The president is known for his business scams. His biggest is unfolding right now.

This is part of Trump’s Great American Crypto Scam, a series about the catastrophic collision between the second Trump administration and the wild world of cryptocurrency. Read it all here.

In January, Delta Air Lines announced its partnership with DraftKings, the mobile gambling app. Delta customers, the airline said, would soon have access to “free gaming.” The details remained sparse. Delta was quick to clarify that it would not allow gambling “using real money or miles,” but not everyone was convinced. One industry expert told CBS News it was inevitable: “This is going to happen at some point. It’s just a question of when.” After all, what better place to indulge in behavior like online gambling than a cramped metal capsule, hurtling through the atmosphere, borne aloft by a sector that has been perilously deregulated, in which everything costs more and everything else costs extra? Now the casino will be airborne.

Even before the inauguration and the mind-bending first two months of Trump’s second presidency, something distinct was in the air, and it wasn’t just the planes. All of America feels increasingly like a casino. The rapid legalization of sports gambling in 38 states has put a fine point on a broader unleashing of the economy of vice. Delta’s January announcement came right around the same time that Polymarket, the online platform where you can bet on anything, was offering 95–5 odds that the Palisades fire would not be contained by day’s end. Everything—our lives, our future—has become a game for profit.

It’s not just that we gamble on the outcomes of disaster response. Many activities that for a long time didn’t seem like gambling sure do now. Investing, for example, or dating, or even just watching social videos—so many online activities now induce a trance state similar to how a slot machine does. The largest internet companies, in descending order—Amazon (shopping), Meta (Instagram), Google (YouTube), Alibaba (shopping), Tencent (gaming), ByteDance (TikTok), Netflix (TV and movies)—all rely on binging or mindless scrolling or some other addictive behavioral pattern to generate their value, the algorithms fine-tuned to make usage compulsive. Compulsion, it seems, makes the optimal consumer.

And there is one fundamental truth to the casino: The house always wins. Similarly, the one pillar of American society that seems to be unalterable as everything else breaks is that the superrich continue to get richer. In this America, there are a lot of flashy lights and highly saturated colors and that specific feeling where you just know, at some deep level, that fundamentally, you’re getting ripped off.

Is it any surprise that we elected a casino man as president? Trump was not successful even in that world, which is laughably niche in comparison to today: In the 1980s, when he got into Atlantic City, Indian casinos didn’t really exist, and only 15 percent of Americans had ever been to Vegas. By 2019, 45 percent of Americans reported visiting a casino within the past year. It will surprise almost no one that the National Council on Problem Gambling reported a 30 percent increase in gambling addiction and other issues between 2018 and 2023, during the wave of sports-betting legalization. (It’s hard to get exact figures on this because, as the Rutgers Addiction Research Center estimates, only 8 percent of those people will ever seek help for their problem.)

Cryptocurrency¹ is perfect for this moment, and in some ways defines it. Just as the casino gives tokens that correspond loosely to money, so too do these internet coins. You don’t hear much in the way of a use-case explanation for crypto anymore, only that Republicans—and increasingly anyone else who doesn’t want to be crushed by the crypto lobby—say it’s good. But it feels worth noting that the original predominant use case for crypto was to circumvent prohibitions on the vice economy, to gamble, and to buy drugs online.

The guy who facilitated at least some of that—Ross Ulbricht, founder of the online black market Silk Road—was pardoned by Trump in one of his first moves back in the White House. And while Ulbricht sat behind bars for almost a decade, gambling became legalized, and many of those drugs became legalized too. The countercultural aspect of it is gone. Crypto is now the darling of the robber-baron class.

The launch of TrumpCoin was instructive. The most powerful person in America, already a billionaire, used the early days of his presidency to launch a valueless cryptocurrency that quadrupled his wealth in a matter of hours. Then he fired the heads of the regulatory agencies that might have prevented such a thing—the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission², the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau³—and replaced them with deregulation enthusiasts to drive home the point. According to Reuters, 50 of the “largest investors in the coin have made profits in excess of $10 million each”; meanwhile, “some 200,000 crypto wallets, most with small holdings, lost money.” It’s no accident that the department tasked with goring the public sector, obliterating the regulators, and selling what’s left for parts—DOGE⁴—got its name from Dogecoin⁵, the shit coin that Elon Musk holds and has repeatedly pumped.

The crypto pump and dump⁶ has introduced a new, most profoundly antisocial element: If you can get rich ripping off the guy next to you, why shouldn’t you? Of course, it is also a version of DOGE tasked with shredding the institutions that make up the social fabric. That the fastest way to get rich is putting money into something with zero social utility is one thing; that those riches come from pawning that uselessness off on someone else—that every other person is, primarily, a sucker waiting to get made—is worse than that. It was Margaret Thatcher who said there “was no such thing” as society, but it is crypto that is making it so.

After the libertarian Argentinian president, beloved by Musk, pulled off a $TRUMP-style pump and dump of his own, he was unapologetic: “If you go to a casino and lose money, what’s your complaint?”

The first sure sign that you’re the mark is the belief that you’re not the mark. We’re rich in genuinely tragic tales of Trump voters’ lives being ruined by Trump’s cuts. Yet the project continues apace—everything becomes feast or famine, and we know exactly who is guaranteed to feast. Everything is boom or bust now: You might get the world’s best health treatment, or going to the doctor might financially destroy your life; you might get high-tech online troubleshooting from a Social Security–funded private contractor, or the system might have already decided, with no recourse, that you’re actually already dead. Using state authority to regulate the power or diminish the wealth of our elites has become nearly laughable, as unlimited money now flows legally into the political system.

And it’s not just Republicans on the take. The speed at which the wealth of the super wealthy has grown under successive Republican and Democratic regimes is blinding. Already the American system was corrupt with its lobbyists, but now the Supreme Court has legalized unlimited campaign spending. The era of elite impunity has been on at least since zero bankers were prosecuted for the financial crisis, and Trump’s first election drove that home further. It’s too cheap, and too easy, to pay off the politicians for exculpation after the crime is done.

We’re 15 years into the crypto “revolution,” which has taken many forms. The blockchain⁷ was originally pitched as a way to cure disease, then it was a conduit to effective altruism, then it was going to save migrants and poor people without access to formal banking. Look where all of that has ended up—with a bunch of jokers back in the Oval Office (or adjacent to it) who have no compunction about minting coins that do nothing but make them richer. The people tasked with passing and enforcing laws have the most contempt for the laws of anyone. Remember how people yelled about those brazenly corrupt, high-priced stays in Trump hotels in D.C. the first time around? That seems downright quaint now; the rip-off they are effecting is at such a bigger scale, and we hardly have time to pay attention to it.

Crypto is confusing because it’s new, because it’s technical, because there’s an insider vocabulary. It is a platform, like the casino, where insiders always win. But this is a huge, looming scam that demands being understood—and so, in Slate’s series, we are going to give you the tools to wrap your head around it, even if you’ve been sitting this one out for a while. Because it is also the oldest thing in the world: It seems that all we can do is make the house richer. But the stakes are immense. Can you have cryptocurrency and have a society? Well, let’s go back to the airplanes: It’s not for nothing that the second Trump administration began with a crash.

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