Donald Trump appears intent on using single-issue ‘crypto’ voters to ensure his margin of victory over U.S. President Joe Biden this November, despite Trump having long since mastered the political art of saying one thing and doing another.
On May 25, Trump issued an all-caps post to his Truth Social platform, saying, “I AM VERY POSITIVE AND OPEN MINDED TO CRYPTOCURRENCY COMPANIES, AND ALL THINGS RELATED TO THIS NEW AND BURGEONING INDUSTRY. OUR COUNTRY MUST BE THE LEADER IN THE FIELD. THERE IS NO SECOND PLACE. CROOKED JOE BIDEN, ON THE OTHER HAND, THE WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY, WANTS IT TO DIE A SLOW AND PAINFUL DEATH. THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN WITH ME!”
The post followed Trump’s May 8 comments to a group of ‘crypto’ enthusiasts at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida, in which he declared that Biden was “very much against [crypto]” but Trump was “fine with it” so “if you’re in favor of crypto, you better vote for Trump.”
Trump’s pursuit of crypto voters garnered him the only round of applause during the otherwise openly hostile reception he received at last weekend’s Libertarian Party convention. Amid nonstop booing, Trump abruptly declared “if you vote for me, on Day One I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served.” This garnered roars of approval from the crowd, many of them waving ‘Free Ross’ signs.
In 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to two life terms plus 40 years with no possibility of parole for running the Silk Road dark web marketplace, which specialized in crypto-based sales of drugs, weapons, and other controversial/illegal items. His harsh sentence has never sat right with libertarian-minded types, turning him into a cause célèbre within ‘crypto’ circles.
And yet, Trump has repeatedly called for the death penalty for drug dealers, including comments just six months ago that if “you want to solve your drug problem, you have to institute a meaningful death penalty for… a drug dealer.” (Not for nothing did Trump endure a sustained chant of ‘hypocrite’ at the Libertarian shindig.)
Trump is notorious for making contradictory claims on numerous subjects, often contradicting himself within the same interview. So anyone who takes him at his word stands a pretty good chance of being disappointed down the road. That could include Ulbricht himself, who tweeted his thanks to Trump for making this pledge.
The national doubt
Trump flip-flopped hard on ‘crypto,’ having previously slammed the BTC token as “a scam” that he didn’t want “competing against the dollar.” As for why he flipped positive, it’s no secret that November’s election could come down to a handful of voters in a handful of swing states.
The same calculus likely factored into Trump’s decision to travel to the Libertarian lions’ den despite the bulk of those in attendance seeing no difference between himself and any other mainstream candidate out to pander.
But Trump has apparently convinced himself that BTC could be useful for reducing America’s titanic national debt. During an X space last weekend, Bitcoin Magazine CEO David Bailey (a Trump aide) claimed that his first meeting with Trump had the candidate inquiring about the possibility of using BTC to somehow fix America’s debt burden. Bailey claimed he ‘had some ideas’ on that front but wasn’t prepared to expound on them during their first meeting.
Bear in mind that there’s no logical way to magically erase America’s debt obligations, despite Trump’s harebrained 2016 comments about negotiating pennies-on-the-dollar deals with America’s creditors.
Such chiseling might have been the solution to Trump’s numerous corporate bankruptcies, but those comments were quickly walked back as markets groaned under the suggestion that a Trump-led America would no longer pay its bills in full. (For a guy who claims to love the dollar, he doesn’t seem to understand the mechanics behind concepts like ‘the world’s reserve currency.’)
Regardless, Trump’s pro-crypto efforts have won him plenty of converts, including those who can’t actually vote come November. That includes Tron founder Justin Sun, who hasn’t set foot on U.S. soil since before (a) the pandemic and (b) he learned he was under criminal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for suspected wire fraud, money laundering, and other felonious activities.
On May 27, Sun tweeted, “We should convey a clear message that we will only support 🇺🇸presidential candidates who are friendly to cryptocurrencies.” Quite how the Chinese-born Grenadian citizen Sun arrived at ‘we’ in this roped-off star-spangled contest is unknown, but ‘we’ eagerly await word on how he plans to vote for the next Pope, next year’s Academy Award for Best Picture and who gets to headline Glastonbury 2025.
Gotta spend money to make money
Meanwhile, last week’s passage of the pro-crypto FIT21 Act in the U.S. House of Representatives with significant Democratic support, coupled with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dropping its longstanding opposition to ETH spot-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs), has led some to believe that Biden is similarly abandoning his opposition to ‘crypto’ making further inroads into America’s financial sector.
That may reflect Biden’s team glancing at unfavorable swing-state polls, or it may simply reflect the scale to which the ‘crypto’ sector has been raining lobbying cash on the District of Columbia. TD Cowen analysts said Tuesday that the “monetary heft” being flexed by crypto-affiliated entities could even result in stalled stablecoin legislation being passed before the current Congressional session concludes.
The Washington Post recently detailed how registered lobbyists advocating crypto causes increased more than fourfold from 2020, with some 270 winers/diners currently making the rounds in DC on behalf of digital asset firms.
The Post identified more than $60 million that the ‘crypto’ sector has spent since 2021 attempting to influence federal policy on digital assets. That’s in addition to the nearly $90 million spent to date on campaign contributions and other initiatives to boost crypto-friendly election candidates and punish those who view crypto with skepticism and/or alarm.
In a recent Republican primary contest for a House seat in West Virginia, the crypto-aligned Defend American Jobs super PAC spent over $750,000 boosting one candidate, Riley Moore. When Moore secured the nomination, his Democratic opponent Steve Wendelin slammed “all these crypto guys” who are “trying to buy up all these politicians. Wendelin added that “crypto is not a concern of the average West Virginian at all.”
Or is it?
Survey says
The question of how heavily the ‘crypto’ issue weighs on U.S. voters has been hotly debated, as have estimates of the number of Americans who currently or ever had any personal ‘crypto’ holdings.
In February 2023, the Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) exchange released the results of a poll suggesting one-fifth of Americans held some form of digital asset. However, a Harris Poll released earlier this month by Barry Silbert’s scandal-plagued venture capital firm Digital Currency Group (DCG) showed only 14% of voters owned any digital assets.
Shrinking these numbers even further, a Federal Reserve survey of U.S. households released just last week found the number of U.S. adults who ‘held or used’ digital assets in 2023 was a mere 7%, down five points from 2021. And the number of new BTC wallets recently hit its lowest level since 2018.
Into this statistical struggle comes yet another crypto-focused voter profile, again by the Harris Poll, commissioned by another DCG subsidiary, Grayscale Investments. Despite the shrinking level of crypto ownership found in other surveys, this survey claims that 18% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats own some form of digital asset.
The new poll also claims that 47% of voters “expect some of their investment portfolio to include crypto,” seven points higher than a similar survey last year. Roughly one-third of voters claim to be ‘more open to learning about crypto investing’ since the year began, presumably due to the artificially inflated values that many prominent tokens such as BTC have enjoyed since the calendar flipped.
Curiously, supporters of both parties think their team is more supportive of the crypto sector. This bucks the narrative emerging from Capitol Hill, in which the Dems appear more eager to clip crypto’s wings to minimize blowback to the traditional finance sector when the next tsunami of implosions, bankruptcies and outright frauds smashes all in its path because that’s a question of when, not if.
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