Donald Trump Jr had a wonderful answer this week for journalists asking whether there might be — just might be — any ethically blurred lines between his family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, and foreign governments or other actors hoping to get special treatment from the US president. 

“I don’t think anyone actually believes that my father or [Zach Witkoff’s] father would be looking at ledgers on the blockchain to see who bought what, and that carrying any kind of favour,” he told CNBC at the Token2049 crypto conference in Singapore, referring to the 47th US president and to Steve Witkoff, father of the firm’s CEO and Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. The idea that there might be any conflicts of interest was “complete nonsense”. 

Per the president’s eldest son, then, the notion that Donald Trump would actually bother looking at who might be pouring vast sums of money into his family-backed firm — all three of his sons are co-founders of World Liberty Financial, he is “co-founder emeritus” and the family hold multiple billions of dollars’ worth of its crypto token, WLFI — is preposterous. Of course, you might argue that anyone wanting a favour from Trump could just tell him they were investing money in one of his crypto projects so as to avoid him having to “look at ledgers on the blockchain”, but that would simply be malicious speculation.