A squirming Donald Trump Jr. tried to distance himself from his dad’s crypto deals after offering a half-hearted defense of the scheme Tuesday.
The Trump family decided to go “all in” on crypto after banks began denying them loans, Trump Jr. told the hosts of CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday. Last year, Don Jr. and his brother Eric launched a crypto company called World Liberty Financial, which in March launched a currency pegged to the U.S. dollar.
Just days before his second inauguration, President Donald Trump announced an “official” $TRUMP meme coin, a type of cryptocurrency named for internet memes. The coins tend to be extremely volatile as their value is tied to cultural caché and internet culture.
The $TRUMP coin in particular—which earned $350 million in the first few weeks after it launched—has also come under fire for creating an opportunity to buy influence in the White House.
Asked by Squawk Box co-host Joe Kernen if it was “okay” for his dad to have a meme coin, Don Jr. first tried to argue that the president “did that before he was in office.”
If by “did that” he means “launched the meme coin,” then that’s technically true, since Trump had won re-election but hadn’t been sworn in yet. But the coin has continued to sell long after Trump returned to the White House, and Trump has offered private dinners to the top 25 token holders.
When Squawk Box co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin pointed out that the coin could create the opportunity for foreign adversaries, people in the U.S., or really anybody else, to effectively funnel money to the president, Trump Jr. seemed caught off guard.
“I think, well. I think, the meme coin. You—you don’t know who’s actually doing any of these things, right?” he said. “It’s different because it’s hard to influence if you don’t actually know where the stuff’s coming from, right?”
In fact, Trump knows exactly who is investing in the meme coin. Last month, he attended a private dinner with its top investors, who paid an average of $1.7 million each to be there. Critics blasted the dinner for giving top crypto investors direct access to the president, with Senator Elizabeth Warren calling it an “orgy of corruption.”
Kernen agreed during Tuesday’s segment that the meme coin “just seems like a way that greases the skids for influence.”
Trump Jr. said he wasn’t involved in the meme coin and was “more focused” on the stablecoin and Bitcoin mining.
“You’re not taking responsibility for the meme coin,” Kernen said.
When Sorkin asked whether people in the crypto industry had expressed concern that the meme coin could be undermining more established forms of cryptocurrency, Trump Jr. was nevertheless defiant.
“I have not heard that from anyone actually,” he said. “What I hear from those people is like, ‘Thank you for doing this. You’re giving us the legitimacy that we fought for for so long.”
