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In the almost year and a half since returning to the presidency, Donald Trump has found plenty of ways to enrich himself and his family and friends. But one scheme in particular, a cryptocurrency venture called World Liberty Financial, is the gift that just keeps on giving. 

Trump, along with his real-estate-buddy-turned-diplomat Steve Witkoff and both his and Witkoff’s sons, launched World Liberty a few months before the 2024 election.

Then, earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that a member of the United Arab Emirates royal family had acquired a 49 percent stake in the company just days before Trump was inaugurated, netting the Trump family at least $187 million.

Now, World Liberty is on the verge of being approved for a national trust bank charter, NOTUS reported last week. If it goes through, the company would be able to issue its USD1 “stablecoin” — a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar — more freely, without having to go through a cryptocurrency exchange. And, of course, the Trump family would receive a cut through transaction fees.

In addition to the straightforward potential for presidential self-enrichment, critics argue that the charter application itself is a conflict of interest; the application is being reviewed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, whose leadership is appointed by the president. (Trump has said he is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, while Witkoff has divested outright.)

It’s all fairly complex — so to sort through what we know about Trump’s crypto enterprise and where it could be headed next, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Zach Everson of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization. Everson is research director of the group’s Trump Accountability Project.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. 

Zach, you’ve followed the Trump crypto business. What is happening here? 

What we’re seeing here is making what happened in [Trump’s] first term look ethical. There are essentially three steps: First, in September 2024, shortly before the election, the Trumps and the Witkoffs launched World Liberty Financial. Second, they came out with two products for World Liberty Financial: a “stablecoin” and a crypto token. 

Now what they need is the banking authority so that they can cut down on the fees that they have to pay outside sources, they can increase the fees that they make, and they can also centralize all regulation under the federal government. 

What is the Trump stablecoin and who has invested in it? 

USD1 is a stablecoin, which is crypto. It means it is backed one-to-one by reserves. Think of it as a bank loan, only going the opposite way. You are giving money to World Liberty Financial. You’re giving US dollars and they’re giving you this virtual currency. And the whole time that they’re sitting on your US dollars, they’re investing them in Treasuries and they are keeping the interest. 

In spring of 2025 it was announced that an investment firm backed by the national security adviser of the UAE had purchased $2 billion of these magic beans using US dollars and was investing them in [the crypto exchange] Binance. It went from nothing to all of a sudden being one of the most popular stablecoins out there, by way of the UAE national security adviser directing this money towards them.

That’s a lot of what this banking trust license would allow them to do. Right now, the reserves have to be held someplace else — they can’t hold their own reserves. Similarly, they can’t issue their own [crypto] coin in the United States. It has to be done elsewhere. If this trust gets approved, which we believe it’s going to be soon, that would allow them to essentially collect more fees in direct transactions and take out some middlemen in transactions they already have going on.

Donald Trump has World Liberty Financial, this token, and he’s got this stablecoin. How would this transition into becoming more of a traditional bank? 

Public Citizen and other groups have long been concerned about regulatory capture. That’s when the lobbyist or the business interests come into government and they take control of the agency that oversees their former employer. 

This is regulatory capture to the extreme, where they’re applying for a banking license from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. And that is part of the Treasury, which is under Donald Trump’s administration. So here you have World Liberty Financial to be regulated by an agency of the US government that is under Donald Trump’s control.

And someone who answers to the president of the United States will decide whether his financial firm, World Liberty Financial, gets to have these banking privileges.

Exactly. And another benefit of this that ties into the administration is if this does get approved for this license, it will fall under federal regulators, not state regulators. This puts his World Liberty Financial in the purview of a federal agency, which appears that it would make it a lot harder for states to try to get in there and push back on this.

What are the potential conflicts of interest here?

Everything. Everything. You’ve got an issue where we have a foreign government investing in this. Another firm backed by the UAE’s national security adviser also owns 49 percent of World Liberty Financial, something the American people didn’t find out about until a year after it took place. We heard a lot in the first term about foreign emoluments. There were all sorts of concerns about foreign governments buying rooms and drinks at his hotel holding banquets. 

Here, you’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars going to Donald Trump and his business partners right before he became president. So if you have concerns, as the Constitution does, about the United States president accepting payments from foreign powers, this one seems to be a massive one.

Is there something to “Trump has this long history of grift,” where people just look the other way at this massive grift?

When he first came in and had that DC hotel and the golf clubs, I thought people were like, well, it’s Donald Trump. Of course he’s going to do this sort of stuff. I think that’s the advantage that Donald Trump has long had is that people have known him for decades. And he’s always been like this. So what are you expecting? 

According to Forbes, Eric Trump’s net worth has shot up from $40 million before his dad was elected to $400 million. Donald Trump, Jr. went from $50 million to $300 million. Barron Trump? College student? He’s doing all right. He’s worth about $150 million. These are massive amounts of money. And a lot of that has come through World Liberty Financial.

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One of President Donald Trump’s core political positions has always been that US allies should pay more for the benefits they receive from US military power. This has included demanding that South Korea and Japan pay more for the presence of US troops on their soil, and suggesting that the US would only honor its mutual defense obligations under NATO for countries that are not “delinquent” in their defense spending.  

Lately, however, he appears to be going even further — mulling the idea of turning the US military into a kind of force for hire. 

Politico recently reported that Trump administration officials have been considering ideas to encourage still-reluctant shippers to return to the Strait of Hormuz, despite their concerns that it still isn’t safe after the US-Iran ceasefire deal. (This was before Iran announced on June 20 that it was reclosing the strait, throwing the entire arrangement into doubt.) The ideas reportedly included a “VIP pass” system where shippers would pay the US to receive a naval escort through the strait. 

On an even more expansive note, Trump suggested in an interview with the New York Times’ David Sanger last week that if Iran does not abide by the terms of its deal with the US, one step he might consider would be making the United States “the guardian of the Middle East” in return for 20 percent of the region’s revenues — effectively a regional police force paid in oil money. 

Over the weekend, Trump expanded on that idea in a Truth Social post, pushing back on reports that Iran would charge tolls for ships transiting the strait, writing, “There ​will be NO TOLLS in the ​Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there ​will be NO TOLLS ​after the 60 day period has expired, ‌unless ⁠they are imposed by and for the United States of America, should the deal not ​be ​completed, for ⁠services rendered as the Guardian Angel to ​the countries of the ​Middle ⁠East for purposes of both past, present, and future reimbursement ⁠of ​costs.”

This is, as Sanger noted, a departure for a president who long questioned both the need to maintain expensive large-scale military deployments in the region and the need to get the US military involved in foreign wars. But it’s also strange given that the need to keep oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf is one of the biggest, if not the biggest of reasons, why the US has such a large military presence in the region in the first place. From the 1980 “Carter Doctrine,” through the Reagan administration’s Persian Gulf tanker war, through Desert Storm and up through 9/11 and the War on Terrorism, US military power helped keep the oil flowing not because it was being paid by local emirs — but because doing so was seen as a vital national interest of the United States. 

The new vision sounds less like a global guardian than a state-backed mercenary force. 

Turning America’s military into a force for hire

At one time, Trump appeared to view the ideal model for America’s global military primacy as a sort of protection racket, where countries would pay handsomely for being under the US security umbrella. He now seems to have something more fleeting and transactional in mind: A system where the US is a global troubleshooter for hire. 

This “have gun will travel” model of American power feels like a natural evolution of Trump’s current approach to foreign policy. It’s transparently obvious at this point that the president isn’t any sort of isolationist; he’s a right-wing globalist who is comfortable intervening — including with military force — to deal with foreign crises, even when American interests aren’t obviously at stake. But unlike his liberal internationalist or neoconservative predecessors, he’s suspicious of alliances and binding security commitments. (The mutual-defense deal the US inked by executive order with Qatar last year feels less like a sign of how seriously this administration takes the security of Qatar than of how unseriously it takes deals like this.)

Rather than the traditional network of alliances and security guarantees that have long undergirded America’s global military might, Trump’s ideal vision sometimes seems to more resemble the deals Russia inked in recent years to provide security services for various governments in Africa, first via the now-defunct military contractor Wagner Group, and now via more directly state-run paramilitaries. That’s a very different way of thinking about the role of American power in the world. 

The “enshittification” of American power

The evolution from the Carter Doctrine — which held that any attempt “to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America” — to Trump’s suggestions of turning the US military into what sounds on paper like a mercenary force for Gulf monarchies, can be seen as emblematic of what the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman have called “the enshittification of American power.”

The term is borrowed from science fiction writer Cory Doctorow’s description of how online products — particularly social media sites — decline in quality over time as they pivot from providing useful and enjoyable services to their users to extracting value from them. Likewise, the United States has spent decades selling its allies on a model that ties their security and stability to American military primacy. And now that they’re locked in, Washington is jacking up the user fees.

In the Carter and Reagan eras, it was seen as self-evident that the US benefited from the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. In the Trump era, the president wants to make sure we get a cut of the action. 

But as Trump seeks to monetize American military primacy, potential “customers” could be starting to wonder what they’re getting for the money. Countries in the Gulf were already reconsidering their traditional reliance on the US as an ally before Trump launched a war that led to missile attacks on their cities and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It didn’t help that the war ultimately ended with the Iranian regime still in power, and much of its missile and nuclear programs still intact. (In recent days, Trump has gone as far as to say that it’s only fair for Iran to have ballistic missiles when so many of its regional rivals do.) It may be hard to market your services as a “guardian angel” when these are the results. Now, there are ongoing talks about developing a regional security framework that includes the Gulf countries and Iran, but not the United States. 

It’s also far from clear whether the US has the firepower for a global troubleshooter role. The Iran war, a relatively short conflict with a far weaker adversary, taxed US stocks of missiles and interceptors to the point that the military had to divert resources from other global hot spots. On Wednesday, Trump gathered the heads of US defense contractors at the White House to pressure them into ramping up production.

And in an age of AI-enabled warfare, the US military is increasingly locked in to the services of companies like SpaceX, which raised the price of internet connectivity for US kamikaze drones during the war with Iran, and Anthropic, which pushed back on how its products were being used on the eve of the conflict. In their 2025 Wired magazine article on the enshittification of American power, Farrell and Newman use Starlink as a prominent example of how countries become locked into US-dominated military platforms. The Ukrainian military’s dependence on Starlink for battlefield connectivity, for instance, became a liability when Musk cut service in 2022 at a time when Ukraine was rapidly retaking territory. (Musk reportedly feared nuclear retaliation by Russia.) But it’s becoming clear that the US is also vulnerable to this kind of leverage from its private contractors. 

Moreover, even as counterterrorism has faded somewhat as a US security priority, it’s clear from this recent conflict that the US still has a hard time winning asymmetric wars against weaker adversaries that have the advantage of geography and more will to fight. The US can’t eliminate the security threat from adversaries like Iran, though it can punish and degrade them — hence Trump’s repeated threats to return to airstrikes if the country steps out of line again. 

The notion that the US will need to play an ongoing “guardian” role to keep the Middle East stable is a long way from the “everlasting peace” Trump was promising a year ago after the signing of a ceasefire deal in Gaza. This moment is not a high point for the US-Israel relationship, just a few months after the two countries broke new ground by going into combat side-by-side for the first time. But still, Trump does appear to have somewhat embraced Israel’s logic of “mowing the grass” — the idea that rather than getting locked into long, drawn-out wars to defeat asymmetric adversaries, it’s better to simply launch periodic missions to degrade and knock them off balance. 

The “guardian” role Trump seems to have in mind may be less a police force than a landscaping service — replacing the goal of long-term security for both the US itself and its allies, with short-term profit.