How Trump is making coin from $TRUMP coin

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Just before Trump began his second administration in January, he and his business partners launched the $TRUMP coin. It's a meme coin that quickly raked in hundreds of millions of dollars. And there's a lot of earning potential still left on the table. Is any of this legal?

Today on the show, we examine how the $TRUMP coin works and talk to an expert about how the president's meme coin gambit interacts with the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.

Related episodes:
How the memecoin game is played
Did Trump enable insider trading?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:11.6	Well, and if you were trying to make as much money as you could from being the president, what would you do?
0:17.3	I would turn the situation room into an escape room and rent it out for birthday parties
0:21.6	and corporate team building. I was thinking cameo videos would make a nice birthday present for somebody.
0:27.1	Yeah. What if they just set up a big shady carnival on the south lawn? Be like, here, try this ring toss.
0:33.8	There are no bad ideas. Carry on. What about selling a meme coin with my name on it and the top
0:40.9	meme coin buyers get to join me for dinner? Now you're on to something, President Wong,
0:46.0	and that is exactly what President Trump is doing. Well, tonight, in fact, if you're among the top
0:52.6	220 holders of the Trump coin, this cryptocurrency,
0:56.7	you can join the president for a gala dinner.
0:59.5	I can taste that dry chicken now.
1:01.6	This is the kind of shenanigans that has me asking, is this legal?
1:07.3	This is the indicator from Planet Money.
1:09.4	I'm Waylon Wong.
1:10.6	And I'm Darien Woods. And I'm Darren Woods.
1:11.8	Today on the show, The Trump Coin.
1:14.1	We explain what it is, how the real Donald Trump profits from it,
1:18.7	and, yes, whether this whole crypto scheme is within the law.
1:35.7	Donald Trump is associated with a few cryptocurrency ventures, the Melania meme coin, the World Liberty Financial Crypto Company. Today, we're focusing on the Trump meme coin.
1:41.3	The Trump coin is similar to any other meme coin, which is to say it's basically
1:45.9	digital monopoly money based on some kind of in-joke or meme or famous person. In this case,
1:52.0	they set up a new type of coin on the Solana blockchain. That blockchain is a record of all the
	...

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