Everyone Is Lying to You—Even the President? Ben McKenzie’s Crypto Crusade Hits the Trump Fortress

Screenshot fromBen McKenzie's official X page, via X. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.
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Most people know Ben McKenzie as Ryan from The O.C. A smaller, more specific group of people know him as the guy who has spent the last several years trying to warn the world about cryptocurrency. Today, both versions of that story collide.

And if you’re not familiar with the second version, the one that doesn’t involve a leather jacket and brooding looks, hold tight, because it’s the more interesting one.

Yes, that Ben McKenzie. Ryan from The O.C., except forget Ryan. For the past several years, this man has been quietly doing something most of his Hollywood peers wouldn’t dare touch: going to war with the cryptocurrency industry. Not as a stunt. Not for a brand deal. Actually going to war.

He wrote a whole book about it in 2023, called Easy Money, and laid out his case with the kind of bluntness that made many people in Silicon Valley very uncomfortable. And then, because apparently that wasn’t enough, he spent three years making a documentary about it.

The documentary is called Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. Before you ask, yes, that is the actual title, and it premiered at SXSW London in June 2025. It’s hitting select theatres today, April 17, 2026, so it’s out. Right now. While everything else I’m about to tell you is also happening.

That timing is not a coincidence. Or maybe it is. Either way, it’s something.

He Sat Down With the Men Before the Floor Collapsed

Here’s the part that gets me. For this documentary, McKenzie didn’t just interview random crypto enthusiasts or read court documents. He sat across from Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX guy, months before the 2022 indictment. Before everything blew up. Before the world found out that FTX, which had been handling tens of billions of dollars of other people’s money, was essentially established on a foundation of vibes and fraud.

At the time, Bankman-Fried was still walking around with that particular energy that powerful men have when they think nothing can touch them. McKenzie sat there, filmed it, and later said the conversation revealed not secrets exactly, but how hollow it all felt below the surface. Like there was just… nothing there. Which, in retrospect, tracks.

He also interviewed Alex Mashinsky before Celsius Network collapsed. Celsius had been claiming to hold billions in customer assets. Then it didn’t. Then Mashinsky was arrested.

These interviews exist now as timestamps. Footage from just before the floor gave way. And the documentary weaves those moments together with something that hits harder: the regular people.

The scam victims. The individuals who believed they were getting in early on a new financial system instead got locked out of their own savings. McKenzie doesn’t sensationalize any of it. He doesn’t need to. The stories do it themselves.

He also testified before the U.S. Senate, describing cryptocurrency as the largest Ponzi scheme in human history. So, he’s committed to that view.

Meanwhile, on the Other Side of Town…

While McKenzie was out here making his documentary, warning anyone who would listen, the Trump family was building their own crypto platform. And not quietly.

World Liberty Financial (WLFI) launched in late 2024, right in the middle of the presidential campaign. It’s a decentralized finance platform, and it prominently features the names of Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump. Barron Trump appears in some filings, though his role is far more limited than his brothers’. By early 2025, its token was trading publicly, and at its peak, we were talking about multiple billions on paper.

The structure of this thing is interesting, and by interesting, I mean eyebrow-raising. There’s an entity called DT Marks DEFI LLC that sits at the center of it all, holding 2.5 billion WLFI tokens and entitled to 75% of net revenue from token sales. So on paper, WLFI is all about decentralization, cutting out the middlemen, and giving power back to the people.

In practice, the structure funnels highly centralized benefits to… a very specific family. By the end of 2025, reports confirmed the family had already taken out over a billion dollars in actual cash proceeds, with billions more still sitting in unsold tokens.

They’ve also applied for a national banking charter through the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. That application is still pending, which means the whole thing exists in this legal grey zone, not quite a bank, not quite not a bank. Hovering.

A Half-Billion Dollar Deal and a Very Messy Fight


In January 2025, just days before the inauguration, Eric Trump signed a deal with a firm tied to the UAE, backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. That firm bought a 49% stake in WLFI for $500 million. So now Gulf sovereign interests are woven into an American president’s crypto platform.

I’ll let you sit with that for a second.

And then, because this story needed more layers, Justin Sun, one of the platform’s early investors, started making noise in April 2026. He accused WLFI of embedding blacklist functions in its smart contracts. Basically, claiming that the platform itself could freeze certain wallets, which is the opposite of what “decentralized” is supposed to mean.

By April 13th, the situation had escalated to the point where WLFI was threatening to sue him for publicly calling it a governance scam. Sun says his own wallet was frozen as far back as September 2025, and he’s sitting on massive unrealized losses.

Reports put his total investment at over $75 million. And as recently as April 15th and 16th, the feud picked up fresh steam, with new governance proposals emerging that would lock tokens further, keeping this dispute very much alive as the documentary hits theaters today.

The irony writes itself. A platform built on the promise of honesty and decentralization is now in a public fight about secret control mechanisms. This is almost word-for-word the pattern McKenzie spent three years documenting.

The Part That’s Actually the Whole Point

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

Both of these things are happening at the same time. McKenzie’s film is in theaters, offering a fully documented, publicly testified, years-in-the-making warning about exactly this kind of crypto structure. And World Liberty Financial is still operating, still expanding, still generating revenue, with its token trading around $0.08 and moving with the market like any other digital asset.

Neither side is losing. That’s the uncomfortable truth.

The critique exists. The capitalization exists. And they’re not canceling each other out, they’re just running parallel, like two highways going the same direction that never quite merge.

McKenzie is right. He might even be proven definitively right at some point. But “right” and “powerful enough to stop it” are two very different things. The people who see the risks most clearly rarely get to control the system. The people running the system rarely move as though those risks will stop them.

And the rest of us, we’re just watching, reading, and trying to figure out which lane we’re actually in.

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