Why Trump’s Crypto Business Wants to Become a Bank – Mother Jones
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6 hours ago
Why Trump’s Crypto Business Wants to Become a Bank
Sen. Elizabeth Warren decries the first family’s latest crypto play as a “clear conflict of interest and corruption.”
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In a move that Sen. Elizabeth Warren has decried as a “clear conflict of interest and corruption,” one of the Trump family’s most lucrative businesses is on its way to becoming a bank. And it’s set to be regulated by a government entity whose leader was appointed by, you guessed it, President Donald Trump.
In August, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency—one of three major bank regulators in the United States—declared that Trump’s controversial crypto company, World Liberty Financial, could begin the process of establishing itself as a bank. It’s a complicated regulatory move that not only creates a new level of conflict of interest for the president and his family, but demonstrates just how drastically Trump has reshaped federal government policy in an effort to embrace his fellow crypto entrepreneurs.
The Trumps’ crypto odyssey ostensibly has roots in the family’s grievances surrounding the aftermath of the 2020 election. "I never thought I’d fall into the world of crypto until every bank began cancelling us for absolutely no reason other than the fact that my father was in politics,” Eric Trump told Fox News in 2024. "They came after us viciously. It wasn’t until that time that I realized how important crypto was."
"We’ve been debanked. We’ve been deplatformed. We’ve had everything thrown at us with the kitchen sink."
In reality, many big banks had long refused to do business with Donald Trump due to his past bankruptcies. But following the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, some banks did, in fact, close Trump’s accounts with them. Trump and his sons founded World Liberty Financial in 2024, saying that it was needed because banks, and the whole system of banking regulation, had been so bad for their family. World Liberty Financial, they said, would be a “DeFi” company—decentralized finance. Instead of managing money through the stodgy old Wall Street system, it would allow people to do a lot of their financial activities on the blockchain.
"So you know, just very excited, entered the crypto space with this product, really looking to upend a lot of the traditional finance markets that we have viewed as very broken," Donald Trump Jr. told an interviewer in October 2024, recounting how traditional banks turned away from the family after January 6. "We’ve gone through a lot in America. We’ve been debanked. We’ve been deplatformed. We’ve had everything thrown at us with the kitchen sink. And so we wanted to do something, to take on a system, frankly, that was quite broken."
The company hasn’t done much of that—there is no way for the public to use World Liberty Financial for many of the activities traditionally performed by banks. But it has created a stablecoin, called USD1, which is a type of crypto asset designed to stay valued at $1. Stablecoins are useful as a way to move money between different crytpo currencies or between partners, without necessarily having to use actual US dollars.