it's just a little throwaway line in a much bigger story but sometimes those little throwaway lines are very helpful and they really stick with me um I'll show you what I mean here's the headline in the Wall Street Journal the headline is anxious trading partners promise to buy American to save off Trump's tariffs you've seen a million articles like this right the bulk of the article under that headline is about what you would expect again you've seen a lot like this it's about various countries trying to strike deals with the US so they can get
themselves some relief some favored treatment um from Trump amid his gigantic catastrophic world tariff experiment so the countries are are trying to get themselves some kind of relief and in among those discussed in this article uh is the nation of Vietnam according to the Wall Street Journal Vietnam has been trying to fend off uh harsh treatment under Trump's tariffs by number one buying American jets number two allowing the Starlink internet service that's owned by Donald Trump's top campaign donor Elon Musk to operate inside their country weird that they decided that was a good idea and
number three here's the kicker vietnam has also quote decided to accelerate the approvals for a $ 1.5 billion dollar Trump resort in Vietnam oh weird how that might get you better treatment from the US government i mean I'm sure Vietnam has lots of good reasons to make sure a Trump Organization resort project is moving forward lots and lots and lots of them it's weird that they think that might be correlated with the US government giving them some sort of favorable treatment but let's just stick a pin in that one for a second there's another story
I want to tell you uh and I will tell you even though I'm going to use the word cryptocurrency in telling you this story don't worry you don't have to understand anything about cryptocurrency in order to get this story but here it is um a couple of years ago the Justice Department accused an online cryptocurrency company that's called Binance of being basically a supermarket for crime doj accused Binance of being a giant money laundering hub for terrorists and cyber criminals and customers in sanctioned countries like Iran and Russia um Binance plead guilty they paid over$4
billion dollars that was the largest fine ever in the history of crypto its founder spent four months in prison ever since Binance has been overseen by US government appointed monitors who ensure that Binance is no longer a supermarket for crime it is now following the law and making sure Binance is only operating overseas and not operating in the United States at all now Binance naturally they would very much like to get out from under that oversight and they would very much like to operate in the United States again but to do that they need to
get these pesky government monitors off their back they need the US government to decide they are out of the doghouse and it would make their return easier of course if their founder were no longer a convicted felon well when Donald Trump won the election last year Binance sensed opportunity this is also from the Wall Street Journal quote "At an Abu Dhabi crypto conference last December weeks before the inauguration in the Walesonly back room accessible to attendees who had paid $10,000 for a VIP pass Binance's founder mingled with Trump's sons Trump's son Eric and Trump allies
eric was there to promote World Liberty a crypto venture the Trump family had founded months earlier for world liberty Binance's market power could help turn it into a serious player in the crypto industry binance has more than 250 million users the more World Liberty cryptocurrency in circulation of course quote the more the Trump family could profit again ignore the word like cryptocurrency this could be anything i mean say the Trump family had launched a new company that makes doohickeys well Binance if they partnered with the Trump family in this enterprise they could get Trump doohickeys
in front of hundreds of millions of potential customers which would of course mean lots of profit for the Trump family that is what Binance is offering to the Trump family what does Binance want well their convicted felon founder quote has been pushing for a Trump administration pardon has been pushing for the Trump administration to grant him a pardon and the Wall Street Journal reports quote executives from Binance met with Treasury Department officials last month and discussed loosening US government oversight on the company quote "Binance executives are optimistic the Trump administration will acquies." Oh yeah oh
they are are they maybe that's because as president Donald Trump has already pardoned a whole slew of crypto felons and his justice department has just disbanded its crypto policing unit and also because Trump's SEC halted an investigation of another crypto executive after that executive dumped $75 million into the Trump family crypto company so if the Wall Street Journal's reporting on this bears out this is not even like this this isn't even like textbook corruption because you would not need to get to the level of school that uses textbooks in order to get to this level
of understanding of corruption this is like a coloring book of corruption this is like corruption that you could understand if you'd never been to any school ever anywhere in any other time in American history this scandal onetenth of this scandal would be the end of a presidency but this is just like day that ends in Y this is our life now
