Alan Zendell, May 23, 2025

Years ago, a story circulated about a brilliant way to avoid capital gains taxes on the sale of a home (or any other capital property.) The idea was not only clever, but simplicity itself. It worked like this: suppose someone made you an offer to purchase your home, let’s say, for half a million dollars. You sign the contract and the buyer makes you an alternative offer.

The buyer has a rare coin collection. Every coin is legal U. S. currency, mostly solid gold or silver. The buyer presents you with an assay report valuing the collection at $650,000, 30% more than your agreed price, and offers to trade the collection for your house. You do your due diligence, accept the offer, and issue a bill of sale. The price on the bill of sale is $375, the total face value of all those gold and silver coins. Remember, the coins were legal currency.

To make the issue more interesting, my suburban Washington DC county, was home to dozens (maybe hundreds) of IRS agents, so there was a spirited debate about whether you could claim you sold your home for $375. If IRS accepted that, you’d not only avoid capital gains taxes, but be able to claim a sizable capital loss. Even my extremely conservative tax accountant couldn’t definitively answer that, although he said if I ever tried it, he wouldn’t sign my tax return. I believe IRS eventually ruled such transactions were illegal, but since I didn’t know many people with million-dollar coin collections, I lost interest in the issue.

The story seems particularly apt today because of all the ways Donald Trump is enriching himself in office. It sounds a lot like his Crypto marketing campaign. Federal law makes it illegal for non-Americans to contribute to political campaigns, candidates, or elected officials. But it’s not illegal to sell them highly inflated Crypto shares or futures.

Seven federal agencies play a role in regulating Crypto sales and trades. For example, the US Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Unit (FinCEN) “governs virtual currency businesses…and mandates them to have anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regulations.” I’m not an expert on this stuff, but it seems to me that the only difference between Trump selling Crypto shares to billionaire foreigners and money laundering is that we can’t know whether the money they invest comes from criminal acts.

Neither Trump nor his foreign investors are likely to open their books to public scrutiny any time soon, so it will be decades and several administration changes before we can examine these transactions, but insiders are leaking and speculating that the whole thing is rigged. It looks like a legal investment scheme on the surface, except we know it’s not.

If, as president, I offer to sell you $100 million in Crypto shares, and privately, we both agree that you expect to lose half of your investment, because it’s worth $50 million to you to have access to me, that smells like a bribe that carries heavy federal prison time if you’re indicted and convicted. (Not me, the Supreme Court said I’m immune.)

When Trump talks about making deals, he always means, “What are you willing to give me in exchange for… .” You fill in the blanks. In a local barter economy, that’s fine. When you’re the President of the United States, and your investors are wealthy foreigners who stand to profit from being in your good graces, it’s criminal.

Crypto corruption is only the latest in a series of actions that began the moment Trump took office. Half-million-dollar memberships in the Trump family’s Executive Branch Club, which explicitly offers presidential access to members, started it all. I won’t list the other instances here – I and many others have enumerated them before.

If you voted for Trump, was that kind of outright theft and corruption you had in mind? And as his “Big Beautiful Bill” and his tariff war make everything you buy more expensive while enriching Trump and his wealthy friends, while it reduces your health care options, and even threatens your job if Trump doesn’t like your employer, do you still think you made the right choice?

We hear a lot about Trump’s fixation on President William McKinley, who also loved tariffs. But in the 1890s, America was not the most powerful country in the world and the hope of every nation threatened by 21^st century imperialism. We have a responsibility to at least pretend to act morally and ethically.

All the bad actors aren’t Trump loyalists. The Democrats have their problems, too. While there is no federal law that specifically makes lying about or covering up a President’s failing health a crime, the events of the past year tell us there should be. Jake Tapper’s new book, Original Sin, while much too late to the party, details a horrifying conspiracy among senior Democrats to hide President Biden’s failing health from voters. That would be appalling under any circumstances, but when you look at the result – four more years of Trump as president – I wouldn’t mind seeing a few Democrats held accountable. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries should be ashamed of what they were a part of. Nancy Pelosi got it right, but the cow was already out of the barn by then.