Donald Trump made $2.29 billion off crypto this year. The people who bought in lost $2.28 billion—almost as if they simply handed him their money, and a lot of them were working-class Americans who wanted the best for him. This week on Amped Up, Cliff Schecter and David Schuster sit down with economist Justin Wolfers, and he does the one thing nobody on cable will do: he shows you the exact math on how getting a president a few billion dollars can cost the rest of us trillions. It is not a metaphor.
He walks you through it step by step, using nothing more than a bicycle and a $400 pile of bike locks—and by the end you will never again nod along to “he’s just smarter than everybody else.”
This one is not a lecture, though. Wolfers proves that buying the presidency is now a straight-up profit opportunity—$2 billion in, $8 billion out, a 300 percent return— and then, live on the show, offers to run himself if the audience will fund him. From there it careens into what money actually is, why the man whose entire job is defending the dollar is quietly holding crypto instead, why Ukraine’s $20,000 drones are humiliating America’s $2 million missiles, and a climate-change explainer built entirely around taxing Cliff’s flatulence at the top of a Ferris wheel. You will laugh out loud. You will also understand the economy better than you did an hour earlier.
That is the whole trick—and you have to watch it to get it.
Cliff’s Note: Look, here’s the deal, and I’m only saying it once, because today is the last day: you can lock in a full year of Blue Amp Media for 40 percent off— thirty-six bucks.
That’s three dollars a month to fund a newsroom that says the quiet part out loud while the predator class robs your neighbors blind and calls it a “crypto opportunity.” Trump cleared two billion dollars this year fleecing his own supporters; I’m asking you for thirty-six dollars, and unlike him, I’ll actually give you something for it—every show, every takedown, every time we drag a world-class economist onto a Ferris wheel to explain exactly how you’re getting robbed.
The 40-percent-off deal dies tonight. Jump in, join the people funding independent progressive media, and let’s keep making these bastards miserable together.
