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John Oliver took aim at Donald Trump and his family’s various crypto schemes on his return to Last Week Tonight, calling it all “corrupt and compromised”.
The host joked that Trump looked as if he was “slowly turning into Mrs Doubtfire” before moving on to the night’s major theme, calling him “the first crypto president”.
Trump had once referred to bitcoin as “a scam”, but has had a “pretty significant change of heart” after seeing an industry “willing to spend a shitload helping him get elected”.
He also saw that it was a fruitful source of money – in his first year back in office, he made more than $2.2bn, most of which came from his family’s crypto dealings of $1.4bn.
It has now become the family’s most dominant business interest and they have a “truly absurd number of crypto-related ventures”, yet Oliver decided to focus on just two of them, “the big one and the dumb one” which he joked is how Trump refers to his sons Eric and Don Jr.
The first is the Trump memecoins, which are online jokes converted into real money and focused on novelty.
Oliver said they are “pump and dump schemes” as they spike in value then immediately crash with insiders selling at the peak.
Trump announced his own memecoin on social media, closely followed by Melania, and while some thought the president’s account had been hacked, Oliver said the big tell for that would be a “normal coherent sentence without any randomly capitalized words”.
Trump’s coin was once worth $50bn, but later crashed – by the following November it was down 92% since its peak. But in that time, Trump had a $636m payout.
During that period, in one of his “weirder interludes”, Trump tried to juice his coin’s value up by offering access to the White House in exchange for an investment in one of his ventures.
But even though the special dinner was “a bust for those who attended it”, Oliver said, the value jumped 30%.
“It clearly doesn’t look good for a president to be involved in something like that,” he said.
More than 1 million people who bought it ended up losing money, which is “pretty shitty” but only the tip of the iceberg, Oliver said.
Trump also started a crypto company called World Liberty Financial, which was co-founded with his sons and announced weeks before the 2024 election. The company has since become worth more than any other business the family owns.
Oliver suggested that the company had been used to curry favor with the president through various investments, including one made by Justin Sun, the “eccentric” Chinese millionaire who once bought and ate an infamous $6.2m banana.
Sun spent $75m on World Liberty Financial tokens and $37.7m on memecoins at the same time as he was fighting an investigation from the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) that claimed he defrauded investors.
After ploughing money into Trump’s business, the SEC paused its investigation and the government eventually settled. Both sides have denied any quid pro quo.
Oliver said it is “by no means a one-off” and spoke about an investment firm linked to the United Arab Emirates that also put huge amounts into Trump’s company at the same time as the UAE tried to get advanced computer chips made by US companies, something that had been stopped by Biden.
It was later approved, a link called “extraordinary” by some, but Oliver joked that the word he would use would lead to “a few million in legal fees”.
About 49% of money put into the company is from a UAE royal referred to as the “spy sheikh” which “sounds like the title of a culturally insensitive 90s thriller starring Steven Seagal”.
After HBO’s legal team reached out to the White House, an email claimed Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public”, which Oliver said was “huge for this country if true”.
Trump has claimed he doesn’t know details as his sons handle the business and Oliver said “in most cases I am willing to believe that Trump doesn’t talk to his sons,” especially given that his “wedding present to Don Jr was to not show up”.
Yet Oliver added that “it is really hard for me to believe that Trump is unaware”, given how the company is “exploiting crypto sketchiness for maximum profit” and “making it much easier for others to do the same”.
Trump promised to hire the head of the SEC who was seen as being too hard on crypto, which led to huge cheers from the audience at a bitcoin conference.
Gary Gensler, the former SEC chair, stepped down on Trump’s first day back in office and a more pro-crypto replacement – Paul Atkins – was hired, which has led to 60% of related cases being eased up.
Trump has tried to “lock in that lax regulatory environment for the foreseeable future”, Oliver said, moving it out of the purview of the SEC to a small agency with limited enforcement capacity.
These “changes could be hard to undo” with a proposed Clarity Act, a cryptocurrency regulatory measure that has faced Democratic opposition, being pushed by Trump that “should be worrying you”.
Oliver said Trump looks “flagrantly corrupt and compromised” and any further mention of his crypto dealings should imply that “some shady shit is likely going down”.
