Trump and Crypto Are Now in Perfect Alignment
There were also a whole lot of MAGA acolytes. Vice President J. D. Vance, the eldest Trump sons, and the White House crypto czar David Sacks all gave speeches that coalesced around a unifying theme: Trump and crypto are meant for each other. 'What's going on here in this very room, at this very conference, that's the financial side of everything we've been fighting for on the free-speech side,' Don Jr. said during a conversation with the CEO of Rumble, a social-media platform favored by right-wing users. 'They're inextricably linked.'
In other words, the message was that Trump cares deeply about the kinds of civil-libertarian ideas that the bitcoin world has long touted. It's a convenient narrative, a lofty way of explaining this once very bitcoin-skeptical president's sudden embrace of crypto. At least, it's one that transcends sheer self-enrichment: In the past year, members of the Trump family have launched two meme coins and announced a majority stake in a new crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. As I've previously written, crypto is quickly becoming the Trump family business: Last month, the president hosted the biggest investors in his $TRUMP coin for a private dinner at his golf course outside Washington, D.C.
But the linkages between Trump and crypto run deeper than just a couple of business investments. His White House has also ushered in a starkly pro-crypto agenda—rolling back regulations and dropping lawsuits to punish alleged crypto wrongdoing. The same week that Don Jr. spoke at the Bitcoin Conference, the Department of Labor eased a Biden-era guidance that made it difficult for Americans to invest their 401(k) plans in crypto because digital currencies can be volatile and prone to hacks. In cutting this language, regulators are taking away a guardrail, encouraging more investment in crypto. This, in turn, could boost the price of bitcoin and other coins, which is a boon to Trump's own enterprises. It always comes back to the president himself: Trump's crypto ambitions are as much about public policy as they are about his own meme coins.
Crypto has become the glue that binds together so much of what the president and his administration are doing. Consider Trump Media & Technology Group, best-known as the parent company of his social-media app, Truth Social. Trump Media didn't start as a crypto business, but now it's pivoting to crypto. Late last month, Trump Media announced that it would raise money to purchase $2.5 billion in bitcoin, effectively creating a corporate bitcoin reserve. Why? 'We view bitcoin as an apex instrument of financial freedom,' Devin Nunes, the CEO of Trump Media and a former Republican congressman, said in a statement. Putting the pseudo-utopian language aside, such a bitcoin reserve mostly just serves to tie the price of Trump Media's stock, $DJT, to the price of bitcoin writ large. A multibillion-dollar investment is unreservedly good for crypto, but it's also good for the Trump family, because much of the president's own net worth is now tied up in crypto assets. (Neither the White House nor the Trump Media & Technology Group responded to my requests for comment.)
Perhaps the idea of a bitcoin reserve sounds familiar. It explicitly mirrors the White House's announcement of a 'Strategic Bitcoin Reserve' in March, as part of a broader effort to make the U.S. a global leader in crypto. Both serve the same function: Such large-scale institutional investment in crypto—whether from the government or a company—further legitimizes these digital currencies, ensuring their long-term viability as an asset class. Trump's campaign to promote crypto and juice the price of these coins is in essence two-pronged: Once the White House sets its agenda, the Trump family's private-sector business can back it.
Trump was all about pro-crypto policy even before he began launching his raft of crypto businesses. His campaign promise to fire Biden's top crypto cop, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, helped pull in donations from industry heavyweights. Especially after the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried, Gensler was focused on prosecuting individual crypto companies—a policy now derisively referred to as ' Operation Choke Point 2.0 ' (a nod to the Obama-era initiative that put pressure on banks to stop working with payday lenders, pawn shops, and certain other businesses). During his keynote speech at the Bitcoin Conference, Vance put it bluntly: 'Operation Choke Point 2.0 is dead, and it's not coming back under the Trump administration.'
Indeed, the administration has dropped more than a dozen lawsuits and investigations against crypto firms. And as Trump's second term has gone on, the distinctions between what's pro-Trump and what's pro-crypto have blurred together, approaching something like a singularity. In MAGA cosmology, crypto, Trump, and America now exist in perfect alignment—what's good for one is good for the others. While Trump talks about bringing back manufacturing jobs to the U.S., the Trump sons are running a crypto-mining company called American Bitcoin and Trump Media is throwing its weight behind 'Made in America' crypto investment funds. After firing many of the top regulators responsible for keeping crypto in check, Trump has cleared the way for major cash injections throughout the crypto industry—including, of course, in his own businesses. The pretense for the regulatory rollbacks and Trump's personal crypto investments is the same: It benefits America.
The irony is that cryptocurrencies were supposed to be a form of protection against exactly this sort of connection to the state. Bitcoin was invented as a way to privately transfer money online, with the ambitious goal of creating a new financial order outside the purview of the international monetary regime, uncontrolled by any government. (After all, the technical basis for crypto is known as 'decentralization.') In loosening crypto restrictions that benefit the industry (and Trump himself), Trump is manifesting the old crypto dream of a new financial order. But far from being faceless and decentralized, the very concept of crypto is starting to reflect the image of just one man.
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