Donald Trump has revealed a new plan to attract funds and potential voters. But experts warn against it – and call it “fraud”. What’s behind it?
There are still around three weeks until the presidential election in the USA – and candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are trying to mobilize everything they can now. This includes, above all, collecting money for final advertising campaigns with which they want to convince undecided voters in the so-called swing states.
The ex-president now apparently has a new idea for how to get money – as well as the votes of a certain group of voters. An idea that experts warn against and that many users on Platform X describe as “fraud”. A user asks him: “Do you ever stop cheating? It’s so tasteless.”
Because Trump has announced a “token sale”, i.e. the sale of so-called digital tokens that function like participation rights in the crypto sector. According to the portal “The Block”, Trump wants to earn $300 million with this token sale. Users can secure the tokens from Tuesday, which in turn will give them the right to vote in decisions on the underlying platform.
Behind the announced “token sale” is the company World Liberty Financial, which Trump founded together with his sons and other entrepreneurs in September. Donald Trump Jr. said at the time that they wanted to start a “financial revolution.” The intention is therefore to offer decentralized financial services (DeFi) based on blockchain technology, which in principle should make classic intermediaries such as banks superfluous. You can read more about blockchain here.
For example, World Liberty Financial will enable users to lend cryptocurrencies to each other. Such services are also offered by numerous other platforms.
The project leaders of the Trump project are cryptocurrency entrepreneurs Zachary Folkman and Chase Herro. They announced that the platform would primarily use so-called stablecoins, which are usually linked to the value of a conventional currency, often the dollar. This means they are immune to the sometimes violent price fluctuations in the crypto sector.
World Liberty Financial wants to create a platform that is easily accessible to people, Folkman announced. Through the tokens, buyers received the right to participate in the management of the platform, the project leaders said. 63 percent of the tokens should be offered to the public, 20 percent should go to the founding team and the rest should be reserved as a reward for the users – i.e. the buyers.
Alone: Folkman and Herro are highly controversial. Herro proudly calls himself the “scumbag of the Internet” and is able to “sell anything to anyone,” as he once claimed, writes the New York Times. Folkman was the head of a company called “Date Hotter Girls”: Here he gave advice under a pseudonym on how to approach women in bars.
The two men have worked as start-up entrepreneurs in recent years, but during that time they left behind unpaid debts and taxes, the New York Times continues. Lawsuits were also filed against their companies.
Trump Jr., meanwhile, praised the two during an online presentation in September. “You could put them in a boardroom at Goldman Sachs and they would outperform the people in the room,” he said.
However, experts have doubts about the project. Eswar Prasad, an economics professor at Cornell University, told the New York Times that Herro and Folkman do not appear to have the technical or financial expertise necessary for digital tokens “to make the company a success.” John Reed Stark, a former senior official at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, was even clearer. “It’s a load of nonsense,” he told the newspaper, and certainly not a good opportunity for investors.
