“I made a fortune with Trump’s memecoin, but I lost it all the following month,” a user on X admits. “It’s a perfect Ponzi scheme,” says another. “It’s a scam, a fraud.” On other social platforms there are thousands of comments like these, ranging from investors asking “What did you expect?” to others who watched their savings vanish after chasing the promise of quick gains.

Donald Trump returned to the White House promising to usher in a new era for crypto. He stoked the enthusiasm of thousands who gambled on a market legitimized by the president himself. But the outcome has not matched expectations. Not only has he broken many of his promises, he has exposed a contradiction in his own populist rhetoric: while presenting himself as a defender of investors’ freedom and of a sector born to challenge traditional elites, he has multiplied his own fortune through his crypto businesses even as many others have suffered multimillion-dollar losses.

Despite his past as a crypto skeptic — he once called them a “scam” — Trump re-entered the 2024 campaign as a bona fide cryptobro. With grandiose proclamations, he vowed repeatedly that he would reverse the Biden administration’s hostile stance toward cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, his children founded World Liberty Financial (WLF), a company dedicated to trading digital assets.

Trump’s conversion to the crypto universe does not stem from deep ideological conviction or in-depth knowledge of the sector. The logic behind the shift is purely economic: the industry became a gold mine for his business, to the point of becoming a top donor in midterm elections. That’s why he jumped on the crypto wave. Before long, Trump became one of the sector’s loudest megaphones and took an unexpected step: launching the memecoin $TRUMP.

The cryptocurrency, backed by no underlying asset and intended simply as a show of support for the president, at one point reached a market value of more than $10 billion. But it collapsed within hours, leaving most investors empty-handed. A report by crypto analytics firm Nansen, cited by U.S. media, estimates that nearly one million investors who bought $TRUMP lost at least $3.81 billion.

The U.S. president, by contrast, reported $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency income in the first year of his second term, according to his financial disclosure. Of that amount, $635 million came from sales of his memecoin through the company CIC Digital. Even though the asset lost nearly all its value (down 97% since launch and now worth $600 million), he profited regardless of whether its price rose or fell because he earned fees whenever someone traded the tokens — trades he himself encouraged: he hosted exclusive dinners for his investors and launched a video game that simulated his life and used the token as its currency.

Trump has faced harsh criticism over his dealings in these digital assets. He has been accused of a conflict of interest for promoting policies favorable to the financial products he profits from. “He is enacting policies that benefit the crypto industry. But under the surface of this policy posture is a sweeping self-enrichment scheme that has seen the president and his family profit handsomely, including from deals with foreign nations” says the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive think tank.

Reddit has been the scene of heated debates about the president’s digital assets and the losses suffered by thousands of users. When the platform’s AI was asked to summarize conversations containing the words “Trump” and “cryptocurrencies,” it distilled opinions into three lines: “Many believe Trump enriched himself with crypto while others lost money.” “Users say Trump’s coins worked as bribes or money laundering.” “Several see the coins as a pump-and-dump or a rug pull that ruined retail investors” — two types of scams used to manipulate a financial market.

But he did not enrich himself solely with the memecoin. At the height of the crypto boom, driven in part by his own policies, Trump and his associates launched WLF, one of The Trump Organization’s most valuable assets, the corporate umbrella through which the president’s family groups its businesses. With that company they signed dozens of deals and alliances with various firms in the sector. Part of the business involved accumulating partners’ tokens in a sort of strategic reserve.

In this way, they padded their coffers with little-known assets — cryptocurrencies that, thanks to the Trump effect, rose in price. According to a Nansen analysis for Bloomberg, tokens typically appreciated between 10% and 26% in the 24 hours after WLF purchases. But that boost was short-lived.

When the crypto market fell, prices of all assets plunged. Doubts about the viability of a business model based on token accumulation deepened the declines, stalling many announced deals that never materialized while the company sold its positions.

In most cases, an investor who bought those tokens after WLF’s acquisitions — that is, when prices had already risen — would have ended up losing money. Everyone except Trump: those assets appeared in his financial disclosure as income tied to company activity. He reported more than $520 million from cryptocurrency sales and another $250 million from the sale of company shares.

Profiting from his policies is controversial, but he is also accused of influence peddling. The Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, notes how Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s co-founder, who had pleaded guilty to violating anti–money laundering laws. Binance was instrumental in developing WLF’s stablecoin. “The undertaking netted Mr. Trump hundreds of millions, part of $1 billion in crypto gains, while most token buyers lost money,” the think tank notes.

At the same time, Trump has courted industry leaders. Months after returning to the Oval Office, he hosted a dinner with more than 200 industry representatives. Soon after, he released a 166-page report supporting the sector and predicting favorable regulation. He recently met again at the White House with executives from Coinbase, Ripple and other crypto investment platforms, where he announced plans to push a legal reform favoring the industry, the Clarity Act. Despite presidential pressure, last week the U.S. Senate rejected the bill.

The Trump family would benefit from looser regulation. A detailed Reuters investigation into their digital businesses concludes that the president and his children have increased their net worth by at least $2.3 billion from their crypto projects since his return to the White House, all with little outlay of their own cash. In contrast, Reuters estimates other investors lost $2.3 billion. The losers are retail buyers of cryptocurrencies and shares linked to those assets, and those who invested indirectly through funds exposed to Trump’s crypto holdings.

Double paradox

The president’s staggering gains and the multimillion-dollar losses suffered by many investors reflect a double paradox. On one hand, they clash with the populist rhetoric Trump uses to present himself as a champion of ordinary people against the economic elites, even though much of the generated wealth ends up concentrated around him.

On the other hand, they call into question the fundamentals of cryptocurrencies, originally conceived as an alternative to established financial and political power, but which today also serving to swell the fortunes of some of the system’s most influential figures.

This antiestablishment rhetoric, marked by distrust of the state and institutions, fits the ideology of parts of the populist right and of authoritarian leaders who have co-opted the iconography of this universe in their political discourse. “They see the individual as the only legitimate actor against powers that always want to control you and take away your freedom,” Gerbaudo summarizes. Trump has been able to exploit that narrative by presenting himself as the sector’s savior from an oppressive regime. The balance of these two years contains a contradiction that is hard to ignore: what began as a rebellion against power ended up integrated into existing power structures and, above all, enriching the fortunes at the center of that power.

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In September 2025, the film that won the most awards at the Ophir Awards, Israel’s equivalent of Spain’s Goyas, was The Sea, which tells the story of a Palestinian boy who sneaks past checkpoints to try to reach Tel Aviv and see the Mediterranean for the first time. The film does not delve into the daily squalor and violence of the Israeli occupation, but it provoked the ire of Culture Minister Miki Zohar at the time, who said he would not allow a “group of extremist left‑wing thugs” to take over the film sector.

A year later, Zohar is calling for the revocation of the citizenship of Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, directors of the film NAZA, which won awards in Venice and is screening at the San Sebastián Film Festival (September 18-26). He called them traitors. On Israel’s streets and on social media, anger toward the two filmmakers has gone even further. “We’ve had hard years, but this is the first time I’ve witnessed attacks of such cruelty on social media and even in some media outlets. People are calling for them to be hanged, for them to be killed. It’s incredible,” Uri Rosenwaks, a filmmaker and former director of the Israeli forum for documentary directors, told this newspaper. “The problem is that Israeli society lives in a huge bubble of denial about what is happening in Gaza. And this film has burst that bubble.”

The filmmakers interviewed for this report describe a gradual strangulation over the past 10 years, sheltered by increasingly extremist governments and an unabashed radicalism that has clearly intensified since the start of Israel’s offensive on the Gaza Strip in 2023, following the attacks by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.

They all live in an environment of lack of funding, canceled screenings, rejection by festivals, scorn from the authorities, and insults and threats on social media. “It seems we have reached the point where critical culture is regarded as an act of treason and is becoming dangerous for those who create it,” laments Shai Carmeli‑Pollak, director of The Sea.

More than 200 Israeli filmmakers signed a statement last week in solidarity with Abraham and Szor. NAZA collects testimony from more than 20 soldiers and intelligence officers who detail the tools used to relentlessly bombard Gaza and the sense of revenge that has permeated the offensive. The film attacks the army head‑on — a kind of sacred cow in Israel, where it is seen as a model of morality.

“This is a true collective psychosis,” Carmeli‑Pollak sums up. “It seems the fact that the film received such a prolonged ovation bothers local audiences more than the disturbing facts the story exposes. It’s deeply disheartening and terrifying.”

The 25‑minute ovation NAZA received in Venice might lead one to think that it is still possible in Israel to make films critical of the current government and that culture, in all its forms, remains an effective channel for denouncing the occupation of Palestinian territories, the massacre in Gaza, or the army’s abuses.

But the reality is that NAZA is a film that has not received a cent from public coffers, has not been released in Israel, and it seems clear that, for now, no Israeli theater would risk screening it. It is not even certain that its directors will be able to return home in the medium term. “Before, only people from the radical right allowed themselves to attack a film like this, which, moreover, they hadn’t seen. But now the criticism comes from everywhere: academics, more moderate figures… It has been brutal,” Rosenwaks says.

The biggest fear among these artists is what will happen if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains in power after the legislative elections at the end of October. “One can oppose Netanyahu and critique him openly, but attacking the army or speaking about Palestinians’ rights has become very risky. Not only for our careers, but for our physical safety,” says Noam Sheizaf, co‑director with Idit Avrahami of H2: The Occupation Lab, a film about the Palestinian city of Hebron, presented as a microcosm of the occupation.

At the same time, Israeli artists — not only filmmakers but also writers, dancers, intellectuals, and historians — are received with suspicion abroad or directly face boycotts. “We Israelis have become toxic people. Our presence at a conference, a film festival, or a book fair can create problems,” Rosenwaks details. “And if Netanyahu is re‑elected we won’t be able to cope. There will be a mass emigration, because the last few years have already been a challenge.”

Self‑censorship

In Israel, film directors do not receive funds directly from the Ministry of Culture. Each year, the government provides about 130 million shekels (roughly $42 million) to film funds — independent non‑profit entities — that decide which films to finance according to certain criteria. “There are no guidelines about the political or ideological content of the films they back, but repeated attacks by the authorities on critical films have undoubtedly created a deterrent effect,” admits Nirit Anderman, a film‑specialist journalist at Haaretz. In other words, organizations that receive public money have understood that financing a film critical of government policies toward the Palestinians will not be well-regarded and could exclude them from the list of cultural entities that receive those funds.

That is why self‑censorship is a reality among artists, although few admit it openly. “Obviously, if a filmmaker is torn between making a family drama or a scathing political satire, he or she will choose the former because he or she knows that the chances of securing funding will be greater,” Anderman says.

After the success of The Sea at the Ophir Awards in 2025, the culture minister threatened to stop funding those awards, although he has not succeeded in doing so. He also announced the creation of other government‑backed awards, which were held in December and distributed substantial prizes, and proposed new rules for public funding of Israeli cinema that are still being refined. For example, that awards won at foreign festivals would not count toward eligibility for funds, or that a specific funding line be created for films about the heroism of Israeli soldiers.

The minister, Miki Zohar, has long had critical filmmakers in his sights and said, for example, that the Oscar‑winning documentary No Other Land, co‑directed precisely by Abraham and Szor, was “an act of sabotage” against the State of Israel. On September 9, at the most recent Ophir Awards, the big winner was Tell Me Everything, a family drama set in the 1980s that has homophobia and AIDS as its backdrop, followed by Where To, which deals with relations between Israelis and Palestinians but is set in Berlin, far from the harsh daily reality of the occupied territories.

“In my case, after the minister’s attacks, some people criticized the film, but others were curious and went to see it. Also, there were screenings canceled due to opposition from local residents,” says Carmeli‑Pollak, director of The Sea, who secured difficult funding thanks to support from the Israeli Film Fund, an independent non‑profit, and a Palestinian production company.

In 2022, Sheizaf and Avrahami, the directors of the film about Hebron, also saw several screenings canceled and the film go almost unnoticed in Israel. “As an Israeli documentary filmmaker, I make films for the people of my country, so they can see and understand. I’m a journalist, and I believe in this work,” Sheizaf adds, explaining that since it was a co-production with France Télévisions, there were screenings abroad. “We were very happy about that because we believe the world has a role to play in ending the occupation.”

Along the same lines, Avi Mograbi, director of The First 54 Years. An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation, explains that “everyone” rejected his film in Israel in 2022, months before the Hamas attacks. “The television channels that used to show my films, the festivals, the cultural institutions where I was once well received… all of them,” he says. “Sometimes being ignored is more painful than being criticized.”

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The Bank of Japan had already announced an interest rate hike, in order to close the gap somewhat with the U.S. rate. However, by the time Japan’s monetary authority confirmed the increase on Friday, September 18, the Federal Reserve had already preempted it with another hike that further widened the gap between the two economies.

The Japanese increase was 0.25 percentage points. This brought Japan’s rates to 1.25%, a 31-year high that ended decades of ultra-loose monetary policy. The move was widely expected by analysts: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had repeatedly advocated for a stronger yen, while Bank of Japan (BOJ) Governor Kazuo Ueda had expressed support for the measure. The main objective of the rate hike was to curb depreciation of the Japanese currency and get inflation under control.

Sayuri Shirai is a professor at Keio University (Tokyo) and served as a member of the Bank of Japan’s (BOJ) Policy Council from 2011 to 2016. She explains that the underlying tension is between the central bank, which is willing to raise rates in order to strengthen the yen, and the government of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, which prefers low interest rates to support its expansionary fiscal policy. However, the academic asserts, American pressure gave the BOJ a pretext to raise rates. She adds that, “until Bessent’s statements, there was no clear direction.”

Bessent began his current campaign in favor of a stronger yen with the joint intervention that took place on July 31, when the United States and Japan made massive purchases and managed to lift the Japanese currency, which had fallen to 164 yen to the U.S. dollar, its worst level in 40 years, to 157 yen. It was the first coordinated action between the two countries in defense of the yen since 1998, with the American president describing it as a gesture of friendship toward Japan. In doing so, however, Donald Trump didn’t miss the opportunity for sarcasm: “Japan’s been very good to us, with the exception, of course, of Pearl Harbor.”

Shirai believes that the United States intervened for its own benefit, pointing to the nearly $1.2 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds held by Japan. Selling them to repatriate yen would increase the cost of U.S. debt.

In an export-oriented economy like Japan’s, dependent on imported materials, currency fluctuations have mixed effects. For companies like Toyota, a one-yen drop in the currency’s value against the dollar increases their operating profit by 50 billion yen (approximately $317 million), according to a study by the local news agency Jiji Press. However, the gross foreign exchange gain is affected by dollar-denominated payments for purchases of steel, electronic components, lithium for batteries, freight and insurance.

Another expert consulted by EL PAÍS, Tsuyoshi Ueno, an analyst at the NLI (Nippon Life Insurance) Research Institute, refers to the past two decades of wage stagnation, during which the average Japanese citizen lost purchasing power, while the country was flooded with tourists whose spending power was multiplied by a weakened yen. He adds that, even though wages have begun to rise, the pressure on households continues, due to the rapid currency depreciation. “Japan is at a turning point,” he warns.

The U.S. Treasury’s support for the yen, he argues, stems from Japan’s inability to curb the currency’s weakness, despite repeated unilateral interventions since 2022. “It was necessary to send a stronger warning to speculators,” he adds, suggesting that, despite Bessent’s defense of American interests, “he may have created a sense of indebtedness and gratitude in Japan.”

Back in 1999, when the BOJ lowered its interest rates to zero, the Japanese currency became a favorite for “carry trades” (borrowing in yen to invest in higher-yielding assets). This fueled one of the largest speculative operations in the global financial system.

Ippei Fujiwara, a professor of macroeconomics at Keio University and the University of Tokyo who was an economist with the BOJ from 1993 to 2011, summarizes the joint intervention as an “alignment of interests” between Japan and the United States. His main concern is the fiscal sustainability of a country with a debt “whose ratio to GDP is 250%,” a figure that includes sovereign bonds and all of Japan’s government debt. Fujiwara fears that the rate normalization process, which is necessary to combat inflation, will increase debt-servicing costs and generate unexpected increases in the sale of new Japanese government bonds (JGBs). He emphasizes the need to monitor who exactly bears this fiscal burden, citing demographics.

Although almost 90% of Japan’s debt is held by Japanese citizens, Fujiwara warns that this financing has thus far relied on the savings of baby boomers, who are now around 75 years old. Facing massive expenses as they pay for medicine and care, they can no longer accumulate money. According to the professor’s scenario, Japan will begin to depend on less-predictable foreign investors.

Rate hikes on the horizon

Ueno, from the NLI Research Institute, outlines a scenario for the coming months, in which there are two 0.25 percentage point interest rate hikes in 2027, one in January and another in July, bringing Japan’s interest rate to 1.75%. The U.S. Federal Reserve’s increase announced on September 16 was also 0.25 percentage points. And, by leaving rates in the average range of 3.87%, it places them around 2.6 percentage points above the BOJ’s rates.

“There’s a slightly greater resolve when it comes to containing the yen’s depreciation,” Ueno concludes. Professor Shirai, for her part, anticipates two similar rate hikes in December of this year and in March of 2027.

Still, the academic considers the expectation that interest rates will reach levels close to 2% to be unrealistic. This is due to the direct effect that this would have on Japanese household mortgages, of which, she notes, more than 70% are based on variable rates that are reviewed every six months.

Despite the pressure being applied on the Bank of Japan by Washington and Takaichi, Shirai supports the monetary authority’s technical independence, although she fears that the public may not feel the same way.

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