MAGA investors lost their shirts in 'legal scam' that brought Trump billions

During his first presidency, Donald Trump was a vehement critic of cryptocurrencies — calling Bitcoin a "scam" and saying that cryptos could never hope to compete with the U.S. dollar. But these days, Trump is an aggressive promotor of cryptocurrencies, which have done a lot to increase his net worth since his return to the White House. And the Trump family's crypto-oriented World Liberty Financial, launched in 2024, has made them a fortune.

According to the New York Times, however, the "overall results" have been "remarkably bad" for MAGA supporters who invested in a Trump-themed memecoin.

Times reporters Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany, on the Fourth of July 2026, explain, "Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump's memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion. The analytics firm's assessment was calculated this week after Mr. Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a $636 million payout on the same crypto bet, part of a haul of at least $2.2 billion from all of his business ventures in 2025."

Trump, Lipton and Yaffe-Bellany report, "profited whether the price of his memecoin went up or down" and "collected returns whenever anyone traded the tokens" — which he promoted on his Truth Social platform. But crypto investor and 2024 Trump voter Nicholas Pinto, according to the Times reporters, wasn't so lucky.

Pinto told the Times he invested roughly $500,000 in the $TRUMP digital coin and has lost around half of that investment.

Pinto said of Trump, "He is leveraging the power of being president to launch currencies, when he seems trustworthy in the public's eye. It is kind of incredible. It is almost a legal scam."

Lipton and Yaffe-Bellany point out that "several crypto ventures…. reeled in profits for Mr. Trump and his allies."

"Mr. Trump's total profits from World Liberty reached $799 million last year, according to his financial disclosure, including hundreds of millions from the United Arab Emirates, which secretly moved in early 2025 to buy nearly half the company," the reporters note. "A Trump business entity also collected a 75 percent cut of sales of $WLFI, after the deduction of certain expenses, guaranteeing that Mr. Trump would profit, even if the coin's price ultimately crashed. The losses on World Liberty's coin are more complicated to track."

New York University Stephen Gillers said he wouldn't be surprised if Trump and his crypto partners face a class-action lawsuit from investors who lost money.

Gillers told the Times, "Trump, back when he was a real estate developer, boasted that he plays 'to people's fantasies.' Here, he seems to have encouraged supporters to invest with the expectation they could anticipate riches — even as he himself was cashing out."

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