Governance by Scam

I fully expect this kind of thing to be official U.S. policy by Tuesday:

The scandal began with a tweet.

“The world wants to invest in Argentina,” Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, posted at 7:01 p.m. on Valentine’s Day, offering a code to buy a new cryptocurrency.

The digital coin was called $Libra, and it had been created 23 minutes earlier.

Over the next few hours, thousands of people invested. $Libra’s value skyrocketed.

Then it swiftly collapsed. The largest stakeholders had sold their coins, leaving almost everyone else with a collective $250 million in losses.

To cryptocurrency veterans, it was a classic “rug-pull.” A celebrity touts a new digital coin, prices soar and then insiders who own most of the coins pull the rug: They sell their stakes for a big profit at the expense of amateur investors who got in later.

To Argentina, it was a national scandal. The president, critics said, had just scammed his constituents. The opposition called for impeachment. Argentine citizens filed a dozen criminal complaints. A federal prosecutor opened an investigation, with Mr. Milei as a target.

Then Mr. Milei left for Washington. At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, he gave a combative speech ahead of President Trump, the other president who promoted a new cryptocurrency this year that soared and then crashed. That coin, $Trump, generated enormous profits for insiders and a cumulative $2 billion in losses for more than 800,000 other investors.

Mr. Trump has claimed ignorance. “I don’t know if it benefited” me, he said. “I don’t know much about it.” (The Trump family and its business partners earned nearly $100 million in trading fees alone on the coin.)

To say the least, Trump and Milei love each other as much as two fascists can.