Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Citadel, is often viewed as a market maverick. This week, however, he turned politically contrarian too. Speaking in West Palm Beach, he complained that US President Donald Trump’s White House was “choosing decisions or courses that have been very, very enriching to the families of those in the administration”. In plain English: grift abounds.
And while that observation is hardly shocking — it has emerged that an Emirati royal invested $500mn in a Trump family crypto venture days before he took office and the White House unveiled pro-crypto policies — what is startling is that Griffin actually stated the obvious.
In recent months I have often heard America’s corporate elite mutter in private about the White House self-dealing. Even some Maga loyalists are becoming quietly dismayed. “It’s disgusting,” one recently told me in a (disappearing) text. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Maga acolyte, has described Trump’s political slogan as “a lie”.