Rolling in Riches

 So, by the latest news accounts, Trump's meme coin turned out to be exactly the pyramid scheme it looked like. According to the New York Times yesterday, Trump's crypto business followed the classic life cycle of most such financial scams. 

The token first skyrocketed in value—leading on many innocent people to risk their savings on an investment in the coin. By now, however, it has apparently lost between 80 to 97% of its peak value. 

This means that a small number of people made a lot of money by selling the coin at the right moment. And Trump personally made a fortune—the Times reports—off of transaction fees for high-volume trading in the coin. 

But the vast majority of investors—most of them Trump's own supporters, who trusted him—lost virtually everything they had risked on this venture. 

"[S]ome 764,000 crypto wallets, most with small holdings, lost money on $TRUMP," according to the Times. 

As I predicted, so it has come to pass. Back during the first days of Trump's second term, I wrote that his meme coin would prove a means of enriching himself at the expense of the American people. 

I said that Trump was about to make a fortune by the same means employed by the brilliant industrialist Mr. Crotchet, in Thomas Love Peacock's satirical classic, Crotchet Castle:  

"He applied his science-illumined genius to the blowing of bubbles, the bursting of which sent many a poor devil to the gaol, the workhouse, or the bottom of the river, but left young Crotchet rolling in riches."

At least 764,000 "poor devils" were so treated in this case, by the sound of it. 

But hey, don't feel too bad. Not everyone who threw good money after bad by investing in this meme coin was an unsophisticated first-time investor who lost their life savings on a foolish venture. 

At least one of them was a Gulf monarchy, the UAE, which reportedly bought a mammoth stake in Trump's crypto venture—most likely as a means to curry favor and influence the new president. 

This is the same authoritarian petro-state that has been apparently bankrolling one of the most brutal parties to the genocidal civil war in Sudan. 

Let's hope they got hosed in this deal along with the rest of America. That means less money for the RSF, at least.