Trump's First National Bank of Scams Is Coming

[Celerity]

The kleptocratic nightmare we’re all living in is about to get worse.

https://newrepublic.com/article/205924/trump-witkoff-crypto-bank-scam

https://archive.ph/cTSX0


A cutout of President Donald Trump holding a bitcoin is displayed on a group of servers during the Bitcoin Conference at the Venetian Las Vegas, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Have you heard about the proposed First National Bank of Trump? I get paid to know such things, but this kleptocratic scheme tiptoed past me earlier this month while I was distracted by our invasion of Venezuela, the phony criminal investigation of Jerome Powell, the Greenland invasion scare, ICE’s rising body count (eight dead so far in 2026), and the declining dollar. Among his many other accomplishments, President Donald Trump has altered our traditional experience of time.

The bank won’t actually be called the First National Bank of Trump, but it might as well. The Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, filed an application January 9 with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, to charter a “trust bank” that will be called World Liberty Trust Company. A trust bank is a bank that doesn’t accept deposits or issue loans. The purpose of the bank would be to manage USD1, a stablecoin that World Liberty Financial created last March. USD1 is already the fifth-largest stablecoin in the world, with a market capitalization (Donald Trump Jr. announced December 28) of $5 billion.

If you aren’t a cybercurrency person but nonetheless feel that “USD1” rings a bell, that’s probably because last May the United Arab Emirates purchased, from World Liberty Financial, $2 billion of USD1 to acquire a stake in Binance. Two weeks later, the UAE persuaded the Trump administration to remove a Biden-era national security restriction on the country’s importation of advanced AI chips. The Trump administration agreed to this despite intelligence that the UAE had previously shared technology with China that extended the range of Chinese missiles.

So far as we know, the UAE never enunciated any quid pro quo (“Here is the illegal bribe you asked for to send us some AI chips”). But members of the Witkoff family (Steve Witkoff is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and also to Ukraine) were involved in both transactions, and so was Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who manages the UAE’s sovereign wealth fund. Six months later, Trump gave Binance founder and convicted money launderer C.Z. Zhao a presidential pardon. When asked about this on 60 Minutes, Trump said, “I don’t know who he is” and then contradicted himself by saying, “He’s highly respected. He’s a very successful guy.”

snip