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Donald Trump’s rise to power, especially during his second term in office, has changed the political culture of the United States.

He is using the presidency as an instrument for the enrichment of himself and his family that has in fact no precedent in U.S. history. Trump is running the government like a mafia boss.

He has managed to defy accountability by destroying or marginalizing institutions that would rein in his executive power, and in Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office.

Enter Trump’s crypto business dealings as a case in point, from which the president made more than $1 billion last year.

In a move that makes even Vito Corleone look like an amateur, a regulator appointed by the president himself has granted the Trump family-backed crypto firm World Liberty Financial preliminary approval to function as a bank. Sen. Elizabeth Warren commented after the approval: “President Trump is now the first president in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank. This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen — and Congress cannot allow it to stand.”

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This is one of the sleaziest acts of conduct by a sitting president of the United States. But the fact that it happened without overwhelming pushback from the populace also speaks volumes about the thorough and wide-ranging transformation of U.S. political life during Trump’s second presidency.

Ironically, Trump had previously expressed that he was not a fan of cryptocurrencies. In June 2021, during an interview with Fox Business Network, he described Bitcoin as a scam and even suggested that cryptocurrencies posed an actual threat to the status of the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency. In another interview with the same network that year, he said that crypto was “potentially a disaster waiting to happen.”

But The Donald was never one to hold values of any kind. With him, money is everything — nothing else really matters. So, he reversed course on cryptocurrencies during his 2024 presidential campaign when he became........

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