Steve Bannon famously talked about using “muzzle velocity” as a strategy: doing so much so quickly that you overwhelm the ability of the media to cover it. I think what the Trump family is doing with crypto is muzzle velocity for corruption.

What they’re doing isn’t necessarily illegal. It would be if these were official campaign donations; the sums involved are so large, and the buyers include foreign nationals. But the Trump family is making this money personally. And they’re doing it across so many different crypto ventures, it’s almost impossible to keep track.

So that’s what I wanted to do with this episode: try to track at least some of it.

The person I’ve enlisted to help me out is Zeke Faux. He’s the author of the fantastic book “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall” and an investigative reporter at Bloomberg, where he’s been covering many of these strange Trump family crypto schemes.

This episode contains strong language.

Read the full transcript here: https://nytimes.com/2025/05/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-zeke-faux.html

0:00 Introduction
2:27 Crypto in Trump 1.0
11:24 How Trump learned to love crypto
21:32 World Liberty Financial and its connections
37:18 Memecoins and $Trump
48:32 Stablecoins and USD1
54:37 The big picture
1:03:29 Book recommendations

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You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

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