He Lost $32,700 on Trump Branded Crypto. So Naturally, He Blames Democrats.

Surely there has never been a better time to be a grifter in American history than the current moment. When we think of a flim-flam man, we tend to picture some slick, Harold Hill type running a door-to-door scam in rural America in an earlier, “simpler” time period, back when folks “trusted each other” and were thus supposedly more gullible. But at least the rubes of such a theoretical, hokey setting of Americana would have the decency to be incensed or rueful after realizing that their life savings had been stolen by the con man. In modern America, rampant, tribal partisanship has robbed the average MAGA mark of even that ability: You can be the President of the United States and steal every penny they possess in a disgustingly blatant crypto rug pull, and they won’t even blame you for it once the money is irrecoverably gone. They’ll just go on blaming the other side of the partisan divide while their own leader shamelessly counts his profits in full view of everyone, not even bothering to hide the naked profiteering.

Hiding your theft is simply no longer necessary; not when even your victims would rather die than acknowledge you’ve stolen from them, collapsing their identity in the process. Case in point: A man featured in a recent Reuters investigation of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency profiteering, who essentially watched his life savings be wiped out by the price collapse of crypto and stock investments hyped by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. All told, he found himself down by $32,700 on shares of ALT5 Sigma, a little-known crypto company chosen for “partnership” with Trump’s World Liberty Financial, which subsequently lost more than 90% of its value in the last 10 months. But no matter, the guy knows exactly who is to blame for his financial misfortune: It’s clearly the fault of Democrats that his money now lines Trump’s coffers. He told Reuters that wicked Democrat and “anti-Trump investors” possessed the power to drive the company out of business by taking short positions against Trump-boosted crypto projects.

“When a stock has presidential backing in a way – at least from his sons – you would think it would go up,” said the man, a 45-year-old machinist in Indiana identified only as “Matt.” “Here’s the dark side. I know all of these globalists have TDS and they are just going to short it.”

And there you have it: He’s out more than $32,000 because of “globalists” sporting “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” who possess the singular ability to tank and boost anything in the market. Which, if it was true, would be a good advertisement for never investing in anything with the Trump name on it–if a shadowy cabal can drive the price to zero for anything connected to Trump, then wouldn’t anything connected to Trump represent the least logical investment possible? Maybe we can get a list of cabal-approved stocks instead, and clean up?

This shows a different reflecting pool – the pool of investor losses in Trump family crypto companies. Investor losses mirror Trump family profits. Really a way for people wanting something from Trump to pay him under the guise of investing. Probably some chumps too.

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— DrDinD.bsky.social (@drdind.bsky.social) 9:28 AM · Jul 2, 2026

But of course, not everyone lost money on companies like ALT5 Sigma, the $TRUMP memecoin, or other Trump-backed companies like “American Bitcoin”–only the rank-and-file retail investors lost everything. The small handful of Trump confederates on the inside track? They made their healthy profits, while the Trump family itself made literally billions, leaving the President’s most ardent and deluded supporters perpetually holding the bag. Trump’s central crypto hub alone, World Liberty Financial, made more than $1.1 billion from crypto token sales between Nov. 2024 and April 2026 according to Reuters’ investigation, while World Liberty Financial investors lost $674 million over the same period. Along the way, the family essentially found the best possible way for those wanting to launder cash to Trump to give it directly to his companies, under the guise of “investing.”

The blatant profiteering is perhaps most clearly captured in the intensely predictable pump-and-dump trajectory of the $TRUMP memecoin, using the current President of the United States’ own name, and promoted heavily by Trump himself from the White House. The coin launched in January of 2025 at a valuation of just over $1, although naturally early investing was mostly limited to those with business connections with the President. Its value then immediately shot up to as high as $118 as retail investors stampeded into the market, garnering massive profits for a handful of early investors, and for the Trump family–token sales have netted Trump’s company more than $616 million, while the family has also hosted lavish, lucrative galas at Mar-a-Lago to court investors. The value of $TRUMP then of course plummeted and has been slowly bleeding out ever since, with the occasional mini-pump to shake a bit more profit off the remaining bag-holders who can’t admit that the money is gone. All told, 58 solitary investors into $TRUMP made profits of $10 million or more, according to CNN’s analysis. Meanwhile, at least 764,000 investors lost money on the coin, which is down 98% from its peak. All told, there have been $711 million in investor losses on $TRUMP, all while the President’s family has made out like bandits.

Despite our bitterness at such obvious corruption going unpunished, and the implication that none of the people ripped off by Trump managed to learn a thing, there are the occasional “investors” who recognize that they were viciously scammed. One New York retiree told Reuters that he put a whopping $60,000 in retirement savings into ALT5 Sigma–which has since changed its name to “AI Financial Corp,” always a good sign–at nearly the company’s peak of $7 per share. Today it’s trading around 60 cents, good for a roughly 90% loss, and is facing delisting from major stock exchanges following its collapse. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., who hyped the stock for months, have long since washed their hands of any connection or responsibility, deploying their golden parachutes. The retiree, meanwhile, isn’t lying to himself about what happened, not that it makes him any more able to recover his tens of thousands of dollars. Understandably requesting anonymity out of pure shame, he put it simply: “I was scammed and embarrassed.”

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. celebrated a deal with Alt5 Sigma that generated roughly $500 million for the Trump family. The company's shares are down 93%.

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— CNBC (@cnbc.com) 11:00 PM · Jun 9, 2026

The Trump family, on the other hand? Would you believe they came out ahead on the ALT5 Sigma partnership, to the tune of $538 million in profit by April of 2026?

The entire, broader cryptocurrency industry is now effectively circling the drain these days, held up by only Bitcoin as many would-be competitors failed to prove genuinely profitable use-cases in the real world, and hyperactive investment instead flowed in recent years into hotter corners of the tech world, particularly when it comes to commercial AI. The latter is being sold to the public with the same breathless promises that it will revolutionize every facet of daily life that cryptocurrency once promised to deliver, except this time with a side of apocalyptic corporate job-slashing to boot. Few of us will find a way to personally profit. But don’t worry: The President of the United States will determine the most efficient possible way to extract a few billion more from the same people who chose to return him to office even after he led an unsuccessful coup of the United States government. Ultimately, most of us are just keeping Donald’s money warm for him.