“Since the finance aristocracy made the laws, was at the head of the administration of the state, had command of all the organized public authorities, dominated public opinion through the actual state of affairs and through the press, the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere, from the court to the Café Borgne to get rich not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others. Clashing every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society—lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes crapeleaux (debauched), where money, filth, and blood commingle. The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.”

So wrote Karl Marx, the founder of scientific socialism, in The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850. As in so many other spheres, Marx provided not only a scalding critique of the infamies of the bourgeois society of his time but an analysis of the fundamental tendencies of capitalism as a socio-economic system that still drive bourgeois politics today. And in the persona of Donald Trump and his family of fascist parasites and swindlers, we have, as in the period leading up to the 1848 revolution in France, the reemergence “on the heights of bourgeois society” of every form of criminality in the service of wealth accumulation.

The subject of Trump family corruption is an inexhaustible one. His first term was notorious for the use of his “branded” properties, various Trump hotels and resorts, as conduits for corporations and foreign governments to funnel cash into the family coffers. Behind the scenes, far greater sums were raked in through the overseas operations of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with more than a billion dollars “invested” by Saudi monarchs and Gulf sheiks alone.

However, Trump’s reelection last November and his return to the White House on January 20 have been accompanied by an even greater orgy of money-grubbing. By some estimates, the Trump family wealth has doubled since the election. His social media company Truth Social, despite negligible advertising and customer base, has seen its stock price soar. The president has made significant cash from the sale of branded items, ranging from replicas of his fascist executive orders to bibles, golf clubs and guitars. Trump has also raked in $500 million in contributions to various political action committees to fund future campaigns, although the Constitution bars him from seeking a third term in the White House.

But nothing compares to the vast fortune accumulated through the Trump family’s plunge into the cryptocurrency market, with the launching of World Liberty Financial, a venture that is 60 percent owned by the Trumps. It is overseen by sons Don Jr. and Eric and co-managed by Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s top Middle East envoy, billionaire Steve Witkoff. World Liberty has partnered with an array of companies whose financial flimflam is supposedly “regulated” by federal agencies now controlled by Trump himself. 

There was little to no interest in World Liberty before the election, but after Trump’s victory, the value of its cryptocurrency, known as #WLFI, soared to a nominal $1.1 billion. Estimates reported by Fortune and Forbes magazines place the Trump family’s total crypto fortune at between $2.9 billion and $6.2 billion. 

In a lengthy profile of World Liberty, the New York Times wrote:

The firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.

Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry—and in some cases his own company—even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.

The super-rich have made use of World Liberty for what amounts to barely disguised bribes of Trump in return for favorable regulatory decisions and even presidential pardons. Chinese crypto billionaire Justin Sun, previously best known for paying $6.2 million for a piece of “art” consisting of a banana taped to a wall, bought $75 million of $WLFI. Soon afterwards, the Securities and Exchange Commission, now headed by a Trump appointee, asked a federal court to halt proceedings in a fraud case against Sun. Arthur Hayes of Ethena Labs, a crypto partner of World Liberty, had pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act in 2022. Trump gave Hayes a full pardon on March 27.