Source: Rolling Stone
There were less than four days to go until Donald Trump was sworn into office for a second time. In those final days of the presidential transition, Trump and his team were busy finalizing their blitz of executive actions, which included a widespread crackdown on civil rights, trans Americans, and diversity programs. Trump’s government-in-waiting was putting the finishing touches on plans for a startlingly nativist propaganda campaign, which would soon feature an “ASMR” video of officials preparing to fly migrants to camps at Guantánamo Bay.
Trump had preemptively allocated an astounding amount of power to the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, giving him near free rein to desecrate the federal workforce. And the president-elect was giddy about one of his more depraved opening acts still to come: the mass pardons and commutations for his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Amid all of this, the incoming president had something else on his mind: his meme coin. The Friday night before his inauguration, Trump announced he was launching his own cryptocurrency called “Trump Meme” — a purely speculative asset, comparable to a digital baseball card, with no inherent value or use. The price of $TRUMP quickly blew up, surging from around $6 to $74, generating billions of dollars on paper for the Trump family.
The launch was so successful that First Lady Melania Trump quickly raced her own meme coin out the door, too, less than 24 hours before Trump’s inauguration — a move that caused $TRUMP to begin crashing. By late February, the coin was trading at around $13. The earliest investors likely made huge profits; hundreds of thousands of suckers appear to have lost big. The Trump family will make a killing no matter what: By early February, his family and their partners had made nearly $100 million on trading fees.
In the final days of the transition and even during his early presidency, Trump privately encouraged close allies — in big business and on Capitol Hill — to buy his meme coin, according to a source familiar with the matter and one Republican lawmaker. He’d even do this over dinner.
“Of course he did,” the GOP lawmaker recounts. “He told the whole country to do it [via an X post], so why wouldn’t he tell the people he knows? There’s nothing wrong with that.” The lawmaker refused to say whether they invested — though if they bought any Trump coin more than an hour or two after it launched, they would have lost big.
The meme coin was a blatant cash grab, to the point that one of Trump’s former White House communications directors denounced it as “Idi Amin-level corruption.” It wasn’t even the Trump family’s first foray into crypto — during the 2024 campaign, his family announced the creation of their own cryptocurrency platform, World Liberty Financial.
As he promised on the campaign trail, Trump has worked aggressively to push the crypto industry’s interests in Washington and ensure the incredibly risky assets operate with little regulation, signing an executive order to promote crypto, announcing a “crypto strategic reserve,” and naming an industry ally to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission. At the end of February, Trump’s SEC moved to throw out its prosecution of Justin Sun — who had been charged with marketing unregistered crypto securities and manipulating the market for a crypto token — after Sun’s investments in World Liberty Financial reportedly netted the Trump family $56 million in fees.
The crypto caper is a perfect encapsulation of the bold-faced graft at the heart of the new Trump presidency: Uber-wealthy elites are poised to cash in, while ordinary people get hosed. And public policy will be designed to encourage this exact outcome.
“Compared to other major corruption scandals since the 1870s, this administration is shaping up to be the most corrupt of them all, because never before has a president been willing and able to blatantly use the office to make massive personal profit,” says Kedric Payne, the Campaign Legal Center’s general counsel and senior director for ethics. “Compared to his first term, he’s more strategic and more prepared to engage in corruption — and he’s taken big steps to wipe out any possible enforcement against his actions. An example of this is his financial interest in crypto, while at the same time shaping the policy to allow that very industry to flourish.”
Payne adds: “The blatant nature of this is genuinely new, which I think a lot of people have trouble wrapping their heads around. Normal corruption involves lobbyists providing gifts and perks and campaign contributions to lawmakers in hopes they will receive beneficial legislation. These are acts that directly benefit Trump’s bottom line.” (The Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment.)
“This administration is shaping up to be the most corrupt of them all.”
WHILE STILL IN its infancy, Trump’s second administration has been a shocking expression of corruption, lawlessness, and cruelty, with an even higher level of chaos than Americans had grown to expect from the former game-show host. It’s clear now his critics were correct about what a Trump win would mean; if anything, many of them undersold the threat he would pose.
At the center of the horror show is Elon Musk, who spent $290 million boosting Trump and Republicans in the last election cycle. In return, Musk was put in charge of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump and Musk have used this not-so-legitimate office to blitz through constitutional checks and balances and long-standing federal laws in order to consolidate and expand presidential power, so they can dismantle whole agencies and purge the workforce to make it more MAGA.
With Musk and his team of young far-right helpers at DOGE leading the way, the Trump administration has moved to fire tens of thousands of federal employees with no basis at all — ranging from the vast majority of workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development, America’s foreign aid bureau; some health care workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs; staffers who take care of our great national parks; and employees at the Federal Aviation Administration who keep the skies safe. (They also fired hundreds of staffers at the agency that manages America’s nuclear weapons before attempting to hire them back.)
Veterans make up 30 percent of the federal workforce — so Americans who served our country are all but assured to absorb the brunt of Trump and Musk’s mass firings. Moreover, Musk and DOGE specifically sought to cancel hundreds of Veterans Affairs contracts that would eviscerate the department’s ability to provide promised care and benefits; according to Washington Technology, a magazine for government contractors, most of the contracts targeted were held by service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses.
“Congress estimates 50,000 veterans will lose jobs, homes, and more,” says Michael Embrich, a former policy adviser to the secretary of Veterans Affairs, adding: “Those who swore to defend democracy will now have their pursuit of happiness stripped by two of the richest and most powerful men ever to skirt serving in the public interest.”
‘Paying to See the President’
In a short time, the ethical quandaries of Trump’s first term have begun to look comparatively small. Outside of the crypto space, there are so many different ways for businesses — or foreign interests — to put money directly in the coffers of the president and his family.
During the campaign last year, Trump privately discussed jacking up the price for membership at his private Florida club and estate Mar-a-Lago, because members are “paying to see the president.”
After Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris, top CEOs and corporate executives amped up their visits to the president’s Palm Beach club — with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, suits from the pharmaceutical industry, and many others making a show of kissing the ring.
Senior staff at lobbying outfits and a variety of corporate giants immediately began planning retreats, galas, and annual meetings at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump-branded golf resorts and event spaces — so they could shovel cash to Trump. One longtime D.C. lobbyist referred to these payments as “tips” for the president. Wired separately reports Trump’s Super PAC has charged $1 million per seat at Mar-a-Lago events with the president; one-on-one meetings cost $5 million.
Even the first lady has been making deals — including an outlandish agreement with Amazon. The company signed a $40 million deal with Melania Trump for a documentary film that, as one Amazon source puts it, “nobody asked for.” Other studios, to the extent they were interested, reportedly offered far lower sums. It’s expected that most of the money will go directly to Melania. She personally pitched Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, about the film project, directed by disgraced filmmaker Brett Ratner, over dinner at Mar-a-Lago in December, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Becoming president again has given Trump leverage to resolve his often frivolous lawsuits against Big Tech companies and large corporate-owned media outlets, and to walk away with multimillion-dollar payouts. In one case, he has already wielded the weight of the Federal Communications Commission against a media company he’s suing.
ABC, owned by Disney, announced in December it would pay $15 million to resolve Trump’s lawsuit over George Stephanopoulos’ claim that Trump had been “found liable for rape” in civil lawsuits from E. Jean Carroll. (Trump was found liable for “sexual abuse.”) In late January, Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit over Facebook suspending his social media accounts after he fomented the Jan. 6 riot.
The Facebook and ABC payments went to Trump’s new presidential library and museum slush fund. In the case of Trump’s settlement with X, Musk didn’t even bother with the library fund, and instead negotiated a $10 million deal with Trump that will reportedly benefit the president personally. Trump has claimed he gave Musk “a big discount.”
Obvious Conflicts
The $10 million deal with Trump might be smart for Musk after all, given that his relationship with the president has made him one of the world’s most powerful people and put him in a position to profit off the government even more.
Musk’s DOGE team has demanded sweeping access across the federal government to sensitive data and systems in order to enact firings, cancel projects, and cut off payments to entities that Trump and Musk don’t like. The upshot for Musk is he now has access to an unparalleled trove of data about every American as well as his competitors. The opportunities for conflicts of interest are endless, given Musk’s businesses.
As Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at the Stetson University College of Law, puts it, “The number of potential conflicts of interest are legion.”
The Trump White House has argued that Musk can police his own activities — and choose to excuse himself from DOGE’s work overseeing certain contracts or funding if he believes it poses a conflict. Musk, for his part, has suggested that the public will hold him accountable regarding any conflict — people won’t “be shy about saying that,” he said in a press conference with Trump.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy
“We would not let him do that segment or look in that area if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest,” Trump volunteered, before waving away any concerns: “He’s a successful guy. That’s why we want him doing this.” Trump later publicly added one potential restriction: “Anything to do with possibly even space, we won’t let Elon partake in that,” he said.
That would make sense, since Musk’s company SpaceX has received billions in contracts from NASA.
When it was reported in February that the Trump administration was targeting NASA for a round of painful cuts — potentially 10 percent of the space agency’s workforce — the agency was abruptly let off the hook. Within hours of those reports emerging, NASA staff were told that they could take a breath: At least for the moment, those cuts were postponed, or maybe called off for good.
The reason? Musk and his allies personally intervened to forestall the reported haircut, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.
As he tears through the federal workforce, Musk is cashing in on new and existing contracts, including with agencies that regulate his businesses.
After Musk and DOGE cut hundreds of jobs at the FAA, an agency that previously fined Musk’s SpaceX for regulatory and safety violations, news outlets reported the agency was preparing to hire Starlink, owned by SpaceX, to upgrade the systems it uses to manage America’s airspace. As Rolling Stone reported, before anything was official, FAA officials quietly directed staff to find tens of millions of dollars to fund a Starlink deal.
“If Musk is in charge of hiring and firing workers at the FAA, then getting a no-bid FAA contract to provide services would be an epic conflict of interest,” says Torres-Spelliscy. “If this is the case, then he is basically paying himself with taxpayer funds through a part of the government he partially controls through his ability to fire people.”
Talk of hiring Starlink has come up elsewhere. According to a source familiar with the matter, during the first few weeks of the second Trump era, DOGE personnel reached out to officials at the FBI and Justice Department — and asked if the bureau had ever thought about adopting Starlink for sensitive operations and surveillance.
“I wanted to vomit,” this source says, adding that there is no conceivable reason the FBI would need Starlink.
The administration has also shielded Musk’s X platform from potential oversight, pausing the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which polices big banks and other financial institutions, such as peer-to-peer payment apps. Musk is working with Visa to offer a peer-to-peer payment service called X Money Account.
Other agencies scrutinizing Musk’s businesses have faced steep job cuts — including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has been investigating Tesla’s self-driving technology.
“To the extent that Musk is hiring and firing people all over the U.S. executive branch, he is not in arm’s-length transactions with government regulators,” Torres-Spelliscy says. “With respect to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, he would be both the regulator [NHTSA] and the regulated [Tesla].”
Lawlessness is core to Musk’s DOGE project and Trump’s slash-and-burn agenda for his second administration. The president’s mass-firing campaign and efforts to expand executive power depend on his and his cronies’ willingness to ignore the Constitution, existing federal laws passed by Congress, and any expectations of transparency.
Musk has not been appointed or confirmed; he is a “special government employee,” a designation that allows him to bypass a Senate confirmation process and avoid publicly disclosing his vast financial holdings.
“Special government employees do not go around directing people in agencies and telling them what to do,” says Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. “If you’re directing people in agencies and telling them what to do, under the appointments clause of the Constitution, you need to be appointed and confirmed by the Senate.”
The office Musk has led, DOGE, was created by rebranding the U.S. Digital Service — a technology unit that was housed within the president’s Office of Management and Budget. Musk and Trump have attempted to bestow the office with expansive authorities never granted by Congress. (They also moved DOGE into the executive office of the president, to shield it from open-record laws.)
In court, the Justice Department has claimed that “Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself” — even as Musk publicly threatened to fire any federal employees who failed to respond to his HR emails asking them, “What did you do last week?”
Meanwhile, DOGE has worked to help the Trump administration claw back funds appropriated by Congress, including $80 million taken right out of New York City bank accounts. Those funds, meant to help the city house asylum seekers, were removed after Musk falsely claimed that DOGE had “discovered” that disaster-relief funds were “being spent on high-end hotels for illegals.”
There’s a term for this type of act: impoundment. Trump pledged to try this during the 2024 campaign. However, the Constitution does not give the president the power to impound, freeze, or refuse to spend funds appropriated by Congress.
“It’s pretty clear as a textual matter, and the history is even clearer, that the president needs to defer to Congress, and cannot override Congress’ specific appropriations,” says Jed Shugerman, a Boston University law professor and expert in executive power. He notes that Musk “has deputies who are directly pushing the buttons that are blocking payments,” thanks to DOGE’s unprecedented access to America’s payment systems.
Trump is challenging the Constitution in other ways. The president has attempted, via executive order, to end birthright citizenship — the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States. (A judge appointed by Ronald Reagan found Trump’s order “blatantly unconstitutional.”)
“He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
Donald Trump
Compounding the constitutional threat, Vice President J.D. Vance has suggested Trump can ignore judges’ rulings, and Trump has publicly threatened to “look at” judges who rule against DOGE’s efforts to gut federal agencies and freeze their funds.
“At this point, there’s enough reporting to suggest that Elon Musk is exercising invalid power that the Constitution doesn’t allow,” says Shugerman. “He should not have executive power at all if it hasn’t been established by Congress,” Shugerman continues. “The executive power he’s exercising is that of a department head or principal officer, and he has not been confirmed. Elon Musk is unconstitutional.”
‘What Are You Gonna Do About It?’
Since the dawn of his first administration, Trump has told his followers: “Promises made, promises kept.” One 2024 vow he’s kept was his pledge to make the federal government as autocratically MAGA and cultish as possible.
During the Presidents’ Day weekend in mid-February, Trump screamed the quiet part out loud, writing online: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” In paraphrasing an apparently fake Napoleon quote, Trump effectively declared that he thinks he can break any law he wants.
In a more sane time, this sort of expression from the U.S. commander in chief would be a scandal. After all, the president is — due to the American Revolution — not a king. Trump and his staff soon doubled down, outright calling him “THE KING.”
It would be easier to dismiss these words as mere trolling if Trump were not seeking to consolidate unchecked power. In his first month back in office, Trump moved to purge the FBI and Justice Department as vengeance for the criminal investigations he’s faced. He’s quickly turned the DOJ into a political arm of the White House and a protection racket for him, his friends, and allies — and a weapon against his enemies, real or perceived.
Almost as soon as he was sworn in, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone there was a sudden, jarring information clampdown at the DOJ. Senior career officials at the Justice Department were suddenly cut out of daily conference calls and meetings to go over top-line threats or prime suspects that the feds were focusing on. Trump’s political appointees repeatedly warned Justice Department career officials and attorneys that failure to comply with Trump’s interpretation of the law — however illegal it may sound — is grounds for removal.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump told several confidants that his new Justice Department would not be conducting any more, in his framing, “illegal” federal investigations of Trump’s Republican pals. Already, the president and his administration are following through on that.
Ed Martin, Trump’s new interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has publicly pledged to “protect DOGE,” and described his team as “President Trump’s lawyers.” More ominously, in February, his office reportedly declined to sign off on an arrest warrant for MAGA Florida Rep. Cory Mills, after he was accused of physically assaulting a 27-year-old woman. At the same time, Martin has publicly threatened to investigate Democratic lawmakers over their criticisms of Musk and the conservative Supreme Court.
After Trump took office again, the Justice Department’s interest in corruption-busting quickly evaporated, and the department announced it was ending its focus on foreign bribery and influence. The DOJ also moved to throw out its corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams so that he could more fully devote his “attention and resources” to assisting Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The ensuing scandal triggered a wave of resignations at the Department of Justice that included prosecutors who had clerked for staunchly conservative justices. In another presidency, it would have been the defining, darkest episode. In Trump 2.0, it was another day, another week, another chance for the president and his people to practice their guiding, Sopranos-style legal principle, which is simply — in the words of one conservative attorney close to Trump and his inner sanctum — “What are you gonna do about it?”
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