A trucking logistics magnate from Monterrey, Mexico, named Javier Selgas didn't need to direct a rig laden with crypto cash toward Trump Tower

Javier Selgas, the CEO of Freight Technologies Inc, a cross-border trucking concern, said his firm recently purchased $20 million worth of the $TRUMP memecoin — a faddish type of cryptocurrency with no inherent value other than its ownership by Donald Trump

A trucking logistics magnate from Monterrey, Mexico, named Javier Selgas didn’t need to direct a rig laden with crypto cash toward Trump Tower on New York’s gilded Fifth Avenue to make a politically strategic investment in the family of America’s 47th president — but he might as well have.

Selgas, the CEO of Freight Technologies Inc, a cross-border trucking concern, said his firm recently purchased $20 million worth of the $TRUMP memecoin — a faddish type of cryptocurrency with no inherent value other than its ownership by Donald Trump, his family and close allies — for the explicit purpose of lobbying the White House on tariffs.

How do we know this? Because Selgas said so himself, both in a public news release and in a related filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, needed to sell bonds for this international company to invest in the Trump family coin. The CEO said its $20 million purchase would be “an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced and free trade between Mexico and the U.S.”

It sure could be. The Mexican entrepreneur’s large investment in the $TRUMP coin, which features his famous “fight” gesture after last July’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., would seem to guarantee an invitation for Selgas to an unprecedented — and I mean that in the worst possible way — event. The president recently announced that the top 220 holders of the $TRUMP meme coin are invited to dine with him at his Virginia golf course on May 22, while the top 25 will get exclusive facetime with POTUS 47.

So a foreign multimillionaire with $20 million to burn on a meme coin will get to personally plead his case for relief from the 25% tariff that the Trump regime imposed on Mexican goods earlier this year. An everyday American schlub who can’t afford a $25 margarita or find a doll for their daughter on a barren store shelf could never dream of such access.

This shockingly brazen case of the Selling of the President 2025 (as watchdogged by the group Accountable.us and HuffPo’s S.V. Date) probably should have been a huge breakthrough national story but it hasn’t been, for arguably a couple of reasons.

On one hand, the $20 million windfall wasn’t the largest or most dubious foreign investment in “Trump Inc.” this week — not by a longshot. In Dubai, the Trump family cryptocurrency venture called World Liberty Financial — a separate operation from the meme coin — announced that a concern backed by the oil dictatorship of Abu Dhabi is buying $2 billion of its digital coins to complete a deal with a troubled top crypto firm that is regulated by the Trump administration.

The cofounder of World Liberty Financial — Zach Witkoff, who perhaps not so coincidentally is also the son of Trump’s surprising and inexperienced pick for Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who deals regularly with the oligarchs of the United Arab Emirates — promised a Gulf crypto conference, “This is only the beginning.”

But on the other hand, a massive scandal involving the web of conflict between the growing array of Trump family business ventures and his government’s dealings on tariffs, or ending the bloodshed in the Middle East, is so brazen, so public, and so large that the institutions tasked with stopping this level of graft seem overwhelmed, when not corrupted themselves. What ought to be a larger scandal than Watergate has instead been met with one large “American shrug.”

Why?

This is the president who famously bragged during his 2016 campaign that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” At least metaphorically speaking, this has proved to be the truest thing Trump has ever uttered from a campaign podium. But why deal with messy bloodstains on the asphalt of Manhattan’s main shopping artery when there’s millions and possibly billions of dollars in graft to be pocketed instead.

The corruption of Trump’s first presidency — foreign lobbyists, out-of-town favor seekers and government-backed Secret Service agents keeping his hotels and resorts above water — was both without precedent, yet also a mild kind of spring training for what was to come with Trump 47.

The foreshadowing came early — with that $2 billion Saudi investment in son-in-law Jared Kushner’s (a key Middle East envoy during Trump 45) vague new hedge fund, and the billion-dollar rise of Trump Media, a stock that soared and confirmed Trump’s billionaire status despite the firm’s huge losses and unlikely future prospects.

All that before Trump discovered crypto, which he quite rightly nailed in 2021 when he told Fox Business Channel that products like Bitcoin looked to him like “a scam,” but who in 2024 seemed to wonder why he