will do a research piece of how.

9:52Ai Weiwei:And when you're stopped, I said, till the last students been found, we organized what's called a citizen's investigation. We go through all the villages and check name by name. And we found 5 ,219 students, their names, their birthdays, their parents. and I post every day the name we found online till they shut off my blog. They shut down the site? Yeah, because my blog was getting very popular because people, everybody is watching to see how can this crazy individual find all those names one by one and the states never reveal one name. I want to ask how effective you think this censorship is, right?

10:42Ai Weiwei:Your site was removed, information on the earthquake. I remember in 2009, I was in our bureau in Shanghai, and we had a very smart college student from China, from Shanghai, in our bureau. And, you know, we were talking about the Tiananmen killings of 1989, June of 1989. And she popped up and she said, what are you talking about? This is only 20 years after the incident. And she said, I have no idea what you're talking about. It was erased. When you think about censorship, things, when the government attempts, perhaps succeeds in erasing things from the public memory, what does it do for society?

11:23Ai Weiwei:Any information being covered is in favor of whoever governs. What they are afraid is, did they do the right job or is their control legitimate? So they have to cover up all the information. That means almost any information being published has been twisted or covered or fixed into their favor. Yeah. You write in your book about what you describe as a different kind of censorship in the West. In 2023, during the war between Israel and Hamas and Gaza, one of your exhibitions in Europe was canceled. after you tweeted, quote, the sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been transferred to offset the Arab world, end quote.

12:14Ai Weiwei:And you went on to comment about Israel's influence and the Jewish community's influence in American media and finance and culture. Tell me about the cancellation of your exhibit that followed. That one caused a devastating response. I've been named as anti-Semitic. Oh, anti-Semitic. They call me like a terrorist. I was really wondering what's really going on. Then, of course, that caused five of my shows being shut down. One in England, one in French, one in Germany, two in the United States. Five shows. In four different nations, five shows. Who was calling you a terrorist? Where was that coming from?

13:01Ai Weiwei:It's just online. It's just online. But cultural institutions responded so quickly. Of course, when censorship happens, certainly there's no reason. You know, they cannot really explain it. Only reason is people are scared. Can I ask about these cultural institutions that are supporting the arts, right? They're supporting open inquiry, individual expression. The fact that they canceled your exhibits. What does that say about what they were afraid of? Were they afraid of their money, their funding? Was there pressure from social media? What were they afraid of? Good question. I think basically the buyer who normally buy art and they're supporting art institutions.

13:55Ai Weiwei:So for them, it hurt their business. I see. They say, oh, that's controversial. then the fear is their business model. That is perhaps people who come to the exhibit with money, they might not come. Does that surprise you that, I mean, you've lived in many European countries, you've lived in New York for many, many years, this kind of censorship in the West, does that surprise you? I'm irritated but not really surprised because I grew up in this. I have no fantasy about East or West or communist or so-called capitalist free economy type person. I think censorship exists in every power. And if they allow you to speak, that means your message and your information is almost irrelevant.

14:48Ai Weiwei:Only when you say something which they care about, definitely they will not let you speak. If you really have original thinking, you're in danger. You know, we can see what happened in universities, you know, Harvard, in Columbia, in many, many universities. During and after the student protests about the war in Gaza. You know, you really think, oh, my God, this is only happening in a third-world nation, right? I mean, how could the U.S. government interfere? Oh, yes, they do. They do in the past, they do now, and they will do in the future. You also write about surveillance and the power of surveillance.

15:29Ai Weiwei:Can you talk about that? The policy for surveillance, there's a guideline. First, they avoid facing you eye to eye. So you cannot identify them. But my tactic is I directly take photos. I would record it. Then later study, oh, I found that guy on Great Wall, and I found the guy in the park. There you are again. There you are again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can easily identify. But this is old time, old-fashioned. Today, we can follow our phones, you know, exactly where you are. Facial recognition. Yeah, and also, you know, who you talk to, what you buy, you know, what your eating habit or your sleeping habit, and what you're checking on the phone.

16:18How should Americans we're sitting here in New York think about their surveillance that we are under and the effect of it?

16:27Ai Weiwei:I think, especially with the current administration, they are ignoring the so-called human rights or civil liberty. So I think Americans no longer can say we'll protect individualism, we'll protect personal privacy. Forget about human rights. Who's going to talk about human rights? Human rights become dirty words. So that's why I think Americans are totally giving up in protecting humanity and human rights, which is very sad because that is a foundation for so-called democratic society. Ai Weiwei, his new book is on censorship. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you.

17:28Michelle Conlin:Coming up, a struggle, but also a gift of love. Indira shares how today's grandparents are supporting grandchildren.

17:49Michelle Conlin:While many grandparents say caring for their grandkids brings them joy, for many it can be physically and financially taxing. A new study from AARP finds that grandparents in the U.S. contribute more than$900 billion a year to the economy by supporting their grandchildren, mostly through unpaid child care, as affordability and accessibility remain a strain for many working families. Deborah Whitman leads policy development for the organization. Housing costs have also gone up. And so we find more and more families moving in together, either temporarily or permanently. And grandparents are really playing that role.

18:31Michelle Conlin:But they're also contributing to their kids and their families financially. We estimate that they're giving over one social security check a year, over$2 ,000 to their grandkids. And some of that are for gifts, you know, birthdays or holidays. But a good portion of that is also for basic needs, for schooling, for clothing, or to pay rent or utilities. Grandparents are really helping out in so many ways, and we see that's largely growing because families of all ages are struggling. Well, one thing that this raises in my mind is that many grandparents are retired and living on a fixed income. The average Social Security benefit per month is$2 ,000.

19:17Michelle Conlin:So between covering their own living expenses, the often higher cost of health care for seniors, how realistic is it for us to expect grandparents to financially support their families and provide free child care? Well, it is a struggle for many, and it is a gift of love for others. So as you said, this average Social Security check is just a little over$2 ,000 a month. and they're financially supporting on average$2 ,600 a year. So the money that they're giving to their family comes out of their own pocket and those people who are on fixed income then don't have that to pay their own rent or utilities.

20:00Michelle Conlin:And this is how families work. We know when older adults need help, their kids and grandkids will help them. And when their children and grandchildren or need help, it goes both ways. I think we often pit generations against each other when in the reality, people are working together across all generations to help support each other. Debra Whitman tells Indira that cost of living will definitely be a voter issue to watch in the upcoming midterm elections. You can check out more of their findings about grandparents at hereandnow.org.

20:38Michelle Conlin:Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Lynn Menagon, Emiko Tamagawa, and Sam Rafelson. Today's editors were Todd Munt, Mikaela Rodriguez, Michael Scotto, and Kat Welch. Technical direction from Caleb Green and Matt Reed. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin. Here and now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. Back with you tomorrow.