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      Trump says he fired National Portrait Gallery chief in latest conflict with arts

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      Donald Trump says he is firing the first female director of the National Portrait Gallery, which contained a caption that referenced the attack on the US Capitol that his supporters carried out in early 2021.The president announced the termination on Friday in a post on his social media platform that accused Sajet – born in Nigeria, raised in Australia and a citizen of the Netherlands – of being “a strong supporter” of diversity initiatives that his administration opposes as well as “highly partisan”. He cited no evidence for either claim.Legal experts, including Eric Columbus, a former litigator for the January 6 select committee, suggested Trump does not have the power to fire Sajet, since the gallery is part of the Smithsonian, which is not run by the executive branch.In its collection of portraits of American presidents, the gallery had this text about Trump: “Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials. After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mounted a historic comeback in the 2024 election. He is the only president aside from Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) to have won a nonconsecutive second term.”Sajet arrived in the US with her family in 1997, held positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and was appointed director of the National Portrait Gallery in 2013, according to a Guardian profile of her.The National Portrait Gallery is an art museum in Washington DC that opened in 1968 and is part of the Smithsonian Institution. It boasts the only complete collection of presidential portraits outside the White House.After beginning his second presidency in January, Trump issued an executive order directing the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the institution’s storied museums.Sajet had said the gallery under her leadership tried “very hard to be even-handed when we talk about people and that’s the key”.“Everyone has an opinion about American presidents, good, bad and indifferent,” Sajet said. “We hear it all, but generally I think we’ve done pretty well.” More

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      Oval and out: Musk and Trump’s farewell marred by disillusionment

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      Another day, another made-for-great-television encounter between Donald Trump and the media in the Oval Office.The president, quite perversely, prides himself on the access he grants to a group of professionals he has routinely denounced as the “fake news” and “enemies of the people” – although any pain suffered from doing so has been eased by widening the net to include formerly fringe rightwing news organizations, who have responded in kind by lobbing friendly questions.But Friday’s was no ordinary presidential briefing.That was clear when Trump acknowledged – surely uniquely – that it wasn’t even primarily about him.“Today, it’s about a man named Elon,” he intoned, referring to Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who spent $275m of his own money to help Trump win November’s election and return to the White House.Yes, the Special One – as in “special government employee” – was leaving after 138 days at the heart of Trump’s administration. He had spearheaded the purportedly cost-slashing “department of government efficiency,” or Doge; boasted of feeding entire federal agencies “to the wood chipper” fought with cabinet secretaries; publicly paraded with a chainsaw; terrorised federal workers; and generally fomented mayhem within the governing bureaucracy.All in the name of rooting out “waste, fraud and abuse” – boldly forecasting in advance that he would be able to find $2tn worth of it. He had fallen well short of that target, and his popularity plummeted amid widespread resentment over his interference in the US government process. With that, the stock of his business empire, principally his electric vehicle firm, Tesla, had fallen too.So Musk – weeks ago seemingly ubiquitous and all-powerful – was not exactly going out on a high. The unaccustomed shadow of failure stalked him. Disillusionment did, too, as illustrated by his criticism of Trump’s Big Beautiful bill, which he warned would undermine Doge’s cost-cutting endeavours.Still, the president was generous. “He’s one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced,” he said, as Musk – wearing a black baseball cap – stood beside the resolute desk. “He stepped forward to put his very great talents into the service of our nation, and we appreciate it.”But apparently not everybody.For some people had been gossiping about Musk – and had snitched to the New York Times.Hopes that he would be afforded a graceful exit from the political arena were somewhat dashed when the Old Grey Lady of American journalism disclosed Friday that his illicit drug intake was much more widespread than previously known.The paper reported he used ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, substances whose effects on political judgment have not been hitherto explored. He was also said to have imbibed so much ketamine – a drug prescribed for depression – that it affected his bladder.Predictably, the report was the first question raised by the media. And, clearly primed, Musk decided that the best form of defence was to take the piss, so to speak – out of the source.“The New York Times? Is that the same publication that got a Pulitzer prize for false reporting on the Russiagate?” he said, in a delivery that bore the hallmarks of being pre-rehearsed – and perhaps coached by Trump himself, as it reprised one of his favoured gripes against the “fake news”.“I think it is. That New York Times? Let’s move on.”And move on things did – before anyone realised that Musk had failed to address, or deny, any of the revelations in the Times’ report.Trump reclaimed his accustomed place centre-stage for a bit – riffing, in part, on Emmanuel Macron, the French president who had been in the news after his wife apparently shoved him as he was about to disembark from a plane on a visit to Vietnam.“Do you have world leader-to-world leader marital advice?” the thrice-married and twice-divorced US president was asked, cast in the unlikely role of marriage guidance counsellor.Trump replied, “Make sure the door remains closed,” before revealing, intriguingly, “No, I spoke to him and he’s fine. They’re two really good people I know very well. And I don’t know what that was all about.”Then somebody asked what had been, until then, an elephant in the room question: Elon appeared to have a black eye.“What happened to you?” asked a reporter. Given the popular anger against Musk’s imperious mien recently, there could have been any number of potential culprits: enemies in Maga-world, who have come to include Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer; a disaffected cabinet secretary taking exception to being insulted; perhaps even the disaffected mother of one of the billionaire’s numerous children as he has embarked on a one-man baby boom enterprise.But Musk gave the most prosaic of explanations. The bruise had happened in a bout of horseplay with his five-year-old son, X Æ A-12 – who has accompanied him on previous visits to the White House but was, perhaps fortunately, absent this time. “I was just messing around with X and I said, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face,’ and he did. Turns out, even a five-year-old punching you in the face – actually, if you knew X.“I didn’t really feel much at the time and then, I guess, it really bruises up.”It seemed perfect as a metaphor for his reputation – and perhaps his psyche – as he prepared to leave Washington.Moments later – after Trump expounded on the alleged criminal havoc perpetrated by his favourite scapegoats, undocumented immigrants – Musk offered his take on the “fundamental moral flaw” of the left, a political grouping which once feted him but now holds him in contempt.“Empathy for the criminals, but not empathy for the victims,” said the man who previously told podcaster Joe Rogan that empathy was the “fundamental weakness of western civilization” and open to exploitation.As he spoke, it was hard to avoid the impression that among those he considered victims was himself. More

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      Anthony Weiner says female politicians ‘judged much more harshly than men’

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      Anthony Weiner says politicians such as him and Donald Trump can survive scandals while qualified candidates like Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton lose elections because “women get judged much more harshly than men do”.“I do believe that,” Weiner said Friday on ABC’s The View amid his run for a New York City council seat years after he crashed out of Congress in the wake of a sexting scandal that some argue aided Trump in clinching his first presidency in 2016.Much of Weiner’s appearance on the talkshow involved his addressing the various scandals that set the stage for one of the most spectacular falls from grace in US politics. As he has done before, Weiner asserted that he was in “recovery” after sexually messaging a teenaged girl led him to serve 18 months in prison.That came after a sexting scandal drove him out of the US House in 2011 after 13 years representing New Yorkers there. A 2013 run for New York mayor failed after he became ensnared in another scandal over sexual texts sent under the moniker Carlos Danger.Then, in 2016, as former secretary of state Clinton ran for the White House against Trump with the help of Weiner’s then wife, Human Abedin, federal authorities opened a criminal investigation into the ex-congressman’s exchange of lewd photos with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. Investigators involved in that inquiry found emails on Weiner’s personal laptop that prompted them to re-examine a private email server used by Clinton.Agents did not find any incriminating evidence against Clinton. But many Democrats to this day believe the unflattering media coverage that surrounded the private email server investigation had a hand in Clinton’s decisive electoral college defeat to Trump despite his having lost the popular vote.Trump then lost the 2020 presidential race to Joe Biden before retaking the Oval Office in 2024 against vice-president Harris, overcoming – among other things – having been convicted of criminally falsifying business records in connection with payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels and having been held civilly liable for sexually abusing former Elle magazine columnist E Jean Carroll.All of which prompted The View co-host Joy Behar to tell Weiner it seemed that men like him were held to a different standard in politics than “qualified women”. Beside him and Trump, she also mentioned other figures who had faced notorious, sex-related scandals, including Clinton’s husband – Bill Clinton – as well as the ex-New York governors Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo.Weiner replied by arguing that he, Clinton, Spitzer and Cuomo all did “pay a price” to some extent. The ousted congressman said Clinton was impeached during his second term as US president while Spitzer and Cuomo both resigned New York’s governorship.“I mean, I hate to correct you,” Weiner said. “The question is … how do you judge their record in totality?”Nonetheless, Weiner added: “I do believe that women get judged much more harshly than men do. I do believe that.”The Democratic primary election for the New York City council seat that Weiner is eyeing is on 24 June. Cuomo is signed up to run in the Democratic primary election for mayor that same day. The general election for both races is set for 4 November. More

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      Why Trump does not suffer Congress when it comes to his prized tariffs

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      When it comes to cutting taxes or paying for mass deportations, Donald Trump is happy to work with Congress. But if the issue is his prized and disruptive tariff policy, the president has made clear that he has no time for their legislative wrangling.Trump underscored his sentiment towards Congress after a US trade court this week briefly put a stop to his controversial policy of placing levies on a wide range of countries, before a different court reversed that decision while legal proceedings continue.“The horrific decision stated that I would have to get the approval of Congress for these tariffs. In other words, hundreds of politicians would sit around DC for weeks, and even months, trying to come to a conclusion as to what to charge other Countries that are treating us unfairly. If allowed to stand, this would completely destroy Presidential Power – the Presidency would never be the same!” the president wrote on Truth Social.The statement served to put Congress in its place, even though its Republican leaders have shown Trump great deference since taking office. The Senate has approved just about every official he has nominated, no matter how controversial, while the House of Representatives last week overcame substantial differences among the GOP conference to pass the One Big Beautiful bill containing Trump’s tax and spending priorities.If there’s one place where there is daylight to be found between Trump and his Republican allies, it’s his tariff polices. Even avowed supporters of the president have raised their eyebrows at his on-again, off-again imposition of levies on the countries from which US consumers buy their goods and factories source their inputs, and Republican leaders have gone to great lengths to thwart their attempts to do something about them.Which might be why Trump struck out on his own, and hoped the courts would back him up. So far they have not. The US court of international trade, which ruled to block Trump’s tariffs on Wednesday, was very clear it believed his policies “exceed any authority granted to the president”.The matter may ultimately come down to the views of the supreme court, where Trump appointed half of the six-justice conservative supermajority during his first term. Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor, said the case is likely to present a test of how the supreme court views the “major questions doctrine” (MQD), which argues clear congressional authority is needed for agencies to carry out any regulations of national importance, in light of Trump’s tariffs moves.The doctrine was used to defang regulators last year when the court overturned the Chevron decision, limiting regulators’ powers and arguing they had overstepped their authority.The supreme court may not be minded to accept the major questions doctrine when it comes to the commander in chief, wrote Goldsmith in his newsletter, Executive Function. “It is an open question whether the MQD applies to congressional authorizations to the president. Every Supreme Court decision involving the MQD has involved agency action, and lower courts are split on whether the MQD applies to presidential authorizations,” he said.For Congress’s beleaguered Democrats, this week’s court intervention, however fleeting, provided grist for the case they’ve been trying to make to voters ever since Trump took office, which is that he is trying to act like the sort of monarch America was founded on rejecting.“This is why the Framers gave Congress constitutional power over trade and tariffs,” said Suzan DelBene, a Washington state House Democrat who has proposed one of many bills to block Trump’s tariffs. “The court spoke decisively in defense of our democracy and against a president attempting to be king.” More

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      Supreme court allows White House to revoke temporary protected status of many migrants

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      The US supreme court on Friday announced it would allow the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants living in the United States, bolstering the Republican president’s drive to step up deportations.The court put on hold Boston-based US district judge Indira Talwani’s order halting the administration’s move to end the immigration humanitarian “parole” protections granted to 532,000 people by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, potentially exposing many of them to rapid removal from the country, while the detailed case plays out in lower courts.As with many of the court’s emergency orders – after rapid appeals brought the case to their bench – the decision issued on Friday was unsigned and gave no reasoning. However two of the court’s three liberal-leaning justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, publicly dissented.The court “botched” its assessment of whether the administration was entitled to freeze Talwani’s decision pending the litigation, Jackson wrote in an accompanying opinion.The outcome, Jackson wrote, “undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending”.Jackson also said that “it is apparent that the government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum pre-decision damage.”She added that those living under parole protections in this case now face “two unbearable options”.One option is to “elect to leave the United States and thereby, confront ‘dangers in their native countries,’ experience destructive ‘family separation’ and possibly ‘forfeit any opportunity to obtain a remedy based on their … claims”, Jackson wrote.The other option is that they could remain in the US after parole termination and “risk imminent removal at the hands of government agents, along with its serious attendant consequences”.To Jackson, “either choice creates significant problems for respondents that far exceed any harm to the government … At a minimum, granting the stay would facilitate needless human suffering before the courts have reached a final judgement regarding the legal arguments at issue, while denying the government’s application would not have anything close to the kind of practical impact.”Immigration parole is a form of temporary permission under American law to be in the country for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit”, allowing recipients to live and work in the US. Biden, a Democrat, used parole as part of his administration’s approach to handling migrants entering at the US-Mexico border.Such a status does not offer immigrants a long-term path towards citizenship but it can typically be renewed multiple times. A report from the American Immigration Council found that halting the program would, apart from the humanitarian effect, be a blow to the US economy, as households in the US where the breadwinners have temporary protected status (TPS) collectively earned more than $10bn in total income in 2021 while paying nearly $1.3bn in federal taxes.Trump called for ending humanitarian parole programs in an executive order signed on 20 January, his first day back in office. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subsequently moved to terminate them in March, cutting short the two-year parole grants. The administration said revoking the parole status would make it easier to place migrants in a fast-track deportation process called “expedited removal”.The case is one of many that the Trump administration has brought in an emergency fashion to the nation’s highest judicial body seeking to undo decisions by judges impeding the president’s sweeping policies, including several targeting immigrants.The supreme court on 19 May also let Trump end TPS that had been granted under Biden to about 350,000 additional Venezuelans living in the United States, while that legal dispute plays out.Jackson was the only justice to publicly dissent then, while House Democrats condemned the supreme court’s decision.In a bid to reduce unauthorized border crossings, Biden starting in 2022 offering limited extra pathways to come to the US legally, allowing Venezuelans who entered the US by air to request a two-year parole if they passed security checks and had a US financial sponsor. Biden expanded that eligibility process to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in 2023 as his administration grappled with high levels of illegal immigration from those countries.The plaintiffs in this case, a group of migrants granted parole and Americans who serve as their sponsors, sued administration officials claiming they violated federal law governing the actions of government agencies.Talwani in April found that the law governing such parole did not allow for the program’s blanket termination, instead requiring a case-by-case review. The Boston-based first US circuit court of appeals declined to put the judge’s decision on hold and the government appealed.The justice department told the supreme court that Talwani’s order had upended “critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry”, effectively “undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election” that returned Trump to the presidency.The plaintiffs told the supreme court they would face grave harm if their parole is cut short given that the administration has indefinitely suspended processing their pending applications for asylum and other immigration relief.They said they would be separated from their families and immediately subject to expedited deportation “to the same despotic and unstable countries from which they fled, where many will face serious risks of danger, persecution and even death”.Speaking at the White House on Friday afternoon, Donald Trump praised the decision, saying “a couple of hours ago we had a great decision from the supreme court that’s very important”.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Biden speaks about cancer diagnosis and urges Americans to defend democracy

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      Joe Biden on Friday spoke out in public for the first time since being diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer earlier this month to say he was optimistic about his prognosis and also to urge Americans to defend US democracy.“All the folks are very optimistic … The expectation is we are going to be able to beat this,” he said of the cancer, at an event in Delaware.He gave a speech to commemorate members of the military killed in service, a few days after Memorial Day, and also made comments to mark the 10-year anniversary of the death of his son Beau, from brain cancer at the age of 46.Biden has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones.Speaking to reporters after his official remarks, the former US president said he was already undergoing treatment, which he said currently consisted of “one particular pill” a day.“It’s not in any organs, my bones are strong,” he said. He also said he was under the care of a world-class surgeon who had himself beat prostate cancer three decades ago.During his speech, delivered with vigor and passion, in talking of the military men and women lost in the line of duty, he drew a direct line between their sacrifice and what he said people need to do now.“They are not asking us to risk our lives, they are asking us to stay true to what America stands for. They are not asking us to do their jobs, they are asking us do our jobs – to protect our nation, in our time, now, to defend democracy,” he said.Biden, a Democrat, did not mention Donald Trump, or the Republican president’s self-referential Memorial Day address, or his thrust to expand presidential power in what critics say is a threat to US law and democracy, but the context of his speech was clear.He added later to reporters that the US is at “an inflection point where the decisions we make in the next little bit are going to determine what things look like for the next 20 years”.Biden also claimed he had no regrets, despite being pressured into dropping out of his re-election campaign then watching Trump win back the White House.“No regrets,” he said, adding: “I’m very proud. I’ll put my record as president against any president at all.” More

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      Is every memecoin just a scam? Experts on whether Andrew Tate and Trump are fleecing their followers

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      In November last year, I was turned into a memecoin. Several, in fact.Someone alerted me that a memecoin called Dork Nerd Geek ($DNG) had been minted with a picture of my face, and it already had a market cap (the total value of all coins in circulation) of $29,000. Twenty minutes later it was $100,000. An hour later it was $800,000.I had no idea what was going on, but I did know that “Dork Nerd Geek” was the nickname Andrew Tate gave me because I’ve spent much of my journalistic career investigating allegations of human trafficking made against him.I noticed he was currently livestreaming to his followers. I opened up his live stream and, for the first time, bore witness to the insane volatility of the memecoin market.In the space of 10 minutes, dozens of new me-related memecoins were being minted, including “Disgraced News Gatherer”, “Matt Shea is a faggot,” and “Take My Wife Tate (CUCK),” the latter of which included a picture of my fiancee taken from Instagram. Tate was pumping some of these memecoins in value merely by talking about them, with market fluctuations happening in real time on the order of millions, based on his every word.Two seconds after he said the words “Fuck Matt Shea,” a coin called “FUCK MATT SHAE [sic]” soared in value. Twenty minutes later, he uttered the words “Fuck Matt Shea … ” again and it went even higher, only to drop back down to nothing when he finished his sentence with “… is not a generational asset”. He then said he would pump the coin after taking a piss. He walked offscreen to urinate. It rocketed.View image in fullscreenSoon, there were hundreds more Matt Shea memecoins with similar names, as his followers tried to trick people into thinking that their Matt Shea memecoin was the one Tate was pumping. His words became memecoins, those memecoins shot up in value, and then the value disappeared instantaneously.All in all, about $2m was spent by people on memecoins making fun of me in the span of a few hours, and hundreds of millions more on other coins he mentioned during the stream.By the end of his live stream, the value of all the coins he pumped was back to near zero. All the fans who had invested at his behest collectively would have lost hundreds of millions of dollars.His followers may have felt they were in on the joke, but in the end they mostly lost their money. Only a tiny number of wallets actually profited from the coin including one crypto that made a profit of $240,000.A number of online crypto investigators including Coffeezilla, bored2boar, StarPlatinum and others have found that Tate has manipulated memecoin markets using “pump and dump”-like schemes, leading to large profits for those within his inner circle. We put the allegations in these investigations to Tate’s team, who said they had no comment.What happened on Tate’s stream that day felt bizarre but I didn’t completely understand what I was witnessing. I thought I basically understood bitcoin, but how do memecoins differ, and why do they continue to be popular when so many people have lost money on them?Is every memecoin a scam?According to David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: “Basically, literally, yes.”“All of this is like a big game of pretend with made-up financial instruments,” he said. “It’s printing your own made-up money. You print your own Monopoly money and then people buy it from you for real money.”The best thing you could possibly say about memecoins is that they initially felt like a funny, countercultural way to participate in internet culture. They satirised a financial system that increasingly looked like a silly game to those on the outside. They encapsulated a humorous generational nihilism.According to Sander Lutz, the nation’s first crypto-focused White House correspondent: “You could consider a memecoin to be a stock in a cultural phenomenon – like Dogecoin and the Doge meme.”“Another way of defining a memecoin,” Lutz said, “is a cryptocurrency token that has an acknowledged inherent lack of value. The crypto world, outside of memecoins, is full of so many people who are trying to pitch you on tokens that are ‘actually really profound’ or ‘represent a stake’ in some kind of ‘useful network’, but are equally worthless. What makes memecoins different is that there’s none of that noise.”In other words, all crypto is bullshit, but memecoins are consciously bullshit.In their essence, memecoins distill the attention economy into a tradable asset, monetising the ebb and flow of viral internet hype. This has created a system in which the biggest attention-seekers on the planet – Logan Paul, Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, Donald Trump – can bleed their followers for profit. The more controversial they are, the more viral they are; and the more viral they are, the more their memecoins increase in value. Last year, some developers performed attention-seeking stunts on livestreams to pump their tokens, leading to animal abuse and a faked suicide.Chase Herro, the co-founder of Trump’s main crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, said about crypto: “You can literally sell shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it.”Most memecoins end up making money for the person who makes them as a “rug pull” or a “pump and dump”. The term “rug pull” was actually invented by the crypto community, and it works like this:First, you mint a memecoin, and make sure that you and your mates own most of the liquidity pool (the total number of coins in circulation). The size of the liquidity pool – the amount of that memecoin that “exists” – is, like everything else in memecoins, a totally made-up number.Second, you generate hype around the coin by convincing people it will “moon” (shoot up in value). This usually involves getting a celebrity, influencer or the president of the US, to promote it. People then buy the coin, thinking it will be a good investment. Law of demand means that as people buy it, the “value” of the coin goes up, and since you and your mates own the lion’s share, you get richer.Then, at a time known only to you, the creator of the coin, and other insiders, you “pull the rug”, selling off all your stock at the newly high price. You make money, and the value of the coins bought by the masses you manipulated shoots back down to zero. It’s basically a way to just trick people into giving you money, dressed up as an “investment”.A “pump and dump” is pretty much the same thing, but with the slight caveat that you’re doing it with a coin that already exists, rather than creating your own. You buy a cheap coin, “pump” its value by hyping it so others invest, then “dump” all your stock, selling it off at a huge profit and causing everyone else to lose their money.“It’s provably negative sum,” Gerard told me. “The only way you get money is by other people losing money.”The only people really getting rich off memecoins are influencers and their crypto enablers (people like Herro, or Hayden Davis, the guy who helped launch Argentinian president Javier Milei’s memecoin and was involved in Melania Trump’s memecoin).View image in fullscreenDespite this, the idea that trading memecoins is a good way to get rich persists on the internet. Is it theoretically possible for someone like you or me to invest at just the right time and get rich off a coin?Just as with traditional gambling, there are a tiny number of success stories, such as people like the “Moo Deng whale”, who turned $800 of Moo Deng coin (a memecoin referencing the viral pygmy hippo of the same name), into $10m.But only 0.4% of Pump.fun (the main memecoin trading platform) traders have made more than $10,000. About 0.002% have made more than $1m.Lutz told me: “There are a select number of people who’ve made quite a lot of money on these tokens, but they tend to be the same people. They tend to be people who are very well-connected, who are in specific group chats, and who have a lot of existing capital.”“You’ll always have more people losing than amounts of winners,” according to Gerard. “And the winners never shut up, so you think it’s a winning environment.”One of the main reasons people keep falling for these coins is that they think they’ve figured out the scam and invested early, before the rug pull or the dump. But this is never really the case.According to Gerard: “Crypto has been an ever-escalating series of get-rich-quick schemes, where a whole bunch of people think that they’re smarter operators than the previous operator, and generally they’re not.”Memecoin traders will often be invited to Discord and Telegram chats that are sold as “insider channels” where, according to Gerard, “they think they’ll hear about these scams before the rug is pulled – but actually they’re the suckers. Crypto is full of people who think they’re the scammer, not the sucker.”Young gullible menDespite all this, many people – especially young men – continue to invest in memecoins.Forty-two percent of men and 17% of women aged 18 to 29 have invested in, traded or used crypto, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, compared to only 11% of men and 5% of women over 50.“It’s no accident that memecoins are such a phenomenon among young people who have grown immensely frustrated with a financial system that, I think it’s fair to say, has failed them,” Lutz explained, “and where supposedly sure investments aren’t likely to give them returns that would give them the quality of life their parents had. Memecoins are nakedly meaningless, but there are many financial products, both in crypto and in the world of traditional finance, that may profess to have meaning, but at their core may be nearly as meaningless to young people.”This, too, is why memecoins have become popular with far-right, manosphere influencers and their fans.“It’s undeniable,” Lutz said, “that the trend in memecoin popularity among younger people – in particular young men – is part of the same trend where you’re seeing a loss of trust in institutions and a loss of confidence that traditional paths to success work out.”“These are the same tenets that have brought young men into the fold of the Maga-verse or to influencers like Andrew Tate. There’s overlap between them because they both stem from the same frustrations affecting so many young people, in particular young men, who feel more anger, bitterness, disillusionment and nihilism than a generation ago.”Some people don’t even seem to care that they’re being scammed, according to Lutz. “It’s remarkable to see the culture in these ecosystems, because someone will rug-pull a project – what you would consider to be a scam in that they’re running you out of the money – but that’s kind of an accepted practice and people are like, ‘Hey, good for them, I got screwed over, on to the next one.’”“There are too many cases to count of people who’ve lost their entire savings gambling on new coins. If you’re a gambler at a casino, there’s Gamblers Anonymous and an existing infrastructure to deal with people who are addicted to gambling. At casinos you have ‘no play’ lists in compliance with existing laws. There’s no existing infrastructure to aid people who lose all of their savings on memecoins.”Some memecoins try to claim that they’re more than just high-stakes gambling, in order to ensnare more willing buyers. These coins are often accompanied by the false promise of some kind of utility, be it “roadmaps”, “airdrops” ( free tokens given out for marketing purposes), off-chain value mechanisms, games where you can “spend” the coins, and various incomprehensible frameworks using the coin to vote or create some sort of ecosystem. The utility almost never materialises. $Batman coin promised to integrate “entertainment, gaming, and real-world utility”. Logan Paul’s $ZooToken supposedly allowed buyers to play a Pokemon-like game which never worked.The exception, the one memecoin to offer a tangible benefit in the real world, is the one sold by the president.President MemeOn 17 January, three days before his second inauguration, Trump launched his own memecoin, $Trump. At the time of writing, the coin’s market cap is over $2.5bn, spurred on by Trump offering a dinner and White House tour to the top owners of the coin, which took place last weekend.Unlike other memecoins, it offered something concrete: access to the president. This made its value soar.View image in fullscreenRight now, only 20% of the token’s total “supply” is currently in circulation. The remaining 80% is supposedly held by Trump and his business partners.Trump and his business partners are supposedly only allowed to sell off their holdings in $Trump when they are “unlocked” in tranches over time, according to their own made-up rules. As Gerard puts it: “They own the fake money, but they can’t sell it until it’s unlocked in tranches. Note that the limits are artificial. I mean, they could just ‘print’ more.”But already, “58 wallets have made over $10m each from President Donald Trump’s meme coin, totaling $1.1bn in profits”, while “764,000 wallets of mostly small holders have lost money on $TRUMP”, according to CNBC.Gerard said: “A lot of his own fans bought the coin. They thought it would be a fabulous success because Trump is a ‘business genius’. He ripped off his own fans.“The coins’ creators and original sponsors get free $Trump coins and they can dump those on the market at will every time a tranche is released. And they do. And are people ever going to make money on those $Trump coins they bought? Probably not. The money goes to the Trump family, and that’s the direction it was created to make it go in. So yeah, it’s a memecoin dump. He’s just dumping the coins on the suckers and it’s a textbook case.”Trump and his business partners also profit in transaction fees every time $Trump is traded, so far earning $100m.Whether this is all legal or not is up for debate, but soon after launching his own memecoin, Trump replaced the head of the regulator responsible for memecoins, the SEC, with a pro-crypto appointee.Lutz said: “In the last few months, the SEC has either dismissed or withdrawn all of its crypto-related lawsuits against every big crypto company in the United States and closed all of its investigations. I mean, the SEC is hosting roundtables almost every week with crypto companies, asking how it can be more helpful to the industry.”Trump has also enthusiastically supported a legal framework for stablecoins. Stablecoins are theoretically stabilised in value by being “pegged” to the value of another asset like the US dollar, but in reality have often become “de-pegged” and therefore unstable.Right now, the Stable Bill and the Genius Bill, which reference Trump calling himself a “stable genius” in 2018, are trying to make their way through Congress. They pave the way for the US government to use stablecoins to pay everything from housing grants to social security payments. And Trump himself just so happens to have a stablecoin of his own – through the World Liberty Financial company – which would shoot up in value if these bills pass, earning his family trust potential billions.The Trump family has a claim on 75% of net revenues from World Liberty’s token sales.“It is absolutely the government’s job to stop mis-selling of investments – that’s why ordinary retail mums and dads cannot buy into binary options,” Gerard said. “It’s absolutely open slather for crypto in the US now. This is really bad. A lot of people are going to get skinned. It’s going to be terrible.”The advice? Stay awayIs there any cause for hope? According to Gerard, while it may appear everyone is investing in memecoins, this is mainly exaggerated by the media. Sure, lots of young people have dabbled, but only the real crypto geeks are actually buying the things.“The good news is most people are not falling for it. And our evidence for this is the retail dollar trading volumes at Coinbase, the largest crypto dollar exchange. Coinbase happens to be a public company so that means they have to give accurate numbers to the SEC. So they disclosed their retail trading volumes. They’re down 17% in the first quarter of 2025 from where they were in December 2024. They’ve gone down with the Trump coin regime. That gives hope.”As far as my own memecoins go, even the Tate fans who invested appear to have become aware of the scam they fell for.Shortly after the stream went dead, I received an email from a Tate follower titled: “MATT SHAE WE NEED YOUR HELP.” He, along with other Tate fans, claimed they were victims of Tate rug-pulling them. They wanted me to help spread awareness of their community’s plight – by publicizing a new memecoin they had minted called $RRT (Real Rugger Tate).I didn’t write back. More

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      in US Politics

      So long, Elon: the cuts didn’t go to plan, but you completely shredded your reputation | Marina Hyde

      by

      I can’t believe that Elon Musk is leaving Doge, the government department he named after a tired and basic meme that most of the internet had moved on from around a decade ago. “As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end,” Musk wrote this week (capital letters: model’s own), “I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful government spending.” Oh man. “Thank you for the opportunity”?! At some level you have to salute Donald Trump’s ability to turn even the world’s richest man into an Apprentice candidate who leaves in week four after completely wiping out in the hotdog stand task.Musk arrived in government promising to slash spending by $2tn. He leaves it a mere $1.86tn short of that target, even by his own estimations. Meanwhile, the president’s new tax bill is set to add $2.3tn to the deficit. I imagine Musk thought his government finale would be a spectacular extravaganza – “you’re welcome, Washington!” – involving 2,000 chainsaw-wielding chorus girls. Instead, it’s a tweet. And yes – we DO all still call them tweets.Ironically, the thing that Musk has been most stunningly effective at slashing is his own reputation. Think about it. He arrived in Trump’s orbit as a somewhat mysterious man, widely regarded as a tech genius, and a titan of the age. He leaves it with vast numbers of people woken up to the fact he’s a weird and creepy breeding fetishist, who desperately pretends to be good at video games, and wasn’t remotely as key to SpaceX or Tesla’s engineering prowess as they’d vaguely thought. Also, with a number of them apparently convinced he had a botched penile implant. Rightly or wrongly convinced – sure. I’m just asking questions.But look, it’s good news for Tesla investors, who have managed to end Musk’s practice of WFWH (working from White House), and are now demanding he puts in a 40-hour week to save the company whose stock he has spent the past few months tanking. As the world order dramatically seeks to rearrange itself in the new era of US unreliability, no one should ever be able to unsee the president of the United States’s decision to turn the White House lawn into a car sales lot for his sad friend. Did it work? It seems not. Musk spent a lot of this week airing his hurt feelings about his brrm-brrm cars. “People were burning Teslas,” he whined to Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post. “Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”Well, one thing we will no longer have to endure is this guy’s decrees on what is or isn’t cool. The timeworn thing about money and power is that they allow nerds to reinvent themselves as cool. You see it on Wall Street, where sea-beast financiers get manscaped by trophy wives who are no longer out of their league. You see it in Hollywood, where weird little guys become alpha movie producers. You see it in Bezos’s transformation from puffy-chinos-wearing, dress-down-Friday dweeb to Bilderberg Vin Diesel impersonator. What you rarely see is the alchemy of that process in reverse, live and in real time. But we got that with Elon, and we have to take our laughs where we can. In some other businesses, Musk could have convinced himself it wasn’t happening, but politics is a place where pollsters literally ask real people what they think of public figures every single week. Elon’s approval ratings are underwater.No doubt we’re this close to him identifying the real problem: that we simply need new voters. Musk has long been convinced that people don’t know how to handle his genius in all fields. Four years ago, he hosted Saturday Night Live, and sometime afterwards revealed on a podcast how the cast and writers had reacted to the uncontainably hilarious suggestions made by him and his team of bros. “We come in just, like, guns blazing with ideas,” he honked, explaining he’d pitched a … bit, is it? … where he was “going to take my cock out. So I’m going to reach down into my pants … and then I pull out a baby rooster. Like, ‘This is my tiny cock.’” Oh very good, sir. Absolute genius, sir. Presumably terrified that they would lose their jobs for ever to this superlative talent, the SNL team declined to “yes-and” this genius sketch into the final show running order, but Musk managed to get his own back – at least in his account of hosting an episode with a flattering 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “There’s a bunch of things that I said that were just not on the script. They have these cue cards for what you’re supposed to say, and I just didn’t say it. I just went off the rails.”Mm. Just like you have now. As for where Musk goes next, he’s obviously building a Texan compound for the mothers of his many babies. But, psychologically, Mars would seem to be the answer. After a humiliation this big, only colonising another planet feels like the appropriately sized salve. It doesn’t matter that Mars is an obvious shithole that looks like the least appealing disused quarry on Earth – a place so bleak and empty that if they found one single fossilised flower it would be celebrated like the holy grail, even though the impossible majesty of the Amazon rainforest is right here. But of course, the point of Mars is that it would be the place of Elon, Teslamandias, king of kings. And you know, I feel more confident than ever that we could all look upon his works and despair.

      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More