I have spent more time than I should trying to figure out why President Donald J. Trump is doing his best to sabotage the coming midterm elections for the Republican Party, and my only conclusion is that an electoral victory must be incompatible with The Great Big Beautiful Stealing Operation.

If you were writing a musical about Trump’s performance in the midterms, you might well entitle it: “How to Fail at Politics Without Really Trying,” and start off with the hit number, “Lootin’ Like Putin,” which has such celebrated lyrics as:

We grab what we can
From Venezuela to Iran,
But we only get bold
When going for your gold…

In other words, Trump must see a more lucrative future for his gang of insiders if he doesn’t have to split the jackpot next Tuesday with a bunch of demanding members of Congress or newly elected governors.

Hence Trump’s midterm campaign is based around letting another forever war in the Middle East linger on; priming the pump on runaway inflation; throwing in his administration’s lot with the Russian oligarchy and army; bragging about the profits of Big Oil; and endorsing the idea to broadcast an execution by firing squad live on primetime television.

If that doesn’t cost your party control of the Senate and the House, nothing will.

+++

For the first two years of Trump’s second presidential administration, the only racket that mattered was using cryptocurrency to bleed the Trump faithful dry.

The sting began four days before Inauguration Day in 2025, when Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the ruling family in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), bought for $500 million 49 percent of World Liberty Financial, a crypto front company jointly owned by the families of Donald Trump and Steve Witkoff.

On paper, the mission of World Liberty was “to democratize access to financial opportunities while fortifying the global status of the US Dollar,” but World Liberty is really nothing more than a digitized black bag in which influence peddlers (such as Sheikh Tahnoon) can make direct deposits into to the pockets of one Donald J. Trump, operator.

At the time of the sheikh’s investment, World Liberty was worth nothing, other than perhaps the market value of its press releases prattling on about its access to the American president. One reads:

A key part of our mission at World Liberty Financial is to leverage the global reach and recognition of the Trump brand to bring as many Web2 users into the world of Web3 as possible. Inspired by “Chief Crypto Advocate” Donald J. Trump, we aim to introduce DeFi to a broader audience that may have previously been unfamiliar or hesitant to engage with decentralized assets and cryptocurrency.

The payoff for the sheikh wasn’t to spend 45 minutes with the “Chief Crypto Advocate” to hear his views on Dentacoin (“by dentists for dentists”) but clearance for the UAE to purchase previously restricted U.S. AI-technoloAI-technologygy (worth a lot more to the UAE than $500 million).

In case you’re wondering what happened to World Liberty’s “stablecoin” that, in theory, was pegged to the US dollar, it began trading in September 2025 at $0.32 a coin and now trades at $0.052, reducing the market cap of World Liberty from $7 billion to $1.65 billion (which may explain why co-founder Steve Witkoff is back on the street, having to earn a living negotiating peace with Iran, Russia, and Ukraine).

+++

World Liberty Financial opened Trump’s eyes to the potential of running a con on his millions of delirious supporters, many of whom fit the description of an unsuspecting mark.

On Inauguration Day 2025, Trump went to the market with his personal memecoin known as $TRUMP. In its initial offering, the coin traded as high $46 a coin, valuing the $TRUMP float in excess of $8 billion.

Within two weeks, as Trump bucket shops unloaded his winnings, the market cap of $TRUMP was down to $3 billion, and now its valuation is less than $500 million.

Estimates are that collectively $TRUMP investors lost almost $4 billion while Trump himself walked away with close to $1 billion in what the market calls “other people’s money.”

Melania ran the same hustle with her own coin, MELANIA, whose market cap went from $2 billion on Inauguration Day to $84 million today.

Cleary, not many MAGA punters read the small print on the website of the Trump Coin Club, which states:

$TRUMP tokens are digital collectibles intended as an expression of support. They are not intended to be, nor should they be understood as, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.

Now they tell us.

+++

The magic of cryptocurrency is that anyone from a Russian arms dealer to a Middle East sheikh can make a virtually untraceable direct deposit into the pockets of the American president.

Yes, a few do-gooders in Washington might be upset about the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which reads:

And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

But they are missing the fact that rules of this kind, at least in Trump’s Washington, are for “little people,” not those flying around in $400 million gifted Qatari 747-jets.

+++

For those who prefer their corruption of a more traditional kind, Trump still has his Wall Street Trojan horse and listed company, Trump Media & Technology Group (ticker symbol DJT), whose motto might well be (and with apologies to Smith Barney): “They earn money the old-fashioned way…. They steal it.”

In theory, Trump Media’s mission was “to end Big Tech’s assault on free speech by opening up the Internet and giving people their voices back.”

In reality, the statement should read: “TMTG is a drain established on Nasdaq in an era of unregulated share markets that allows the Trump family to bilk thousands of MAGA supporters out of their life savings.”

+++

As an idea, Trump Media flowered after January 6, 2021, when Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms wanted nothing to do with Trump’s gangland politics.

In exchange for granting Trump Media first use of his social media posts (limited to six hours), Donald Trump was gifted more than 50 percent of the start-up’s equity, which on the first day of Nasdaq trading had a market capitalization of about $8 billion (valuing Trump’s windfall stake at more than $4.5 billion).

As the controlling shareholder, Trump staffed the company with what MAD Magazine would call “the usual gang of idiots” (including at times the likes of Don Jr., Kash Patel, and Pam Bondi), who have done their best to run the company into the ground.

+++

In the last three years Trump Media has posted net losses of $58 million, $400 million, and (in 2025) $712 million (revenue has never exceeded $4.1 million), while the board of directors has voted itself bonuses and stock options. (The company’s only asset is some share-issuance capital.)

Meanwhile, the price of the stock has gone from over $80 a share to $6 today while its market cap has collapsed from $8 billion to $1.6 billion (which still values Trump’s stake at close to $700 million, if he can ever find a greater fool for his plunging shares).

Strategically (a bit like Trump’s America), Trump Media is nowhere. It started out to to corner the social media industry. Then it decided to shift into cryptocurrency (as Willie Sutton liked to say, “I rob banks because that’s where the money is…”). Then it made a stab at legalizing insider trading (selling off early access to Trump’s social media posts).

Now TMTG is moving into fusion energy, having merged with something called TAE Technologies, which has some ideas but no money, while Trump Media has some money but no ideas.

MAGA-inspired headline writers valued the merger transaction at $6.6 billion (an all-stock deal), perhaps so that voters in the midterm elections can cling to the illusion that Trump is “a good businessman” and not just a bloated variation on Bernard Madoff.

What could go wrong when a social media management team gets into nuclear energy?

+++

One focus group left out of the polling data for the midterm elections is those that might well be called the Trump Creditor Class—all those crypto investors and Trump Media shareholders who have watched as their stakes have turned into dust. Clearly they number in the tens of thousands, some say millions.

Pretty much anyone who bought into the Trump dream on January 20, 2025 has lost much of their money. According to the New York Times:

Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion.

Then there are the investors in Trump Media who have watched as the company has shed $7 billion in market value. Together, it adds up to a staggering $10 billion in losses on the part of those who invested behind Trump. How will they vote in the midterms?

Of course, the United States Congress has tolerated Trump’s $48 billion overdraft for his splendid war in Iran, and Trump’s inflation has cost every citizen a percentage of their assets.

Finally, there is the matter that Trump is living rent-free in the heads of most Americans, reason enough to remove his minions from Congress and him from the White House, and to charge many with financial crimes.