I wish I didn’t have the name “Witkoff” in my brain.
Just as I wish I’d never heard the name of a certain brazen self-dealer who cheapens the presidential seal today.
I wish my retinas were not burned by the sight of him.
There he is in the one-time house of Jefferson, Lincoln and two Roosevelts – the Oval Office now festooned with trashy mall-theft décor. My eyes. My eyes.
With this man, everything is debased, like his association with the name “Witkoff.”
It almost rhymes with “Bitcoin.” I wish I didn’t know that.
Last week Steve Witkoff was named a top candidate to become national security adviser. If so, he’ll be promoted from the position of Middle East envoy.
What did he do to rise to such heights? What qualifications? Why, of course. He has helped the president stuff his pockets.
I had “Witkoff” on the brain because the very day his name popped up, I had read a New York Times report about the president’s use of his office to make millions of dollars from a bitcoin enterprise called World Liberty.
Witkoff is its co-founder. Your duly elected president and his family are the chief beneficiaries.
Don’t ask me to explain bitcoins. I promise you the man now hawking them from the White House didn’t know much either back in 2019. At the time he dismissed crypto currency as “highly volatile” and “made of thin air.”
That was before the Witkoffs convinced him he could make a whole bunch of money from it.
That’s how this presidency works. It’s the grift that keeps grifting.
Since then, not only has he promoted crypto in general and appointed crypto figures to positions that would regulate their industry, he’s promoted his own meme coin, boosting its value dramatically, and with it World Liberty’s.
His first stab at his own crypto coin was a dud. Then he became president. Recently the value of the family holdings in this endeavor jumped more than 50 percent when he promised an “ultra-exclusive VIP reception” and gala dinner for the top 220 investors who bought his “product.”
He now is ID’ed as World Liberty’s “chief crypto advocate” in material for prospective investors.
Well, of course.
As the Times reports, when Witkoff and his son, their fortunes from real estate, launched the company in – hmm, October – the Republican presidential front-runner and his sons were given 22.5 billion units of crypto currency, on paper worth $1.1 billion. Quite a start-up from thin air.
Bit by bitcoin, there it is: your government bartered away. Cons and coins – your tax dollars at work.
Who remembers when this president was full-throttle for shutting down TikTok? He signed an executive order to that effect in his first term. Then in 2025, post election, came a visit to Mar-a-Lago from TikTok CEO Shou Chew and one from GOP mega donor and TikTok shareholder Jeff Yass. Suddenly it was, “Hold everything” from the Whore House — er, presidential residence.
Why the turnaround? Maybe because TikTok and its executives donated a million dollars to the president’s favorite dark-money causes and $50,000 to the inaugural wing-ding.
On another front: Republicans in Congress, saliva-trained to the urgings of their golden master, have talked tough, about ending liability protections for pesky social media.
Well, hold everything. After the 2024 election, Jeff Zuckerberg made a Mar-a-Lago pilgrimage and a million-dollar donation to the inaugural.
What do you bet that ended any discussion of regulating social media?
“There is apparently no American institution, no matter how benign,” that this man can’t degrade, writes the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank in an April 22 commentary.
Milbank wasn’t remarking about the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund in this case.
His commentary was about what he saw at the White House Easter egg roll.
The 2025 rendition of the kiddie event, Milbank reports, was the furthest thing from “for the children” and all for the corporate donors who dominated with self-serving promotions.
“We’re going to honor Christ very powerfully,” said the halo-glistened papal president as he observed from the balcony.
Down below, among other gimmicks, crypto-currency firm GALA hosted a “digital egg hunt.”
There goes Peter Cottontail, hoppin’ down the corruption trail.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
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