The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!
The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!

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Steaming headline breaks Snerdley BS scale: ‘Trump administration gives Trump family a bank’

by

BS BULLETIN

  • The OCC conditionally approved a national trust bank charter for Trump-linked World Liberty Financial — but it cannot yet open for business.
  • The proposed bank would primarily handle World Liberty’s $4 billion USD1 stablecoin, not ordinary deposits and loans.
  • Elizabeth Warren calls the process corrupt; World Liberty says federal supervision means more oversight, not less.

The Trump family’s booming cryptocurrency venture just cleared a major regulatory hurdle — and Democrats are already shouting “corruption.”

But first, let’s get straight what actually happened.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Friday granted preliminary conditional approval for World Liberty Trust Company to become a federally chartered national trust bank.

That is significant.

It is not, however, the Trump family opening the First National Bank of MAGA next Monday morning.

The OCC’s actual decision makes clear that World Liberty still has work to do before it can commence operations. It must satisfy numerous regulatory conditions, receive OCC approval for key personnel and systems and undergo another examination before opening its doors.

The proposed institution would also be very different from the neighborhood bank where Grandma keeps her Christmas Club account.

World Liberty Trust would principally issue and redeem World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin, maintain the reserves backing it and provide digital-asset custody and related services.

It would not accept traditional deposits or make ordinary loans. And USD1 is no longer some experimental crypto token floating around the Internet. It has grown to roughly $4 billion in circulation, making it one of the world’s largest stablecoins.

World Liberty Financial was launched in 2024 with involvement from Trump and his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, along with members of the Witkoff family.

The company’s relationship with the sitting president makes Friday’s decision politically combustible. And right on cue, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been one of the loudest critics. Warren previously called the OCC’s consideration of the charter a “sham” and accused Trump of unprecedented conflicts involving cryptocurrency.

“We have never seen financial conflicts of this magnitude,”

Warren declared in January while demanding that the application be delayed until Trump and his family divested from World Liberty. Democrats have also raised questions about World Liberty’s foreign financial relationships, including investments connected to the United Arab Emirates.

Those questions aren’t invented out of thin air. Congressional Democrats have demanded investigations into reports of a $500 million investment in World Liberty by an entity controlled by members of Abu Dhabi’s royal family and into a separate transaction involving World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin.

Those are legitimate matters for scrutiny. But scrutiny isn’t proof of corruption. And there’s another side of Friday’s story that deserves more attention than the screaming headline. World Liberty voluntarily applied to put this operation under federal banking supervision.

Zach Witkoff, World Liberty Trust’s chairman, made precisely that point after the decision.

“We answered all of the regulator’s questions, and we accepted the significant obligations and ongoing scrutiny that come with the national charter.”

And then came the money line:

“If we were looking for less oversight, we would not have chosen federal supervision.”

The OCC didn’t simply hand World Liberty a certificate with CONGRATULATIONS, YOU’RE A BANK! written across the top. Its 14-page conditional approval contains a rather unglamorous mountain of regulatory requirements.

World Liberty must have at least $20 million in initial paid-in capital before receiving final approval. It must maintain appropriate liquidity, implement Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money-laundering controls, establish internal audits and risk-management systems and comply with OCC supervision.

The OCC also addressed one of the most politically sensitive issues surrounding World Liberty: foreign ownership.

Reuters reports that foreign investors have entered into passivity agreements designed to prevent them from controlling or influencing the bank’s operations.

And the OCC’s approval itself specifically requires World Liberty to maintain policies ensuring that certain shareholders cannot exercise impermissible control over the trust bank.

That doesn’t make conflict-of-interest questions disappear. But it does make the story considerably more complicated than: Trump administration gives Trump family a bank.

There’s another important point. World Liberty isn’t the only cryptocurrency company suddenly discovering that Washington is more receptive to digital finance.

The Trump administration has deliberately pursued a more crypto-friendly regulatory philosophy after years in which the industry complained about “debanking” and regulatory hostility.

The OCC’s decision therefore fits into a broader policy shift toward bringing cryptocurrency companies inside federally regulated financial structures rather than trying to keep them at arm’s length.

Friday’s decision could ultimately allow World Liberty to issue and manage USD1 directly instead of relying on outside custodians and intermediaries.

That’s a substantial business advantage. It’s also precisely why the political scrutiny isn’t going away.

MY QUICK TAKE:

Here’s where conservatives shouldn’t fall into the same trap we accuse the media of falling into.

Don’t dismiss the conflict-of-interest question just because Donald Trump’s name is involved.

If Joe Biden’s family owned a company and the Biden administration gave that company a major regulatory approval, every conservative journalist in America would be digging into it.

And we’d be right to.

The president’s family has a financial interest in World Liberty Financial. His administration regulates the financial industry. Therefore, asking who made the decision, what standards were applied and whether World Liberty received preferential treatment is completely legitimate.

That’s called accountability.

But here’s where the other side loses me.

Asking questions is not the same as already knowing the answer.

Elizabeth Warren effectively declared this process corrupt months before the OCC had even finished reviewing the application.

Now we have an actual decision we can examine.

And what does it show? Conditional approval. Twenty million dollars in required capital. Federal examination. Anti-money-laundering obligations. Internal auditing. Restrictions involving foreign investors. Ongoing OCC supervision.

And World Liberty still cannot open the bank until regulators determine those conditions have been satisfied.

If evidence emerges that Jonathan Gould or somebody else at the OCC was ordered to give the president’s family special treatment, that’s a blockbuster story.

Bring the receipts.

But the mere fact that a Trump-linked company applied for a charter and received conditional approval doesn’t prove the process was crooked.

For years, Democrats complained that crypto operated in a Wild West environment without enough government supervision. World Liberty says: Fine. Put us under federal banking supervision.

Now that’s a scandal too. You can’t simultaneously demand that cryptocurrency come under serious federal regulation and then argue that submitting yourself to serious federal regulation is itself suspicious.

So investigate it. Watch it. Demand transparency. Apply exactly the same standard we’d demand if Hunter Biden had launched BidenCoin and suddenly wanted a federal banking charter.

But perhaps we could wait for evidence before writing the guilty verdict.

What a quaint concept.

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