grift

Venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir Technologies and is a Trump supporter, said on X: “It’s wrong to steal my money for grift on the left; it’s also wrong to tax me for crypto bro schemes.”

“When did everything turn into a grift?” asks a young man named Tobey midway through Brian Castleberry’s “The Californians,” an ambitious, widescreen novel about the ugliness that often ensues when art and commerce collide.

In this way, Tobey answers his own question: The grift happens when we don’t pay attention to what we’re destroying for the sake of a dollar.

The weekend before the inauguration, Trump cashed in on his cultists' faith with a grift so obvious it would make Jim Bakker blush: releasing meme coins named after himself and his wife.

Judd Legum of Popular Info summed up the move with, "Trump has turned the inauguration itself into a brazen grift, launching a meme coin hours before being sworn in."