Under this White House, crypto is to income generation what the presidential pardon power is to justice, something bounded almost exclusively by lines that President Trump himself draws. In that sense, it’s unsurprising that the two have been so often intertwined. Trump’s controversial pardon of former Honduras president Juan Orlando Hernández, indicted by the Justice Department during Trump’s first term in office, leaves a breadcrumb trail back to cryptocurrency. (Trump ally Roger Stone, who’s been eager to claim credit for Hernández’s good fortune, has positioned the pardon as a means of protecting “a haven for Bitcoin entrepreneurs.”) His pardon of Changpeng Zhao — the billionaire founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance and advocate for the Trump family’s crypto projects — presents an even more obvious combination.
By their own admission, the Trumps got into cryptocurrency after their existing financial partners started to question whether those partnerships were worth the costs.
On the surface, this is a shift. During his first term as president, Trump once described cryptocurrencies as “highly volatile and based on thin air,” warning, correctly, that they “can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.” But there’s a lot of money to be made in the hustle-friendly cryptocurrency world, and — let’s be honest — the boundaries of the law have never really served as red lines for the creators of Trump University, the Trump Foundation and the Trump Organization. So less than five years after Trump’s warning, he and his family jumped into digital currency with both feet and open wallets.
By their own admission, the Trumps got into cryptocurrency after their existing financial partners started to question whether those partnerships were worth the costs. The Trumps claimed to have been “debanked,” in the popular phrasing of the political right, with accounts held by Trump’s private company or linked to Donald Trump Jr. reportedly closed by financial institutions. Why? Well, politics, of course.
“We weren’t even early crypto guys, but we figured, if they can debank the Trump Organization, if they can debank us, who can’t they go after?” Trump Jr. said in a Fox News interview earlier this year. “And more importantly, who won’t they go after?”
Except, in that same interview, the president’s son offered slightly more context about when this campaign of persecution had begun.
“Basically, during the first term,” he explained. “Certainly after — let’s call it January 6, all the nonsense, it got significantly worse.”
Oh, right. It was after that time the the president stoked an effort to overturn the results of the election and became, however briefly, persona non grata in American politics and society. This was the root of what Melania Trump described as “political discrimination.”
When President Trump signed an executive order targeting “debanking,” he assailed “[g]overnment-directed surveillance programs targeting persons participating in activities and causes commonly associated with conservatism and the political right” — which apparently includes involvement in the Capitol riot. Since his return to the White House, Trump and his allies have repeatedly framed the federal probe into the riot as a partisan attack, complaining about subpoenas for phone records of legislators who aided Trump’s effort to retain power or suggesting that requests for information issued to banks by special counsel Jack Smith were nefarious, rather than investigatory.
The pattern here should be familiar, as it mirrors how the right corralled social media over the past decade. Systems aimed at reducing fraud or abuse often swept up right-wing actors, who insisted that they were targeted not for their behaviors but for their beliefs. Republican legislators and Trump himself joined in the chorus and the social media platforms capitulated, scaling back their moderation efforts or being bought out by ideological allies of the right.
Nearly every element of Trump’s second term in office has orbited around the idea that he (and to a lesser extent his allies) should not have to face accountability.
The important through line here, though, is accountability. People who’d spread disinformation or engaged in abuse or stormed the Capitol or tried to overturn the 2020 election faced repercussions for doing so — and didn’t like it. Some of those repercussions were ham-handed, certainly, but they were predicated on actions, not on ideas. But repercussions for such actions were both unwelcome and unusual, and that prompted the effort to dismiss them as illegitimate.
Nearly every element of Trump’s second term in office has orbited around the idea that he (and to a lesser extent his allies) should not have to face accountability. The shadowy money-making element of cryptocurrency obviously appeals to the president, but so does the idea that it’s a space where he and his family and friends can do what they want. Sometimes, those two outcomes overlap: People looking to build relationships with Trump have simply invested millions in his crypto products to earn pardons or access or both.
People who are old enough — say, at least 1? — will recall that there was a time in which American businesses and entrepreneurs and politicians and others in positions of power held some reasonable expectation of being constrained by rules or laws. They didn’t like this, admittedly, and those constraints were often imperfectly enforced. Both by design and by adoption, cryptocurrency has helped investors sidestep such constraints. By design and in practice, Trump has used his return to the executive mansion to remove the constraints binding himself, his allies and his donors.
It isn’t simply that the president has bound himself to the crypto industry, to their mutual benefit. It’s that he has worked to impose the ethos on which the crypto industry operates, a winking disdain for the rules and an every-Trump-for-himself approach to power. It’s an ethos that has now suffused the country.
The American system of checks and balances, it turns out, was not as robust as it seemed when faced with a culture unabashed about leveraging political polarization to treat any checks as invalid. What we now have little choice but to accept is that, while being president may not be based on thin air, it, too, can be highly volatile and facilitate unlawful behavior.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and creator of the “How To Read This Chart” newsletter. He spent 11 years at The Washington Post and is the author of the 2023 book “The Aftermath.”