‘You’re Taking Their Retirement!’ Scott Galloway Drops Scathing Takedown of Trump Coins ‘Grifting’ Ordinary Investors

Scott Galloway recently dropped an epic takedown of President Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump’s crypto coins, which were both launched shortly before Trump took office a second time.

“Anyway, well, moving on, the SEC’s new leadership has created a crypto task force,” Galloway’s Pivot podcast co-host Kara Swisher said at one point in their conversation before adding:

The force will develop a regulatory framework for crypto assets and address issues surrounding registration of coins. Bitcoin rallied in response to the news and is up almost 10 percent in the last month. And nothing wrong with the crypto task force.

It just depends on who’s on it, right? There should be critics and people who want more regulation. There should be boosters, I suppose.

There have to be legitimate people on it. Anyone that thinks meme coins that Donald Trump pushed are the best thing ever should not be on it. I don’t know.

“What do you think? Nothing wrong with the task force. They’re usually useless,” Swisher added turning to Galloway, a market professor and financial advice writer.

“This thing is rendered castrated before it forms. The person whose idea this is, who’s assembling it and has total influence over it and can fire any of them on a dime, has introduced two coins under the cover of darkness, letting a few people that he knows get a 7,000 percent gain and then seeing ordinary investors absolutely take a bath. The Melania coin is off 67 percent in the last 72 hours,” Galloway said on the Friday podcast, adding:

I mean, what do you want in an asset class? You want credibility, you want people to trust it, you want the rule of fair play, you want it to be a store of value or have utility. This is literally just as my generation has pulled prosperity forward in the form of deficits.

I want your future prosperity, Gen Z and Millennials, pulled forward to my current prosperity. Donald Trump, President Trump took the increasing credibility of this asset class, and it has been increasing over the last year, and future increases in credibility, and pulled it forward for essentially what was a grift and a scam. You know who is outraged about this?

“The crypto community,” Swisher replied.

“They were. They’re like, Jesus Christ,” he agreed, adding:

But what is going to happen with this thing? You are going to see, whenever they try, whenever this quote unquote task force attempts to pass anything resembling laws and regulation that would have given crypto more of a shot, I can’t wait to see the Democratic representative and senators and some Republican senators putting up the data on the Trump and Melania coin and saying, let me get this straight, this is what we want?

The idea, it’s literally like Jeffrey Dahmer puts a task force together on lunchtime meals. It’s just this task force has lost all credibility because the guy assembling it is the greatest offender.

“I like that you got high judging about the crypt that the meme coin, the shit coin. I love that this. I love you’re offended because you don’t not believe in it, but that it’s not fair play,” Swisher replied, adding:

It isn’t something that’s not done in a way that improves the use of crypto or keeps it, makes it legitimate instead makes it sort of like Alex Jones selling vitamins or whatever, selenium tablets or whatever. That’s the kind of stuff it feels like.

“Physical violence is the most heinous crime. But when you steal from people, when you’re already rich, money is the transfer of time and work. When you take people’s trust or their desire to help you or whatever it is, and they lose 70 percent of their money, and what is an obvious grift, you’re taking time from their kids,” Galloway responded, adding:

You’re taking their retirement! The whole point of having an operating system in capitalism is that we do need some protections. We do need some guardrails because some people will try and exploit it.

When the person in charge, the person who’s supposed to be the ultimate exemplar of trying to prevent a tragedy, the commons, engages in the theft of other people’s time and money, the whole fucking thing collapses. How do my kids get rich when no one trusts this economy?

Galloway and Swisher ended by accusing the Trumps of “grifting” and warned that cryptocurrency risks becoming all about the “grift” as opposed to becoming a legitimate industry.

Listen to the full episode here.