On Sunday night, John Oliver returned to the “Last Week Tonight” desk from his summer vacation, and understandably, there was a lot to discuss.
The HBO host, whose contract expires at the end of 2026, focused almost his entire show on President Trump, a left-handed comedian whose parent company is facing a possible acquisition by Paramount Skydance and who is directly in the crosshairs of pro-Trump owners who have already implemented a number of pro-administration changes to CBS News. President Trump has previously called cryptocurrencies a “disaster yet to come” and “could be fake” on Fox Business, but now he is referring to them as such. “The first virtual currency president”
“President Trump realized how much profit he could ultimately make personally by dealing in speculative assets, because it turned out to be huge,” Oliver offered. “According to his most recent financial report, his personal income soared to more than $2.2 billion in his first year in office, with most of that coming from the family’s crypto business, which brought in about $1.4 billion in revenue. In fact, crypto has become the family’s primary business interest, overshadowing his real estate empire and every other business he has ever run.”
“This is like the perfect vehicle to funnel money to (Trump) and his family and enrich them,” said Virginia Canter, a prominent ethics lawyer.
Oliver then detailed two of the Trump family’s major crypto ventures: his meme coins (or jokes converted into cryptocurrencies with pure novelty value) and World Liberty Financial.
“Although most meme coins appear to be intentionally designed, they essentially follow a pump-and-dump trajectory: they first appear, skyrocket in value, and then quickly crash as insiders sell at the peak,” Oliver explained.
As you know, Trump and Melania launched a meme coin just before their second inauguration, and its value skyrocketed and then plummeted. By December of the following year, Trump’s meme coin had fallen 92% in value and Melania’s memecoin had fallen 99%, but Trump walked away with $636 million. Trump even hosted an intimate private dinner for 220 of the top Trump Meme Coin holders, offering them “access to the White House in exchange for an investment in one of[Trump’s]crypto ventures,” the New York Times reported. Meanwhile, the Times reported that nearly 1 million people lost money on Trump meme coins, totaling $3.8 billion in losses.
“But Trump’s meme coin is just the tip of the iceberg here,” Oliver said, before turning to World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s largest crypto venture.
One way to invest in World Liberty Financial is to purchase the governance token $WLFI. This will only allow you to vote on how your tokens are managed, and 75% of your purchase will flow to the company as fees. A number of shady transactions followed, involving World Liberty Financial. As an example, Justin Sun invested $45 million in World Liberty Financial and later had a fraud case brought against him settled by the SEC for $10 million without admitting any wrongdoing.
If that’s not enough, the Emirati investment fund has pledged to invest $2 billion in World Liberty Financial. Trump’s company made at least $187 million from the deal. Two weeks later, President Trump visited the UAE and announced that it would be able to purchase hundreds of thousands of advanced AI chips from Nvidia (while the Biden administration had placed restrictions on exports of advanced AI chips to the UAE due to security concerns).
“Indeed, President Trump appears to be exploiting the dangers of cryptocurrencies for maximum profit,” Oliver asserted.
President Trump is currently pushing the CLARITY Act, which would transfer cryptocurrency regulation from the SEC to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a small federal agency with little or no enforcement powers.
“If these conflicts of interest were as easy to understand as Jimmy Carter and his peanut farm, there would be more alarm about how flagrantly corrupt and compromised President Trump appears,” Oliver argued. “That’s why proper guardrails are sorely needed going forward.”
