Category World News

The crypto project connected to United States President Donald Trump, World Liberty Financial (WLF), has raised $1bn in token sales, while a new Trump meme coin also soared to more than $10bn in market value as Trump took office for his second term.

WLF made the announcement on Monday, the day Trump was sworn in as president.

The boom in Trump-related crypto ventures comes as he promises to usher in a “golden age” for cryptocurrencies, in stark contrast with the regulatory scrutiny of the industry enforced under the administration of former President Joe Biden.

WLF, promoted and formed by Trump, his sons and Trump’s new special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, was launched two months before the US election.

Trump’s new meme coin, branded $TRUMP, was launched on Friday night during the first-ever Crypto Ball in Washington, DC, in conjunction with inauguration festivities. The coin surged on Monday from less than $10 on Saturday morning to as high as $74. 59 before giving up some of its huge rise.

The new coin expanded Trump’s cryptocurrency interests beyond WLF.

Melania Trump launched her own coin, $MELANIA, on Sunday. Its rally pushed its market cap well beyond $1bn.

Four-fifths of Trump coin’s tokens are owned by CIC Digital, an affiliate of Trump’s business, and another entity called Fight, Fight, Fight, according to its website. It says the coins are “an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol ‘$TRUMP’” and are not an investment or security.

The launch of WLF just two months before November’s US election raised concerns over ethics and conflicts of interest. The launch of the meme coin on Friday night also raised red flags, even among those in the cryptocurrency industry.

“While it’s tempting to dismiss this as just another Trump spectacle, the launch of the official Trump token opens up a Pandora’s box of ethical and regulatory questions,” said Justin D’Anethan, an independent crypto analyst based in Hong Kong.

Cryptocurrency lawyer Preston Byrne published a blog post on Sunday predicting a civil lawsuit opposing the coin.

“Someone will lose money, some lawyer will come up with a theory and file,” Byrne wrote. “The memecoin launch is, from a purely political perspective, an enormous unforced error. ”

Byrne declined to comment further.

‘Crypto president’

The Trump Organization said this month that the president would hand daily management of his multibillion-dollar real estate, hotel, golf, media and licensing portfolio to his children when he entered the White House.

By 2:45pm EST (19:45 GMT), Trump’s coin was trading at $42. 20, giving it a market cap of about $8. 5bn, according to CoinMarketCap.

Twenty-four-hour trading volume was nearly $40bn, CoinMarketCap data showed.

WLF sold nearly 22 billion tokens on Monday, according to the company’s website, trampling past its original goals.

That includes a total investment of $75m from Tron founder Justin Sun, who was charged with  crypto-related fraud and securities violations during the Biden administration.

Excitement over the so-called meme coins aided a wider rally in cryptocurrency prices as  traders and investors grew more hopeful that Trump would keep his promise  to be a “crypto president”  by loosening regulations  and  promoting  ownership of digital assets.

Several  key figures  in Trump’s administration and his circles have ties to the crypto industry.

Bitcoin hit $104,031 on inauguration day and has surged nearly 7 percent so far this month.

The Trump and Melania cryptocurrencies were created on the lesser-known Solana blockchain, which CoinMarketCap ranks as the third-biggest blockchain network.

The price of Solana’s coin also rose over the weekend, hitting an all-time high of $294. 33 on Sunday.

“The cryptocurrency market gained additional popularity in recent hours due to the launch of the TRUMP and MELANIA cryptocurrencies just before the inauguration,” said Grzegorz Drozdz, market analyst at Conotoxia Ltd, in a statement.

Blurring the lines

Peter Schiff, chief economist and global strategist at Euro Pacific Asset Management, pointed to the jump in $TRUMP’s value and called it the new digital gold, on social media.

Trump’s net worth is estimated by Forbes to be $6. 7bn. That does not include the value, at least on paper, of the $TRUMP coin or his earnings from WLF.

The prospect of looser regulations around crypto policy has been met with  fanfare  by the industry and had turbocharged a rally in Bitcoin following Trump’s election victory in November.

The huge rise in the new coin prices raised concerns among some analysts.

“Meme cryptocurrencies, like these, are prone to large fluctuations and we generally consider them as speculative assets,” Drozdz at Conotoxia said.

Trump’s coin represented a blending of the world of decentralised finance into the political arena, but it also “blurs the lines between governance, profit and influence”, D’Anethan, the crypto analyst in Hong Kong, said.

“Should public figures, especially those with such political clout, wield this kind of sway in speculative markets? That’s a question regulators are unlikely to ignore,” he said.

The websites for both Trump’s and Melania Trump’s coins avoid referring to them as cryptocurrencies, instead using the phrase “fungible crypto assets” in their FAQs.

On Sunday, Donald Trump Jr posted on X that the $TRUMP coin is the “hottest digital meme on earth” and that WLF would be the “future of finance”.

Donald Trump has held off on tariffs during his first day as the president of the United States and is placing a big bet that his executive actions can cut energy prices and tame inflation. But it’s unclear whether his orders will be enough to move the US economy as he promises.

As a candidate, Trump had promised to levy 10 to 20 percent tariffs on all imports and up to 60 percent on imports from China. He had also threatened to impose 25 percent on imports from Canada and Mexico if they fail to clamp down on the flow of illicit drugs and migrants entering the US illegally.

Those threats did not materialise on Monday, Day 1 of his taking office, but that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away, experts warned.

Trump announced the creation of an External Revenue Service “to collect all tariffs, fees and revenues. It will be a substantial sum of money from foreign sources,” he said in his inaugural speech.

“He chose not to do a kneejerk tariff move today that could then be negotiated away, but the Trump administration and Republican Party goals for tariff revenues suggest that the tariff threat is still out there,” Rachel Ziemba, an economic and political risk expert, told Al Jazeera.

While Trump is set to sign an executive order to prioritise reviewing trade relationships – including setting in motion a US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement review – that lack of tariffs on Monday “suggests to me that some of his team [including Treasury Secretary pick Scott Bessent] and congressional advisers may have succeeded in getting him to phase in tariffs and consider strategy rather than to announce them and negotiate them away,” Ziemba said.

On China, the Trump team is expected to focus on a 2020 deal from Trump’s previous term as president under which Beijing was supposed to buy significant volumes of US resources to bridge the trade deficit between the two countries, a promise that it failed to deliver on.

“A focus now on such purchases both buys time before more aggressive tariffs and suggests the US might be open to such purchases and investment targets,” Ziemba said.

This not only arms Trump with more future negotiating leverage but also takes in concerns about market pressure and worries that a quick imposition of broad tariffs would be inflationary, undermine US economic interests and undermine longer-term tariff revenues, Ziemba added.

‘Drill, baby, drill’

Increasing US oil and natural gas production was another big theme on Monday with Trump saying he intends to declare a national energy emergency.

“America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have, the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it,” Trump said in his inauguration speech at the US Capitol. “We will drill, baby, drill. ”

Former President Joe Biden came into the White House in 2021 promising to wean the US off fossil fuels, but US oil and gas production hit record levels under his watch as drillers chased high prices in the wake of sanctions on Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Trump also said the US would “fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top” and export energy all over the world. Biden had sold a record amount of crude oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) at more than 180 million barrels. The sale helped keep petrol prices in check after Russia started its war on Ukraine but sank the SPR to the lowest level in 40 years.

Trump had pledged in his first administration to fill the SPR in an effort to help domestic oil companies suffering from low demand during the height of the pandemic. The promise was not fulfilled.

Trump also said on Monday that the US would revoke what he called an electric vehicle (EV) mandate, saying it would save the US auto industry.

While there is no mandate from Biden to force the purchase of electric vehicles, his policies have sought to encourage Americans to buy EVs and auto companies to shift from petrol-powered vehicles to electric cars.

“The common theme is really unleashing affordable and reliable American energy,” an unnamed Trump official was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency. “Because energy permeates every single part of our economy, it’s also key to restoring our national security and exerting American energy dominance around the world. ”

Trump has said the US is in an artificial-intelligence arms race with China and other countries, making the industry’s voracious power needs a national priority.

US data centre power demand could nearly triple in the next three years and consume as much as 12 percent of the country’s electricity on demand from artificial intelligence and other technologies, the Department of Energy projected.

The first Trump administration had considered using emergency powers under the Federal Power Act to try to carry out a pledge to rescue the coal industry but never followed through.

This time, Trump could use emergency powers to ease environmental restrictions on power plants, speed up construction of new plants, ease permitting for transmission projects or open up federal land for new data centres.

Donald Trump has been  sworn in for a second term as president of the United States in Washington, DC.

Trump used his inaugural address to reiterate his grievances against his political opponents, saying he would “liberate” the country from a “radical and corrupt establishment”.

Declaring that government faces a “crisis of trust”, Trump pledged in his inaugural address a brighter future under his administration. “Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored. The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” he said.

Trump claimed “a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal”, promising to “give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy and indeed their freedom”.

“From this moment on,” he added, “America’s decline is over. ”

Trump also unveiled a series of executive actions he plans to take in quick succession after his inauguration. The executive orders are the first step in what Trump is calling “the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense”.

Frigid weather rewrote the pageantry of the day. Trump’s swearing-in was moved indoors to the US Capitol Rotunda — the first time that has happened in 40 years — and the inaugural parade was replaced by an event at a downtown arena.

Throngs of Trump supporters who descended on the city to watch the inaugural ceremony outside the US Capitol were left to find other places to view the festivities.

At the US Capitol, Vice President JD Vance was sworn in first, taking the oath on a Bible given to him by his great-grandmother. Trump followed moments later, just after noon Eastern time (17:00 GMT), using both a family Bible and one used by the late President Abraham Lincoln in 1861.

A cadre of billionaires and tech titans — including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai — were given prominent positions in the Capitol Rotunda, mingling with Trump’s incoming team before the ceremony began.

Deir el-Balah, Gaza – After a long-awaited ceasefire agreed by Israel and Hamas took effect in Gaza on Sunday, marking a pause in one of the region’s most devastating wars, residents are now navigating a mix of relief and disbelief.

With the skies finally silent after months of relentless Israeli attacks, people are returning to their battered neighbourhoods facing the immense challenges of rebuilding lives torn apart by the 15-month war.

Displaced residents sheltering in makeshift camps in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, spoke with Al Jazeera to share their mixed emotions, losses, and their hopes and fears for the future.

Hamza al-Ramlawi, 70, from Tal al-Hawa, Gaza City

“We are very happy and relieved that a ceasefire agreement has finally been reached,” al-Ramlawi said.

“The sorrow will remain in our hearts. We will remember those we lost among family and loved ones. There is joy that we will return, but it is joy filled with loss and grief.

“I will remember my son, Mohammed, whom I lost in a bombing near our tent in az-Zawayda in central Gaza. His loss is as vast as the universe.

“For us, we are spending our days with peace of mind now that the bloodshed has finally stopped.

“This is the first night we’ve slept peacefully and stably. Every night during the war, we slept in fear of any strike that could target us.

“We’ve had enough wars. I hope both sides will calm down and let people live their lives.

“We hope this truce will last. We cannot endure this great battle that turned our lives into a catastrophe.

“I would be lying if I said I would return to my home in the north happily when I’ve lost my son. Let me stay silent. ”

Suleiman Abdel Qader, 74, a resident of Deir el-Balah

“We thank God that the war has finally been stopped. I hope all the displaced can return to their homes soon,” Abdel Qader said.

“The people are miserable and have lost so much. Some of our relatives are still buried under the rubble, and others are missing.

“I still feel angry towards the European world and America because they didn’t put enough pressure at the beginning of these 15 months of war.

“It was a great suffering that every individual in Gaza endured.

“I hope people heal from their wounds, that the injured find treatment, and those who lost loved ones find comfort.

“We hope the ceasefire will continue, despite my many fears, because Israel does not keep its promises. ”

Samah Shalail, 44, mother of five from Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza:

“The first day of the ceasefire felt strange. Some people were celebrating and happy, while others were crying and remembering their loved ones who were killed in this war,” Shalail said.

“This is the first night we’ve slept peacefully, feeling at ease knowing that the bloodshed will stop, that we will return to our lands, and that we are on the verge of starting a new life.

“The Palestinian people are full of hope and determination to carry on.

“At the beginning of the announcement of the ceasefire, I felt cautiously optimistic. But when the prisoner exchanges began and the planes disappeared from the skies, I started to feel a bit of relief.

“The heart is still wounded. We cannot talk about joy and happiness, but there is psychological relief. We are still afraid of the obstacles awaiting us. The country has been completely devastated.

“I expect the ceasefire to last as long as there are agreements for the release of prisoners and hostages.

“I’m excited for the upcoming period, for life to resume once again. I want my children to return to their school desks. ”

Soheila Hazem, 65 years old, from Deir el-Balah:

“The feeling of the ceasefire is indescribable,” Hazem said. “We are still deeply affected and pained by the war.

“I lost my son Hatem, 30 years old, a father of three daughters, last June in a bombing in Deir el-Balah. My sister also lost her only son, my brother lost his son, and other relatives as well. No one was spared from loss. We all endured great suffering in this war.

“We finally slept our long nights after such a long absence. We couldn’t sleep because of the bombing and fear. If the bombing wasn’t on us, it would be on my neighbour, my family, or people we know somewhere else. Every night, when darkness came, so did worry and fear.

“We are all one family in this war, and our wounds are shared. We waited for the war to end so we could learn about the fate of those we lost contact with due to the communication breakdowns.

“Things are easier now for us. We feel a great sense of relief and hope international efforts will continue to stabilise the truce.

“Everyone must know that this is our land, and it is our right to live here. We ask God to compensate us for what we’ve lost.

An Israeli sniper shot dead a Palestinian child in Rafah, before witnesses in Gaza filmed the Israeli army opening fire on a man trying to retrieve the child’s body in an apparent violation of the ceasefire agreement.

Donald Trump has taken the oath of office to become the 47th president of the United States, returning to the White House four years after he left it in defeat.

In his inaugural speech on Monday, Trump took an aggressive posture, using his podium in the Capitol rotunda to blast his predecessor, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden.

He also framed himself as a victim of government “weaponisation”, taking jabs at what he called a “radical and corrupt establishment”.

“My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal,” Trump said. “From this moment on, America’s decline is over. ”

This was Trump’s second presidency, after serving in the White House from 2017 to 2021.

But the Trump who returned to the presidency on Monday was a Trump who appeared more confident, ready to start signing a stream of executive actions to reshape policy in the US.

“ With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. It’s all about common sense,” he said, citing a new pro-business energy policy and a crackdown on irregular migration as two of his first actions.

He also pledged to “expand” US borders, warning Panama he would “take back” the canal the US built there.

Still, while Trump once again painted a portrait of the US as a country on the precipice, he tried to strike a more upbeat posture than in his 2017 inaugural address, which became known as the “American carnage” speech.

“I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success,” Trump said. “A tide of change is sweeping the country. Sunlight is pouring over the entire world. And America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before. ”

Biden delivers last-minute, preemptive pardons

But mere hours before Trump’s inauguration, Biden attempted to scuttle some of Trump’s campaign-trail threats.

Trump had repeatedly pledged retribution against those who criticised him, prompting Biden to take an extraordinary action: He issued preemptive pardons for those who might be prosecuted under Trump’s presidency.

Biden’s pardon offered protection to three frequent targets of Trump’s ire, as well as members of his own family.

One was Dr Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who clashed with Trump over the country’s COVID-19 emergency response. Another was General Mark Milley, a Trump appointee-turned-critic who chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a panel of top military leaders, from 2019 to 2023.

The final group shielded under the pardon was the members of the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack, which investigated the events of January 6, 2021, when a group of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in an apparent effort to stop the certification of Trump’s defeat in 2020.

In its final report, the committee referred Trump for criminal prosecution, accusing him assisting an insurrection against the government.

Trump has repeatedly threatened members of that committee with imprisonment, particularly Liz Cheney, its most prominent Republican.

“For what they did, yeah, honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump told the TV programme Meet the Press in December.

Biden noted this threat in a statement that did not mention Trump by name — but warned of impending prosecutions.

“Our nation relies on dedicated, selfless public servants every day. They are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Biden wrote. “Yet alarmingly, public servants have been subjected to ongoing threats and intimidation for faithfully discharging their duties. ”

However, he emphasised that these pardons should not be “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing”.

Trump calls for an end to ‘weaponisation’ of justice

At noon Eastern time (17:00 GMT), Biden and three other former presidents — Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama — piled into the Capitol rotunda with other dignitaries to witness Trump take his second oath of office.

In opening remarks, Senator Amy Klobuchar reminded the audience that the theme of Monday’s inauguration was “our enduring democracy”.

But when Trump took the podium to deliver his inaugural address, he quickly cast a portrait of the outgoing administration as “corrupt”, without naming Biden outright.

“Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored. The scales of justice will be rebalanced. The vicious, violent and unfair weaponisation of the Justice Department and our government will end,” Trump said in the opening minutes of his speech.

While out of the White House from 2021 to 2025, Trump became the first US president to be charged and convicted of felony crimes.

His conviction came in May, after a jury found him guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business documents, related to efforts to conceal hush-money payment to a porn star during the 2016 election.

But Trump faced three other criminal indictments in addition. They included a state case in Georgia, where prosecutors accused him of participating in a criminal conspiracy to undermine the state’s 2020 election results.

And until recently, Trump faced two federal indictments — one for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election, and the other for withholding classified documents while out of office. Both were dropped in November, in accordance with Justice Department policy not to prosecute sitting presidents.

Trump has long denied wrongdoing in all the cases against him, and he has accused Democrats of using the Justice Department for personal “witch hunts”.

In Monday’s speech, he tied the criminal probes to an unrelated assassination attempt he faced in July, while campaigning in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history,” Trump said.

“The journey to reclaim our republic has not been an easy one — that, I can tell you. Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and, indeed, to take my life. ”

State of emergency at the southern border

Trump’s inaugural speech also sought to make good on promises the Republican delivered on the campaign trail.

His first priority, he said, was to declare an emergency on the southern border with Mexico.

“All illegal entry will immediately be halted. And we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came,” Trump said.

As part of that push, Trump explained he would send troops to the border “to repel the disastrous invasion of our country”.

He also pledged to re-implement his 2019 “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required asylum seekers to stay on the other side of the border while waiting for their immigration appointments and court dates.

Critics, however, had challenged the policy as a violation of domestic and international asylum law, pointing out that asylum seekers have the right to cross international borders to flee imminent persecution. They also argued that parts of the Mexican border were unsafe for migrants and asylum seekers to remain in, due to the presence of criminal activity.

Biden attempted to end the policy in February 2021, shortly after taking office, and it has since been wrapped up in litigation.

In Monday’s speech, Trump repeated his false assertion that foreign countries were emptying their prisons and mental health institutions across the US border, and he pledged to designate drug-trafficking cartels as “foreign terrorist organisations”.

Then, he added, he would invoke the  Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the president to detain and deport foreign nationals during times of war, to go after “all foreign gangs and criminal networks”.

“As commander in chief, I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and  invasions, and that is exactly what I am going to do,” Trump said.

An estimated 11 million people live in the US without legal authorisation, and human rights advocates fear Trump’s proposed crackdown may extend beyond criminal networks, ultimately fissuring families and communities.

A return to ‘manifest destiny’

Trump painted a rosy picture of life under his presidency: one in which the US is prosperous and growing.

But in doing so, he used loaded language like “manifest destiny”, a term associated with the westward expansion of colonialism across North America, forcibly displacing Indigenous peoples.

“ The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons,” he said.

“And we will pursue our manifest destiny into this stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars. ”

In the lead-up to his inauguration, Trump has made repeated references to expanding US territory abroad.

In Central America, he has urged Panama to “return” the Panama Canal, claiming unfair trade practices across the US-built waterway. To the north, he has encouraged Canada to become the US’s “51st state”. And in the case of Greenland, he has refused to rule out “military or economic coercion” in his push to assimilate the autonomous Danish territory.

Trump reprised several of those issues in his inauguration speech, accusing Panama as treating the US “very badly”.

“We gave it to Panama,” Trump said of the canal. “And we’re taking it back. ”

Trump also called for the Gulf of Mexico to be renamed the “Gulf of America”, and he said he would revert the name of an Alaskan mountain, currently known by its Indigenous name Denali, to “Mount McKinley”.

In his speech, Trump depicted the US’s colonial era as a time of triumph, arguing that present-day Americans need to return to its spirit.

“The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls,” Trump said.

“Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on earth. No one comes close. ”

‘Colour-blind and merit-based’ society

As part of his depiction of an America in crisis, Trump sketched a vision of the US hampered by censorship, a recurring theme in the conservative sphere in recent years.

“After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America,” Trump said.

But he pivoted from there to attacking efforts to educate about racism and enduring racial divides, through diversity initiatives in schools and businesses. Many conservatives have deemed such programmes “woke” and have called for them to be dismantled.

He also made allusions to his campaign promises to dismantle protections for transgender and nonbinary Americans.

“ I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society that is colour-blind and merit-based,” he said.

“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female. ”

Despite the divisive rhetoric, Trump repeatedly described himself as a “unifier” in his speech, ushering in a new age of prosperity.

“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be: a peacemaker and a unifier,” he said. That spirit will extend beyond the US’s borders, he added.

“ We will be a nation like no other full of compassion, courage and exceptionalism. Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable. ”

Speaking from Capitol Hill, Al Jazeera correspondent Alan Fisher called the speech a “very dark” one.

“This was Donald Trump effectively settling scores,” Fisher said, comparing it to a campaign speech.