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It’s no secret that the second Trump administration is full of grifters who are thrilled to spend your tax dollars to enrich themselves. But you don’t need to be a member of Trump’s cabinet or even his inner circle to benefit from this brave new world.
Trump is comprehensively dismantling financial oversight, pardoning crypto scammers, and making sure cronies get sweet no-bid government contracts. At the same time all of this largesse to white collar criminals is going on, the administration is weaponizing the government against everyone else.
Just look at Trump’s early pardons and commutations. They send a message that financial crime is just fine. You can also think of them as a sort of wish fulfillment. Trump pardons people who were convicted for doing the same things he does routinely. He had to pay $25 million to settle with people who paid for his scammy “Trump University.” He exploited his own campaign donors by signing them up for recurring donations unless they located a tiny box to opt out. He falsified his financial records, inflating his net worth to obtain loans, for which he was fined $364 million.
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Trevor Milton, convicted of defrauding people who invested in his electric and hydrogen vehicle company, is probably the best example of how easy it is to buy a pardon from Trump. Milton is the owner of Nikola, an overhyped vehicle company that leverages the name of a famous inventor and promised the moon, but was faking its technology to defraud investors.
Hmmm. Sound familiar?
Milton was convicted of securities fraud in 2022 and sentenced to four years in prison in December 2023. But since he remained free on bail pending his appeal, he was able to donate $920,000 to Trump’s PAC in October 2024. That netted him a pardon, which doesn’t just mean he won’t serve prison time. It also means he won’t have to pay the nearly $700 million he was ordered to pony up in restitution to investors. That’s quite a bargain: under $1 million in donations to Trump bought a pardon that saves Milton hundreds of millions of dollars.
Trump also commuted the 10-year sentence of Carlos Watson just days before he was set to report to prison. Watson was the co-founder of once-buzzy startup Ozy Media, which imploded when it became clear that he was inflating viewership numbers, lying about revenue, and engaging in shady practices like pretending to be a YouTube executive when talking to potential investors.
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To be fair, it isn’t just that Trump is pardoning rich people. Fervent support of Trump and the lie that the 2020 election was stolen was enough for former Tennessee GOP state Sen. Brian Kelsey to catch Trump’s eye. After the standard Republican whining about how he was the victim of a Biden-led witch hunt, Kelsey pleaded guilty to campaign fraud for trying to shift campaign funds raised for his state legislative seat to his 2016 congressional race. In thanking Trump for the pardon, Kelsey made sure to tie their fates together, twin victims: “May God bless America, despite the prosecutorial sins it committed against me, President Trump, and others the past four years.”
Trump also isn’t limiting his pardons to just people. He broke new ground in excusing lawlessness by pardoning a corporation: BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange. BitMEX had pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by operating without required anti-money laundering provisions. For good measure, he also pardoned BitMEX’s co-founders.
Indeed, crypto scammers might be the biggest beneficiaries of Trump’s commitment to corruption. Crypto probably already had a native appeal to Trump, given that it is largely unregulated and is often used for scams. He and his large adult sons already run a crypto company, World Liberty Financial, which is tailor-made for corruption.
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