A Tiny, Chinese-Tied Company Is Buying Up To $300M Of Trump Crypto
This post was originally published on this site
The Trump corruption just keeps on coming. We haven’t finished digesting Trump’s $400 million “gift” jet from Qatar and now we’re learning about an eyebrow-raising $300 million of foreign money going into Trump’s coffers. This bit of Trump cash comes from a TikTok-related company with no revenue and only eight employees.
From The New York Times:
A struggling technology company that has ties to China and relies on TikTok made an unusual announcement this week. It had secured funding to buy as much as $300 million of $TRUMP, the so-called memecoin marketed by President Trump.
GD Culture Group, a publicly traded firm with a Chinese subsidiary, has only eight employees, its public filings show, and recorded zero revenue last year from an e-commerce business it operates on TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app.
It’s not clear how much of the $300 million is for $TRUMP and how much for bitcoin. But even if “only” one million is for the $Trump memecoin, “Trump’s businesses would receive a nice trading fee and proof of concept for a very important idea: The $TRUMP coin is still a great way for foreign millionaires to buy the president’s attention,” New York Magazine explained.
Also, the Trump family’s new benefactors may very well be the Chinese government. “In a previous financial disclosure, GD Culture Group stated that the Chinese government may ‘intervene or influence’ the operations of one of its subsidiaries ‘at any time,’” New York also noted.
How did this company come up with $300 million? That looks just as fishy. It sold stock to “an unnamed entity in the British Virgin Islands, a popular tax haven,” The Times said, as per a securities filing on Tuesday.
Times reporter David Yaffe-Bellany discussed this very suspicious “investment” on CNN Tuesday night. He said the GD Culture Group claims it just wants to “embrace innovation and be part of the crypto industry.” But, given that its business is “pretty much entirely built on TikTok” and given that TikTok’s fate in the U.S. “rests largely” with Trump, “it looks like [the company] has a clear incentive to curry favor with the administration, like many of the other kind of foreign-based players who’ve gotten involved in the Trump crypto ventures.”
It’s not like $TRUMP has any real intrinsic value. Memecoins “are a type of cryptocurrency based on an online joke or celebrity mascot and have traditionally not had any utility beyond speculation,” The Times article said.
CNN anchor Anderson Cooper pointed out that the company’s public announcement of this purchase shows “They wanted somebody to pay attention” to it.
Ya think?
It’s not just Trump family attention that helps the company, though. The purchase also helps the company promote itself. Yaffe-Bellany noted that the company’s stock soared on Monday, then went back down. “But you can see a kind of concrete sort of benefit to the company just from announcing this,” he said.
As for the “America First” Trump White House? They did not respond to this particular story, Yaffe-Bellany said, “But as we’ve covered this topic over the last few weeks, the Trump administration and the Trump organization have said to us repeatedly that there are no conflicts of interests and that there’s nothing improper about what the president’s doing in the crypto world.”
It’s long past time that the White House stopped getting away with that BS.