This very worrying.

You need your head of state to be neutral in matters of business.

This sort of corruption is badly damaging the reputation of the USA

Honestly, that's the least of the damage to the American reputation.

He's actively distancing the US from our traditional allies. Tariffs undercut our trade partners. We're threatening to invade NATO countries. Even after 2028, our partners are going to have a hard time believing our commitments.

Compared to that, mere grift hardly registers.

It was known well in advance that those making big contributions to his reelection campaign, e.g. as did the oil and gas industry, also the cryptocurrency industry, will receive major favors as they have. Memecoins were just an extension of the approach in a post-victory setting. To my knowledge, it's all legal.

For the future, I wonder if it would be better or worse to eliminate almost all powers from the President's authority, giving him an elevated position mostly just in name, with most decisions being made by Congress. It has its pros and cons, but it's the safer choice.

I think the main pro is that you can't have these arguments of the president being hamstrung by congress.

There's a very common trend of a president campaigning on something and then never delivering as president.

I don't think we'd see much difference in terms of corruption though if Trump was elected by people or congress. The heads of agencies and etc were all confirmed by congress and those agencies are turning a blind eye.

OK but I was referring not to his election but to the significant post-election power that he has. If much of this power were to be stripped from his role, then yes he would be hamstrung, but any damage would also be limited.

Ok, but then he's appointed Prime Minister as well as elected to President and nothing changes?

Like the current congress could impeach him whenever they wanted. The fact that they don't (and voted for BBB) is enough proof to me that they'd vote him as prime minister.

Voting him as their leader is very different from him getting to make all the policy decisions, in contrast with Congress making those decisions.

So a parliamentary system? Pretty common in Europe.

This has been the case in the US for at least 50 years but it did get recently much worse. Previously, Obama was openly shilling for Boeing. Reagan arbitrarily deregulated things, creating the S&L crisis and wrecked many other things, and funded American-trained death squads by getting poor and brown people hooked on drugs. The duopoly "choices" offered thus far have been between John Birch Society Nazis and limousine liberals... both warmongering corporatists who won't do anything for ordinary people but are totally engrossed on winning more money and passing more laws for their masters.

I'd rather have them make billions in crypto than fuck with supreme court judges tho.

When you have billions of dollars you can buy Supreme Court judges.

Not only has he made billions, but he routinely lies or declares things (over which he later changes his mind), allegedly just to move the stock market to favor his friends. His friends could make hundreds of millions of dollars each time he makes an economic announcement, whether his word is true or not.

There's plenty of both and the buyers of their coin are likely foreign governments buying influence.

"Fools and their money..." as the saying goes.

There is nothing foolish about it because those who buy a big chunk of the memecoin know they'll be getting special favors in exchange for the purchase. It's transactional, and it yields significant protections and returns for their businesses.

That huge profit doesn't just show how unstable the crypto market is, it shows that their powerful name and influence were used to create massive value from simple digital assets. It's not just that they earned billions, they've been constantly launching digital collectible ventures and leveraging public statements to move sentiment, effectively playing the market masterfully.

But that level of hyper-speculation proves that the rest of the market is still a shaky, hype-driven casino where the rules are stacked for the biggest names.

That whole environment made me frustrated enough to stop watching the speculation and start researching who was actually building stable, utility-focused infrastructure—the kind of foundation that corporations, not celebrities, need.

I recently found a platform called Lumos Core (https://www.lumoscore.com/), and their approach is completely different. They're focused entirely on building assets that last. They smartly built their platform on Stellar/Soroban, which means you get tokens with super-fast transactions and near-zero fees. This eliminates all the cost and system risk that plagues the older, congested chains.

What really impressed me is their commitment to global market reach. They are actively building that essential connection to the high-volume XRP Ledger (XRPL). This means any serious digital asset you mint there gets massive, built-in access to liquidity from day one.

The future of crypto isn't about chasing those billion-dollar headline profits; it's about building genuine, secure utility on solid ground. Developers should definitely be paying attention to platforms taking this approach.