The Resident Evil at the White House desires most earnestly that we citizens of this country pay no attention to his machinations and excesses. And, sadly, some people are indeed blind or indifferent to what the president is doing as he endangers our democracy at home and soils our national name before the world. Trump has made the United States a laughing stock, but he cares not, because, while the world laughs at us and the leader that has afflicted us, that man has been laughing all the way to the cryptocurrency bank.
But not all Americans are silent or indifferent.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have issued a report that starkly lays out the president and his family’s cryptocurrency grift.
On Nov. 24, 2025, Judiciary Committee Democrats published a staff report titled “Trump, Crypto, and a New Age of Corruption.” To be clear, this document is a partisan piece of work. It was not produced by the full Judiciary Committee, which is controlled by Republicans, who are naturally allied to President Donald Trump. But the fact that Judiciary Committee Republicans are not associated with the report is telling: Judiciary Republicans, like most of the rest of the House Republican conference, and indeed the Senate Republican conference, are silent in the face of Donald Trump’s excesses.
Instead of publicly standing up for their party’s supposed traditional values of accountability and governmental restraint, which necessarily would put them in opposition to Trump, House Republicans in increasing numbers are quietly announcing their departure from Congress. By so doing, they are simply passing the baton of complicity to Republicans with fresher legs who are eager to race to Washington to get their share of the glories of the swamp. Those coming to replace worn-out and embarrassed GOP representatives will not be coming to Washington to hold Trump accountable. They are coming here to empower him further in his authoritarian corruption.
And they certainly will not be subjecting Trump and his family to scrutiny in relation to their gobbling up of cryptocurrency billions.
The November report tells a story of two Donald Trumps:
1. First-term Donald did not see his opportunities in cryptocurrency and therefore disparaged and opposed the phenomenon. This is Trump writing on Twitter on July 11, 2019:
“I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity….”
2. Second-term Trump has executed a remarkable turnaround on cryptocurrency, even declaring himself “crypto president,” and enabling his family business, while he is president, to accumulate billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency assets.
The same Republicans who brayed and carped about President Joe Biden’s supposed financial crookedness are silent in regard to the greedy grifting of their man Piggy. But can one really be surprised at this? Not really. The congressional GOP is a collection of disgusting cowards and hypocrites.
Here is a paragraph from the executive summary of the Judiciary Democrats’ report. Read it and weep for your country:
“In the year since his victory in the 2024 election, Donald Trump’s fortune has expanded monumentally, largely because of his crypto dealings. According to Reuters, the Trump family raked in more than $800 million in income from sales of crypto assets in the first half of 2025 alone. Although it is difficult to determine the precise value of President Trump’s cryptocurrency holdings, public reports make clear the number is in the billions with some estimates putting the value of the holdings as high as $11.6 billion. He has built this wealth from the Oval Office by steering investment to his family firm, shielding his investors from federal fraud and securities investigations and prosecutions, bilking his political base, and degrading the federal agencies ordinarily responsible for investigating bribery and tracking known bad actors online.”
You can read the report here and download it as a PDF.
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I believe that every decision and directive that issues from Donald Trump in his capacity as president is colored with deceit and ulterior motives. Why? Because the man is fundamentally twisted and dishonest.
I challenge you to make sense of this next travesty. On Monday, Trump issued a pardon to former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who last year had begun serving a 45-year sentence in U.S. federal prison after being convicted under the Biden administration of complicity in the trafficking of prodigious quantities of cocaine into the United States. Hernández was extradited to the U.S. in April 2022, as reported in this news release from the Justice Department at the time.
Hernández was convicted in U.S. federal court in New York on March 8, 2024, and was sentenced on June 26, 2024, “to 45 Years in Prison for Conspiring to Distribute More Than 400 Tons of Cocaine and Related Firearms Offenses,” according to the headline of a Justice Department news release.
His pardoning by Trump follows the delivery last week of a letter of appeal written directly to Trump by Hernández and passed to the administration by the indefatigable Roger Stone. In his letter to Trump (reading it at the New York Times requires a subscription), Hernández appealed wonderfully to the devious old paranoiac’s sense of victimhood, persecution and personal greatness:
“Your resilience in the face of relentless political persecution has inspired me deeply. Like you, I sought only to serve my people, to uphold our conservative values while leading unprecedented reforms to make my country stronger and safer. And like you, I was recklessly attacked by radical leftist forces who could not tolerate change, who conspired with drug traffickers and resorted to false accusations, lawfare, and selective justice to destroy what we had achieved and clear the path for the Honduran radical left’s return to power.”
The New York Times gives the following account (reading the Times story requires a subscription) of Trump’s justification of the pardon:
“That was a Biden — horrible witch hunt which was, you know, a lot of people in Honduras asked me to do that and I did it,” he said [to reporters on Tuesday]. “I feel very good about it. If you have some drug dealers in your country and you’re the president, you don’t necessarily put the president in jail for 45 years.”
And previously, over the weekend, Trump had this to say to reporters, according to the Times:
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Mr. Trump said. “And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them.”
This is the same Donald Trump who is accusing Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro of being a drug dealer and has massed U.S. military assets off the Venezuelan coast and declared on Saturday, he issued this on his platform Truth Social: “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY” (a cryptic non-declaration declaration by my reading).
Trump has freed a man who was indicted and ultimately tried and convicted by a jury of American citizens in federal court in the Southern District of New York. But Trump happens to have long despised that particular U.S. attorney’s office, so by overturning a conviction secured in the hated Southern District under the detested Biden administration, Trump is sticking a finger in the eye of that reviled Southern District office and the similarly scorned Biden-Kamala Harris administration.
The Trump who spoke of the injustice that Hernández supposedly suffered in his drug case is the same Trump who is using the U.S. military to execute alleged drug runners off South America in the Pacific and the Atlantic. No arrests, no due process, no presentation of evidence. No justice. Just summary killings including the now infamous “double tap” execution of survivors of an initial strike on an alleged drug boat. That particular outrage is the subject of discussions of possible war-crimes culpability on the part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the unhappy head of U.S. Special Operations Command. And you may be sure that if this particular case becomes truly troublesome for the administration, Adm. Bradley will find himself swiftly flung under the ever-handy accountability bus.
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On the day before Thanksgiving, two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot in downtown D.C. near the White House. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, who was just 20 years old, subsequently died, and Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains hospitalized in D.C. The suspect in the shooting is an Afghan national, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, who CBS News reports “entered the U.S. in 2021 as part of the Biden-era Operation Allies Welcome after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Lakanwal came to the U.S. under Biden, benefiting from that program designed to save the risk of Taliban reprisal such Afghans as had worked alongside U.S. forces during the two-decade, armed occupation of their country by the U.S. And Lakanwal was granted asylum in the U.S. this year under the Trump administration. He is facing multiple charges, including first-degree murder, and the federal death penalty is on the table.
One of Trump’s responses to the shooting has moved a tragic and sad case at least a little distance into the territory of farce. Immediately after the shooting of the two National Guard members, Trump ordered that 500 additional Guard troops be brought to D.C. to walk the streets of the capital, as the initial 2,000-plus Guard personnel had been doing. Before the shooting, many, but not all, of the Guard members deployed in the city had carried firearms. Now the Pentagon says all will be armed.
Cast your mind back to Trump’s justification for deploying National Guard troops on the streets of D.C. late in the summer. A young member of staff of Elon Musk’s DOGE entity had been assaulted by a mob of teenage predators on a street in D.C. Furious, Trump declared a one-month crime emergency and deployed the National Guard and police from a string of federal agencies (and immigration agents, naturally) to back up the D.C. police to address street crime. When the crime emergency expired, law enforcement officers from various federal agencies returned to their home agencies, but Trump kept the National Guard tramping the streets of D.C. to buttress the city’s police in their fight against street crime.
But now, after the shooting of those two National Guard members, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department is providing one police officer apiece to accompany the little knots of Guard troops that continue to walk the city’s streets. This is a puzzle to me. The Guard came here to support the police, but the police are now guarding the Guard. And what is more, the shooting of those two Guard members had nothing to do with D.C. street crime. Lakanwal, the accused, allegedly carried out his attack after driving to D.C. all the way from Bellingham, Wash., which is on the opposite side of the country.
I say again that the shooting was not the product of D.C. street crime, but Trump is boosting the number of Guard troops in the city, where they were never needed or welcomed in the first place; all will now be armed; and city police officers are being pulled off their regular tasks of serving Washingtonians to walk the streets with Guard members to help them protect themselves from … what exactly?
Help me, please. Make this make sense to me.
Democracy Warrior 