01:31 Tim Miller Tim Miller from The Bulwark here. 01:32 Andy McCarthy of The National Review is working on what I think is a pretty important series laying out the scale of Trump's crypto corruption and how it dwarfs anything that the right alleged about Joe Biden. 01:45 I think it's important for this reason. 01:46 Look, any Never Trumper has a... 01:48 Long backstory, maybe some bitterness towards the people at the national review. 01:51 If you don't, you guys don't know the national review, it is a long time traditional conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley in 2016. 02:00 Uh, they published, uh, what we thought would be influential at the time, a magazine cover called against Trump. 02:07 It was a series of essays from conservatives talking why they would be against Trump. 02:11 If we pull up that cover here, we scroll and you might see a couple of names you recognize. 02:14 So as the primary wore on, the election against Hillary wore on and the National Review realized that many of their readers and the vast swath of Republican voters did not share their opposition to Donald Trump. 02:33 They started to get in line. 02:34 And, you know, there are a handful of those, as mentioned, who ventured off into other spaces, created new outlets, created things like this, the Bulwark, where we actually met what we said about Donald Trump. 02:49 The National Review, that's not really been the case. 02:51 You know, they have had an editor for most of the Trump era named Rich Lowry, who is a kind of a pocket protector guy that really is trying to overcompensate for his own issues about his masculinity. 03:06 He tries to talk about tough guy Trump stuff and traditional values. 03:12 And he doesn't really care none too much about some of the old mores around, you know, the American idea. 03:20 And thinks now we should be more of a blood and soil, tough guy thing. 03:25 He's the guy that wrote that Trump was a big middle finger to all of the people that he was jealous of because they achieved more than he did from his elite universities. 03:38 So, you know, it's tough to have to hand it to him. 03:42 After 2016, folks at the National Review never showed a ton of backbone when it came to fighting Trump. 03:49 One of their other editors famously wrote the Trump maybe column, which I think represents really most of the National Review of maybe. 03:56 Maybe Trump. 03:57 We don't like some of this stuff. 03:59 Every once in a while, he gets a little too crude. 04:01 We didn't like that racist video where he made the Obama's monkeys. 04:04 But also, the Libs really overreacted to it. 04:08 And everybody could just chill out a little bit. 04:10 I mean, the president posting a video that makes a wildly racist depiction of one of his predecessors and also talks about how American democracy is fake. 04:20 That's not great. 04:21 We don't love it. 04:21 We'd rather they didn't do that. 04:22 But the real issue... 04:24 is like the pearl-claw chains among the liberal class. 04:27 And that's your general National Review stance. 04:31 And for that reason, I think this is pretty noteworthy, this series. 04:34 And I give a lot of applause to Stanley McCarthy because I think he knows that the readership, a lot of them, not everybody, it's not a monolith, but broadly, you know, MAGA readers or even non-MAGA Republican readers don't really love to hear that the person they voted for three times is a scam artist and he's corrupt. 04:53 And he's worse than anything that they convinced themselves was so terrible about the Clintons or the Bidens. 05:01 That's a tough thing to process. 05:03 If you're a consumer of right-wing media and you've convinced yourself that the Clintons are the devil and the Bidens are a crime family. 05:10 It is a narrative violation. 05:12 It hurts your brain to try to process some new information, which is that no, actually Trump is doing all the things you accuse the Bidens and the Clintons of, but on a scale far, far greater than you even could have imagined. 05:27 So I want to go through some of Andy's article. 05:29 It is behind a paywall, which I think is funny. 05:32 I don't think the National Review is trying to maximize the number of people who could see this, but they published it. 05:37 So shout out to them for publishing it. 05:39 We try to put as little behind the table as possible at The Bulwark, and we appreciate you guys that support us. 05:43 You can do that right here on YouTube as a Bulwark Plus member or at thebulwark.com. 05:48 And we do have some secret podcasts and stuff, but we want people to see our material. 05:51 Here's the series. 05:52 There are only two articles in, but I thought it was worth it to talk about it because the significance, we can kind of tell where he's going. 05:58 First article begins the sordid story of Trump, the Trump-Wickoff family business, and the UAE. 06:05 And McCarthy begins this way. 06:07 It's a long story, but let's cut to the chase. 06:09 In autumn 2024, six weeks before he's about to win back the White House, Trump and his friend Steve Wickoff founded a crypto business. 06:16 And that crypto business is an ideal vehicle for leveraging political power in search of financial gain. 06:22 It goes a little bit into the nature of the crypto business. 06:27 And then he talks about how Trump gets in, how the Trump and Wyckoff children end up running this business so that it's like ostensibly separate. 06:34 And so then Trump can, you know, send his Middle East envoy Wyckoff over to talk to leaders of these countries in a formal role representing the United States of America, representing all of us, but actually cutting deals that will make money for their families. 06:47 Here's the prime case that he gets into more in Article 2. 06:52 But you have this Chinese-born billionaire felon named Changpeng Zhao or CZ. 06:57 He ran a corrupt international crypto exchange called Binance. 07:02 He was seeking a pardon. 07:05 He was close associates with Sheikh Tanoon, the top intelligence operative and second highest ranking royal family member in the UAE. 07:13 The UAE, as part of this whole situation, was also thinking about how they could become an AI powerhouse, but they were being blocked by Washington from access to our cutting edge chip technology. 07:25 And they also wanted a pardon for Zhao because he lives in Dubai and creates some 07:31 geopolitical complications. 07:33 So four days before Trump is inaugurated, the UAE begins pouring in at least $2.5 billion into the Trump crypto enterprise. 07:43 And 07:44 What did they get? 07:45 Well, exactly what they want. 07:46 CZ got his pardon. 07:48 UAE got their chips. 07:50 And on top of that, they were, this is in McCarthy's words, fatted at the White House, inflated into a nation of real consequence in Middle East geopolitics, included in the Trump Stargate project to build a global artificial intelligence and supercomputing capacity. 08:07 And this doesn't get mentioned as much, given an ownership slice of TikTok. 08:12 when the president just unilaterally broke the law and overturned the law that had been passed by Congress and signed by a president and affirmed by the Supreme Court that China had to divest altogether. 08:27 Instead of just having TikTok go belly up as the law required, Trump delayed that and cut a deal where his buddies in the UAE as well as Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen and other big supporters of his got in on the action. 08:42 So that's basically the intro, and Andy says over the course of the next few installments in this series, he's going to go into some of the details. 08:48 We have the second one. 08:49 I'll get to that in a second. 08:51 But here's where he does something that I think is really important. 08:54 This is the portion of any negative article in a conservative outlet where the author always gets to, but the Democrats are worse, right? 09:06 It's like, here's this thing. 09:07 We have to write about it. 09:08 Trump's forced our hands. 09:09 It's just so out in the open. 09:11 But on the other hand, you should know this parade of things that Hunter Biden did or whatever. 09:17 In journalism, they call that a to-be-sure graph. 09:20 And so that to-be-sure in right-wing outlets usually would go something like, Trump did something that we don't really approve of. 09:27 But to be sure, it's not any worse than whatever some liberal did on the San Francisco school board or Ilhan Omar or Hunter Biden's laptop. 09:35 That's just how these articles go. 09:38 So in this article, Andy McCarthy gets to his to be sure graph. 09:42 I started to like get that feeling inside where I was like, oh, this is why I can't read the National Review. 09:48 There's always this to be sure the Democrats are awful graph. 09:51 And well, I got to tell you, this is where I got a little smile on my face. 09:58 The To Be Short graph reads like this. 10:00 Before we get into the gory details, it's worth observing that at National Review, we extensively covered the Biden family business of corruptly profiteering off his political power and influence. 10:09 So did congressional Republicans, etc., etc. 10:15 I'm getting the heebie-jeebies. 10:16 I'm not really enjoying this. 10:18 We fast forward a few sentences and then McCarthy says this. 10:23 The sum generated, I'm going to add allegedly, over several years of Biden self-dealing is over 27 million. 10:30 That flashed in neon throughout the House Republican reports, the 291 pages. 10:36 Republicans were especially incensed because Biden practiced their harlotry. 10:40 You just got to bear with me here on foreigners, in particular, agents of China. 10:46 Family adverse rather than national interest drove the United States government policy. 10:49 The House impeachment report thundered. 10:51 And now we get to the knife into the gut of his readers from Andy McCarthy. 10:57 You know what the difference is between the Biden family business and the Trump family business? 11:02 You'd have to add two digits to the sum of Biden abuses of power, foreign entanglements and corruption alleged in this report to get near what Trump has raked in just from the UAE. 11:14 And then he goes on to insult James Comer for not doing any congressional oversight of Trump like he did of Biden because of his fake investigation into Bill Clinton. 11:26 I just got to tell you kudos. 11:27 Kudos to you, Andy, for just putting it that bluntly for the readers. 11:32 It is true. 11:33 We've all been desperate for this. 11:36 Something that bugs me is right-wing hypocrisy just becomes table stakes and nobody talks about it anymore because it's just like they're all hypocrites. 11:47 They've demonstrated themselves to be hypocrites, so why talk about it? 11:50 I feel like mainstream media feels this way. 11:53 The handful of good conservatives or conservatives that see Trump's flaws at least feel this way. 11:58 Even we sometimes will skip over it just because it's like, how many times can you tell the same story about the fact that these guys are hypocrites? 12:07 And they pretended to care about something when a Democrat was a president. 12:11 And now they overlook it when Trump does something a thousand times worse than that in the same category. 12:19 And so shout out to Andy McCarthy for just calling it exactly like it is on that. 12:24 In article two, he goes more into the corrupt pardon, particularly with CZ. 12:30 And I think the key part of the CZ article is 12:34 Here is that Andy puts his finger on something, which is like Trump's original crypto business idea was shit coins. 12:41 It was something that he knew a lot about, but from Trump stakes and Trump university and Trump, um, 12:47 wines and everything else like all of the other scams that he ran over years he knew how to take a fake product put his name on it and get dupes to pay him for it and that's like basically what a meme coin is right like you're getting dumb people to pay you for like the trump muscle man coin um and then you know you do a rug pull you take money for you and your buddies there's probably a corrupt insider game there and uh you move on to the melania coin next right like he knew how to do shit coins but like 13:16 And by the way, he's made ungodly sums of money on check coins. 13:20 So it's not nothing, but it's not the level of money that you can make from stable coins. 13:28 Like stable coins is ostensibly more of a serious business, right? 13:31 The UAE is not, you know, 13:36 Maybe there'll be some paper bag work into the shit coin and there'll be a little bit of money. 13:40 But nobody can put in billions of dollars into the Melania coin, right? 13:46 You've got to at least pretend to offer them something legit if major bona fide foreign interests are going to 13:56 pay off and so they had to move from those meme coins into these stable coins which are you know pegged to currency and are meant to you know be have be more legitimate because they're not as volatile in their pricing you know people can use them to trade after hours on weekends with criminals you know like all the reasons you'd want to have a stable coin but like they didn't really have the expertise for this and so the pardon of cz 14:26 was critical, not just because CZ gave them money, but because he helped them move into the more profitable stablecoin business. 14:37 Here's how the Wall Street Journal puts it. 14:38 CZ's Binance platform, quote, deployed a team of over a dozen engineers to build the technology behind the USD1 stablecoin currency. 14:49 The team that helped them included Binance's Hong Kong-based stablecoin chief to build the blockchain technology. 14:56 So the corrupt guy, Chinese national that was pardoned, put money directly into Trump's crypto company. 15:03 And then he had his Hong Kong-based experts help them create a new type of cryptocurrency that would allow them to make even more money. 15:16 And CZ's friends at the UAE said, 15:21 put resources into that stable coin. 15:24 Okay. 15:25 And in exchange for that, they got access to these chips, which is now going back to China. 15:32 I mean, this is a truly mind-blowing level of corruption that we're seeing, which basically has the Trump family enriching themselves by doing favors for Chinese national criminals, the UAE, and with one degree of separation, China itself. 15:54 So as Andy McCarthy ends a segment two of his series, as you'll see in the next post, that isn't even half of it, or more accurately, even half of the half. 16:04 So there you go. 16:05 It's behind a paywall at National Review, so I wanted to bring it out for you all. 16:09 And it's something we're going to keep monitoring because, you know, as we saw with the against Trump article at National Review, you don't want to overstate this, but this is the end of Trump. 16:17 Trump's already... 16:19 succeeded without having the intellectual class of the old school Reagan-Thatcher conservatives along for the ride. 16:28 But it is a notable difference from where we've been for a while and where we were certainly last year in 2025, where everybody... 16:35 was scared of Trump. 16:37 Now you have more and more people, even within his own coalition, willing to dip their toe into the water. 16:43 And I think that's important progress. 16:46 And I think that we should highlight it when it's happening. 16:48 So appreciate you guys. 16:49 Subscribe to the feed. 16:50 And we'll be talking to you again soon. 16:53 Enjoy the Super Bowl.