$TRUMP Is Just Feudalism with Blockchain Gas Fees

When the president turns governance into a meme economy, it’s not capitalism. It’s patronage—paid in tokens.

Congratulations, serf.

You’ve been rugged by the king—again.

You didn’t get a job.

You didn’t get a policy win.

You didn’t get a tax cut, or a lowered prescription bill, or a functioning civic institution.

What you got was a meme coin. Airdropped fealty. A tokenized loyalty badge that costs real wealth and bought you nothing except the chance to maybe, possibly, someday sit in a rented ballroom at Trump National while a billionaire grifter squints in your direction over an overcooked chicken filet.

This is where we are.

$TRUMP, the meme token launched ahead of Trump’s second term, is not a joke. It’s not just another crypto rug. In structure and function, it is the clearest example yet of post-democratic finance—a self-dealing asset scheme masquerading as political participation, where the spoils go to the insiders and the faithful foot the bill.

According to Chainalysis, 58 wallets made over $10 million apiece. Total insider gains? $1.1 billion. The rest? 764,000 wallets in the red. You can guess who those belonged to. Small-dollar holders. Retail punters. “Supporters.” The kind of people who buy a gold coin because they think it might get them a chair at the new palace.

And it just might. The top 25 wallets are invited to a reception at Trump National in DC. The top 220 get a seat at a black-tie-optional dinner. And if you’re wondering whether this violates FEC or IRS rules, don’t worry—so is the Senate.

There’s a formal investigation underway. Ethics watchdogs are calling it a direct conflict of interest. House Democrats walked out of a crypto hearing in protest. Meanwhile, 100,000 new wallets bought $TRUMP in the weeks after the dinner announcement—because nothing says populism like competing for a dinner ticket with a state-backed Emirati wallet and Justin Sun.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Before we unravel this—a loyalty auction, a grift-as-governance model, a blueprint for sovereign collapse—let’s look at the numbers because they tell the story better than any slogan.

A Wealth Transfer Disguised as Community

Here’s the math.

Roughly 2 million wallets have bought into $TRUMP. Of those, 58 wallets—that’s 0.0029%—made $1.1 billion in profits. The rest? A retail slaughterhouse. 764,000 wallets are in the red, and those losses are now being celebrated as “engagement.”

Let’s break that down.

This wasn’t a pump-and-dump in the traditional sense. It was a designed hierarchy. At the top: preloaded whales, insiders, and wallets tied to shell entities like Fight Fight Fight, LLC and CIC Digital, LLC—entities that didn’t just control the token supply. They engineered the game board.

As a brief aside: this exact behavior is why I find “crypto bros” to be such irredeemable buffoons. The sheer volume of fraud that passes for culture in the crypto world is staggering. Wash trades. Front-running. Shilling. Market-making fraud. The kind of behavior that, in traditional finance, ends with someone like Bernie Madoff in prison?

In crypto, that’s just another Monday.

But I digress.

Built into the token’s smart contract is a fee-siphoning mechanism: every trade routes a cut of the transaction to wallets controlled by the creators (yet another thing that would be outright illegal in any regulated market). That cut? $324 million—earned not from selling tokens, but from volume churn.

In other words: they profit whether the price goes up, down, or sideways—as long as people stay emotionally hooked enough to keep trading.

Now ask yourself: what is this?

It’s not a currency.
It’s not an asset.
It’s not governance.

It’s a behavioral extraction engine, dressed in red, white, and blue.

A digital loyalty tax.

And the reward? Not dividends. Not liquidity. Not policy influence.

You get a raffle ticket to Trump National. You get proximity. Symbolic proximity. Blockchain-enabled court attendance.

Feudalism. Now with gas fees.

And that’s what makes it dangerous.

Because the average holder isn’t analyzing vesting schedules or smart contract audits. They’re not reading Chainalysis reports. They’re holding because they believe they’re participating. That this coin is a stake in something larger. That this is their movement.

Never realizing they’ve become the movement’s liquidity pool.

This is the point where you realize:

It’s not a coin.
It’s a coded contract for attention.
And you signed it by buying in.

The Loyalty Auction

Let’s not pretend this was ever about finance.

$TRUMP isn’t a store of value. It’s not a unit of account. It’s not even a speculative asset in the traditional sense. There’s no roadmap, no product, no “protocol” to speak of.

It’s a proximity token—a ticket to the court.

And like any royal court, access is currency. The tokenomics make that explicit. The top 25 wallets get a reception at Trump National. The top 220 get a seat at a black-tie dinner. And the top 1,000? They get to say they were “early” when the next loyalty cycle begins.

This isn’t governance. It’s monetized patronage—a leaderboard of fealty, written to the chain.

The logic is pure 14th century:

“I will to my lord be true and faithful and love all which he loves and shun all which he shuns.”

And it’s not even subtle. Trump’s own posts make the structure clear: coin holdings equal access. Not votes. Not advocacy. Balance. You want influence? You’d better open your wallet.

The result is a recursive, rigged loop:

• You buy $TRUMP to get close to Trump.

• Trump posts about $TRUMP to reward loyalty.

• Price pumps. Others pile in.

• You gain influence... but only if your wallet is still bigger than theirs.

This isn’t a campaign. It’s a casino where the high rollers get backstage passes—and the house always wins, because the house wrote the smart contract.

This isn’t democracy. It’s a performance-based monarchy—monetized.

And the blockchain doesn’t decentralize it. It immortalizes it.

Because even if the SEC steps in, even if the token crashes, even if Chainalysis shows a third of the wallets are bots or foreign sovereign funds—the ledger will still say you were there.

That you pledged loyalty in public.

That you burned real capital to climb the throne’s leaderboard.

This isn’t participation.

At any other time, we would call it for what it is, bribery & corruption.

But now? It’s just another day in America under Trump.

The Regulatory Threat Vectors

Let’s start with the obvious: this isn’t just unethical. It’s illegal—and not in the slap-on-the-wrist, fine-and-move-on way that most campaign finance violations are handled. This is federal crime territory.

The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has already opened a probe into the $TRUMP token. Why?

Because 75% of the revenue from World Liberty Financial—a related entity—is reportedly being routed directly to the Trump family.

That’s not a PAC.

That’s not a super-donor.

That’s direct monetization of public office through a speculative digital asset.

If this were happening in Venezuela or Turkey, it would already be in the State Department’s annual human rights report.

So, let’s be explicit:
This isn’t a meme. This is a matrix of criminal exposure.

Here’s what’s on the table:

• Conflict of interest at the presidential level

• Probable violation of the Emoluments Clause

• Probable violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)

• Probable violations of 18 U.S.C. § 208 (acts affecting a personal financial interest)

• Likely unregistered securities offering under the Howey Test

• Violation of SEC regulations and federal law on investment disclosures

• Potential violations of campaign finance statutes and FEC coordination rules

• Probable violations of 18 U.S.C. § 201 (bribery of public officials)

• And yes—potential racketeering exposure under RICO, if the activity involved coordinated use of mail, wire, or banking systems to defraud

And looming behind all of this: foreign money.

Among the largest known wallets are those linked to Justin Sun—a crypto mogul under SEC investigation—and a state-backed Emirati investment fund with long-standing ties to the Trump Organization.

So if you’re wondering whether foreign nationals can purchase preferential access to a sitting U.S. president using ERC-20 tokens, the answer appears to be yes.

That’s not a loophole.

That’s a backdoor to American political influence, dressed up as internet culture.

And yet, there’s no centralized offering. No white paper. No formal IPO. Which means regulators are once again chasing vapor trails through Discord threads and DeFi protocols—trying to piece together a deliberately evasive architecture built on ambiguity and spectacle.

The SEC could bring an enforcement action for unregistered securities. The FEC could pursue undeclared campaign contributions. The DOJ could investigate bribery, wire fraud, or conspiracy. The IRS could start asking how you classify $324 million in siphoned trading fees.

But will they?

Probably not.

Because to prosecute this, you’d have to admit it’s real. And this administration's entire strategy relies on pretending it’s all just performance—a game, not a grift.

So instead, we get gridlock. Hearings. Walkouts. A handful of “deeply concerned” press releases.

And meanwhile, the money flows. The smart contracts execute—the chain records.

It’s not a bug.

It’s the business model.

What Does This Mean to Me?

It means the system isn't just collapsing in slow motion. It's actively being reprogrammed—into something extractive, opaque, and post-democratic.

This isn’t about one coin. It’s not even about Trump.

It’s about the emerging blueprint for how loyalty, money, and power now interact in public life. And if you think you’re not involved because you didn’t buy the token, let me disabuse you of that notion right now:

You’re already in the system.

You’re just not being rewarded by it.

Because here’s what this really means: If access to governance is now something that can be bought, farmed, or traded—then those who don’t buy in are outside the system by design.

Not because they opted out.

But because they didn’t stake enough to matter.

This is feudalism re-skinned as engagement. The old rules—organize, vote, advocate—are still on the surface. But underneath? Loyalty is now a monetized digital asset.

You’re being trained to see governance as influence farming.

You’re being told your economic reality is your own fault.

And you’re being invited—mockingly, quietly—to gamble for proximity in a rigged casino.

So: what do you do?

What Do I Do Now?

First: understand that this is not an anomaly. It’s a preview.

More of this is coming: tokenized loyalty, pay-to-participate governance, and speculative influence structures that convert emotion into capital and capital into access.

You need to start thinking like a sovereign. Not a consumer. Not a citizen. A sovereign.

That means:

• Own assets they can’t freeze.

• Build identity they can’t revoke.

• Hold access that isn’t pegged to political loyalty.

• And insulate your life from systems that depend on spectacle to stay functional.

Don’t chase their coins.

Don’t play their game.

Build your own architecture.

If proximity becomes the new currency of power and governance is reduced to a leaderboard, then the only winning move is to stop depending on the leaderboard altogether.

The truth is, most people won’t exit. They’ll double down. Buy the next coin. Cheer the next dinner raffle. Keep believing they’re participating, long after they’ve been fully absorbed.

Don’t be one of them.

The system isn’t going to collapse.

It’s going to harden into exactly this—until you either conform to it, or escape it.

Plan accordingly.

Congratulations, Peasant.

The $TRUMP coin isn’t the end of anything.

You thought you were participating.

You thought you were early.

You thought this time, the system would reward loyalty.

But you weren’t a knight.

You weren’t a lord.

You weren’t even the court jester.

You were a serf with a MetaMask wallet.

You didn’t receive land, or title, or even an NFT scroll declaring your fealty.
You got a leaderboard, a raffle, and a smart contract that said, in essence:

“I will to my lord be true and faithful, and love all which he loves, and shill all which he shills.”

This isn’t governance. This isn’t democracy.

This is a blockchain monarchy, built on vibes, wrapped in patriotism, and monetized by the ounce. A gas-fee-funded throne room, where the only rule is: stake more, or stay invisible.

And if you protest? If you say, “But I didn’t vote for you!”
Well, as the “King of the Britons” (Monty Python) said:

“You don’t vote for kings.”

No, you don’t.
You buy the token.
You post the meme.
You wait to be noticed.

This is what loyalty looks like now: not civic participation, but asset-backed deference, broadcast publicly and recorded to the chain.

You weren’t invited to the table.

You were harvested for your hope, indexed for your belief, and converted into yield.

Congratulations, peasant.

You helped tokenize the crown.

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And if you're still bullish on sovereignty—but a bit less bullish on $TRUMP as your reserve currency—check out my new guide at Borderless Living:

👉 The Goldstack Strategy: A tactical breakdown of how to use physical gold and silver as a real off-grid hedge, not a speculative loyalty badge. It drops today at the same time as this piece.

Because if you're going to opt out of the casino, you’d better have more than vibes in your wallet.