By Thomas G. Moukawsher

Copyright newsweek

Common sense tells us there are two things in our economy that are going to blow up in our faces sooner or later: artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency. AI is dangerous because of wild expectations about the role of AI in our future and trillions of dollars of unrestrained spending on it, particularly for data centers. Crypto is dangerous because of the corruption of President Donald Trump.

Trump was once a staunch crypto critic. After his first presidency, Trump denounced crypto as “a disaster waiting to happen,” and said: “They may be fake. Who knows what they are? … They should regulate them very, very high.”

Gold colored ornaments and decor are seen as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on September 25, 2025. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

But Trump is often against things—until someone comes up with the bright idea of bribing him. Trump used to attack Qatar as a leading supporter of terrorism. After the Qataris gifted him a $400 million airplane and Gulf States made billions in investments in Trump-related enterprises, he is singing a different tune. The U.S. recently supported Qatar over Israel in the United Nations. Trump declared he would block Israel from annexing the West Bank, and his new Gaza peace proposal specifically includes banning attacks on Qatar. Our foreign policy is evidently for sale. Is that OK with you?

It’s proving the same with cryptocurrency. When Trump criticized bitcoin in 2021 it was trading at $36,000. Today, it’s trading at around $114,000—more than triple. What changed? Donald Trump. Why? Bribery.

Billions in crypto value have flowed into Donald Trump and his family’s pockets since the election. According to Trump ally Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, the Trump family has amassed a $6 billion fortune in a single crypto.

His operation is called World Liberty Financial. One of its products, a stablecoin, owes its value to Binance, whose co-founder Changpeng Zhao is beseeching Trump to pardon him after a money laundering conviction.

Who else is propping up Trump’s crypto enterprise? You guessed it: an oil rich Gulf state, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In May, its government-related investment firm agreed to deposit $2 billion in World Liberty Financial after negotiating with Zach Witkoff, son of Trump’s official Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff.

What did Trump exchange for the bribes? Trump dropped a pending Securities and Exchange lawsuit against his key financial backer Binance that claimed the company was misleading its customers and diverting their funds. Two weeks after the announcement of the $2 billion flowing to Trump from the UAE, the Trump administration granted the UAE access to hundreds of thousands of scarce and sophisticated computer chips despite fears that they could end up in the hands of the Chinese.

According to Forbes, Trump has given the crypto community every reckless thing it ever dreamed of. He began by firing the anti-crypto head of the SEC. He abolished the Department of Justice’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. He pardoned five crypto leaders who were convicted of money laundering. Not only is Trump further deregulating the industry, he has barred the Treasury from creating any competing digital currency and instead created a “strategic bitcoin reserve” in which the United States holds, and thus props up, hundreds of thousands of the privately issued coins.

So, how could this hurt you? While Trump has been reaping his billions, freeing crypto fraudsters, and deregulating the industry, the industry has become a larger portion of the world economy. It has been estimated that the global crypto market has increased to more than $4 trillion, a rise of roughly three-fifths since Trump took office again. That makes it economically dangerous.

Yet, crypto is still the preferred currency of the criminal world. Even as more mainstream financial institutions increase their crypto ties, cryptocurrencies continue to be riddled with fraud on their customers and shaken by price volatility. The situation should remind us of dozens of economic bubbles from the past, ranging from 17th Century Dutch tulips to credit default swaps in 2008. Crypto may be here to stay, but so long as it is the business of buccaneers, we can expect these bogus bucks to buck.

So, a crypto crash will come and may take down our economy with it. If it does, Trump should own it—because, thanks to bribery, he literally does—billions of it.

Thomas G. Moukawsher is a former Connecticut complex litigation judge and a former co-chair of the American Bar Association Committee on Employee Benefits. He is the author of the book, The Common Flaw: Needless Complexity in the Courts and 50 Ways to Reduce It.

The views expressed in this article are the writer&…