How to Reclaim America From the Scammers and Frauds

Trump is turning the country into a huckster’s paradise. The next Democratic president will need to clean house.

America’s first Gilded Age is often remembered as a time of industrial growth and excessive corporate power, when economic power and basic resources became concentrated in too few hands for a healthy democratic society to tolerate. The very name conjures up images of railroads and steel mills, coal mines and robber barons.

It was also a golden age of scams, frauds, and cons. Confidence men who promised high returns on railroad investments would disappear after exchanging worthless bonds for their victims’ hard-earned money. Back-alley bookies worked with crooked athletes to rig baseball games and boxing matches for private gain. Pharmacies and drugstores would sell legitimate medicine alongside snake-oil cures, useless tonics, and even dangerous concoctions.

I’ve written before on how the second Trump administration has ushered in a new gilded age of extreme wealth inequality, corporate consolidation, and public corruption. Just as our ancestors dragged America out of the muck and into a progressive era of cleaner politics and business, so too should the next Democratic administration orient itself around purging scams and frauds from both the economy and our civic life.

Perhaps no scam in modern American life is more Trumpian than cryptocurrency. The digital tokens, of which bitcoin is the most popular, are supposed to fulfill some kind of economic role depending on the owner’s wishes: as a medium of exchange, as a store of value, as an investment vehicle, and so on. At best, cryptocurrency was a cynical response to widespread disillusionment with the banking and financial sectors after the 2008 crash.

It has now been 17 years since bitcoin’s launch, and it is safe to describe cryptocurrency as a failure. The tokens provide no legitimate social or economic value. They do not offer a fixed rate of return like bonds. They do not represent an ownership stake in a company or pay dividends like stocks. They are not a feasible medium of exchange even after nearly two decades of attempts to build the infrastructure for it. You can’t buy groceries with them.

In recent years, cryptocurrencies have abandoned their once-utopian promise of a decentralized financial system and pivoted to purely extractive enterprises. Leading the charge is none other than President Trump, who introduced two official tokens under his World Liberty Financial business around the time he returned to the White House last year. The tokens, $TRUMP and $MELANIA, were initially sold at high prices and then lost between 95 percent and 99 percent of their respective values.

Crypto scams are so common that users have an entire vocabulary around them: Trump’s coins appear to have “rug-pulled” initial customers, meaning that the company cashed in and those customers became “bagholders” of the worthless, useless digital tokens. Indeed, the only real utility that cryptocurrencies appear to provide is facilitating criminal behavior by avoiding regulated financial services. Reuters reported in January that money launderers processed at least $82 billion in 2025, a more than eightfold increase from five years earlier.

In a healthy and functional civic society, the crypto “industry” would be on the verge of annihilation. Instead, thanks to obscene political spending in the last election cycle, it remains an influential power player in Washington under the extremely friendly eyes of the second Trump administration’s deregulators. On Monday, the Labor Department announced a rule that would open up Americans’ 401(k) retirement savings to crypto. Some Republican lawmakers even proposed creating a national cryptocurrency reserve that would buy trillions of dollars in bitcoin and hold it for a fixed period of time. In practical terms, this would allow early adopters to cash in while leaving the American taxpayer as the........

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