Does This Deal Stink? Trump's Crypto Firm Becomes a Bank

The deal: a crypto firm becomes a bank

On January 5, 2026, World Liberty Financial (WLF) — the crypto venture Donald Trump and his three sons co-founded weeks before the 2024 election — applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national trust bank charter.^[8] First reported by NOTUS, the OCC is expected to approve it within weeks; former agency staffers call denial "inconceivable."^[1] The charter is not cosmetic. It would let WLF:

• Issue its USD1 stablecoin directly to Americans without a partner bank;
• Settle payments on its platform like Venmo or PayPal — with the Trump family taking a cut of transaction fees;^[1]
• Preempt state liquidity rules — the "implicit backing of the federal government," as one critic put it.

The official who decides is Jonathan Gould, the OCC comptroller Trump appointed — a known crypto backer who has already granted roughly a dozen similar charters and loosened the approval criteria for crypto firms.^[9] Gould says no one ordered him to approve it and that "only Democrats" are applying political pressure.^[7]

The conflict, in one diagram

That loop is the whole controversy: the president appoints the regulator; the regulator charters the president's family firm; the firm's revenue flows back to the family. Consumer Federation of America's Corey Frayer: "For the first time in history, a president is leaning on a bank regulator to give his private enterprise the implicit backing of the federal government."^[2] Veteran financial journalist Diana Henriques — the chronicler of Bernie Madoff — was blunter: "It is functionally impossible to regulate a bank owned by the president… For heaven's sake, this has to be stopped."^[2]

Who actually owns it

Ownership is deliberately layered. Per NOTUS, Trump holds 70% of an LLC that controls 38% of WLF's holding company; the rest of that LLC is unnamed family members.^[1] Reporting on the family's overall control ranges from ~40% up to a reported 60%+ once a new holding company is counted — we flag that figure spread rather than pick one.^[1] What's not disputed:

• Co-founders include Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Barron Trump; Steve Witkoff (the Mideast envoy) co-founded it but has since divested.^[1]
• The family entity receives ~75% of certain revenue streams.^[4]
• A UAE-linked firm bought a ~49% stake ($500M+), and an Emirati fund used USD1 to settle a $2B deal with Binance.^[5]
• Binance holds ~87% of USD1 tokens — and Binance founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao received a Trump pardon in October 2025.^[1]

That last cluster is the part that should worry people across the aisle: a sitting president's financial firm is substantially funded and used by foreign governments and a foreign crypto mogul he pardoned. Whatever you call the charter, that is an emoluments problem with no modern precedent.

The money: who won, who lost

A Reuters investigation put hard numbers on it. The Trump family made about $2.3 billion in crypto profit between November 2024 and April 2026 — while roughly one million retail investors lost about $2.3 billion on Trump-related crypto over the same window.^[11][12]

WLF was the single biggest source — more than $1.4 billion to the family, via that 75% revenue-share.^[12] The pattern Reuters documented across every venture: the Trumps licensed their name, risked essentially no capital, promoted the tokens publicly, collected as buyers piled in — and stayed in profit when prices crashed. The charter would bolt a recurring, bank-like income stream (interest on stablecoin reserves, transaction fees) onto that model.

Is it legal? (Yes — and that's the problem)

Here is the uncomfortable core. The federal conflict-of-interest statute, 18 U.S.C. § 208, makes it a crime for executive-branch officials to act on government matters affecting their own finances — but it exempts the president, vice president, and members of Congress.^[4] Richard Painter, George W. Bush's chief White House ethics lawyer, spelled out the gap:

If a Treasury secretary had a financial interest in World Liberty and then participated in any government matter that had a knowing economic impact on World Liberty, that Treasury secretary very likely would commit a felony. — Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer^[4]

The same conduct that would be a felony for a cabinet officer is simply legal for the president. The White House's defense leans on this gray zone: it says Trump's assets are held in a trust managed by his children — but that is not a blind trust, and the beneficiaries are the same family running the company, so ethics experts say it firewalls nothing.^[4] Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senate Banking Democrats have demanded the OCC pause the review; the OCC proceeded anyway.^[10]

The fairest case for the defense

An honest briefing has to steel-man the other side — and on one point the critics genuinely overreach:

The "~12 other charters" point is the strongest thing the defense has, and it matters: it means the most likely truth is not that Gould was secretly ordered to rig one application. It's worse in a quieter way — the system simply has no mechanism to stop a president from owning the bank in the first place.

Verdict: does it stink?

The one honest caveat: don't hang the case on "Gould rigged the charter." He probably didn't need to — WLF qualifies under the same loosened rules a dozen other crypto firms used, and proving a secret order is hard. Hanging the scandal on the individual decision is the weak version of the argument, and it's the version defenders will happily knock down.

The strong version is the one that survives scrutiny: the problem isn't one charter, it's the closed loop — a president profiting from an industry he controls, financed by foreign actors, with no legal firewall and a "trust" run by his own beneficiaries. Reasonable people can debate whether stablecoins are good policy. Almost no one designing a republic from scratch would let its chief executive own the bank. So: it doesn't just stink. It's a designed-in conflict that happens to be legal — which is exactly why critics from Warren to a Bush ethics lawyer say the fix has to be a law, not a lawsuit.