Andrew Egger: Trump’s Travels with Natalie

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday, but Bill Crystal finally gets to go on vacation.
The eldest member of the Bulwark team has been the one working the hardest and most diligently this summer, while the rest of us gallivant about. So finally, he gets a break. And sitting in for him is our very own White House correspondent and his co-author on the Morning Shots newsletter. It's sweet Andrew Egger. How are you doing, Andrew?

**Andrew Egger** (0:40)
I'm great. How are you, Tim?

**Tim Miller** (0:42)
I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing pretty good. It's good to be back in New Orleans. It's good to be termite-less in the helm, and we're just pressing forward.
We've got a lot to talk about today. You have some bad takes that I hope we have time to get to at the very end.
Do you have a couple of things that you've been really excited about and angered about righteously that I've not talked about on the podcast at all? So I do want to get to those as well. But I want to start on the corruption beat. Couple of things that really caught my eye over the weekend and late last week. The first one is this Trump crypto bank story. This might seem niche, but I think that it is the most tangible example of the administration's corruption. And I feel like in the year, I don't know, 2034, when we're looking back on this, I feel like this and the internment camps are going to be the things that we look back on. I mean, who knows what horrors are ahead of us between now and then. But from the period of 2024 to 2026, the internment camps and this are going to stand out. Does that feel right to you before I get into the details of the story? Don't you just think there's so much we don't know on the corruption side of this?

**Andrew Egger** (1:54)
Yes, 100%, I think that's right. I mean, you say like the, it seems niche, but like all businesses are sort of niche, right? I mean, the whole point is that like, he is going into these quote unquote niche industries where there's still billions and billions of dollars to be made and he's getting his beak wet on the powers of the presidency and the access that is involved with that. So yes, I 100% agree that the broad overarching corruption story is going to be a major, major part of the legacy of these years.

**Tim Miller** (2:21)
So here it is on the bank. World Liberty Financial, which is the Trump family's main crypto venture, they have several side ventures in crypto. They have received preliminary conditional approval from the office of the Comptroller of the Currency to become a bank. Now I'm sure we have really people of high integrity at the office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the Trump administration, a lot of people with deep expertise and no conflicts at all. This, what this means, this approval means that World Liberty will be able to issue, redeem and safeguard USD1, their dollar-backed stablecoin. Jeff Stein, who used to be at The Washington Post, now to notice, will translate that for people who are not into crypto world. He writes this, a Trump appointee has approved Trump's personal crypto firm to operate as a bank. This means corporations can conduct transactions using the stablecoin. Where the Trump family gets a cut, the public will not have to be informed. There's no precedent for this. Think about it this way.
It's kind of like the Venmo now, or whatever, where the Venmo company takes whatever, 3% of a transaction fee on certain types of transactions. Now people can make transactions with the Trump coin and get a fee, and then they just get to operate no different than whatever, if you're Zelling on your Citibank account.
Important to note here, Chinese-born scammer and current UAE citizen, Chengpeng Zhao CZ, he had purchased half of these stable coins in circulation and got a pardon from the Trump administration. The UAE and Pakistani officials have also invested Pakistan's negotiating MOU, which we'll get to in a second. Seems bad. I don't know. Seems bad.

**Andrew Egger** (4:13)
Yeah. To me, this is interesting in part because Trump has already extracted enormous amounts of value from a lot of people in and connected to the crypto industry with this exact corporation, with World Liberty Financial.
This now seems to be a way to just expand the net of somewhat extortionary behavior much more widely. The idea here is if you yourself are already big in the crypto space, you're probably already all tied up with World Liberty Financial. Now, this is just yet another way for unrelated businesses, businesses that are not primarily crypto businesses necessarily. It's just another new place where you can curry some level of favor with the Trump administration, for whatever business purpose that you might want.