Former President Donald Trump in a livestream on X this past Monday announced his family’s latest project: World Liberty Financial, which intends to function as something of a crypto stock exchange.
Trump’s embrace of this emergent, often scandal-plagued sector isn’t a particularly novel development. In fact, it’s highly predictable, as for roughly a decade crypto’s underlying premises have relied, to a surprisingly heavy degree, on right-wing political thought.
The relationship between crypto and the right stems in large part from how crypto seeks to shift financial transactions beyond the purview of centralized, democratic systems. The right-wing nature of this pivot has been noted by everyone from left-leaning scholars and academics to right-leaning venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen, who has observed that crypto is “quite literally right-wing tech that is far more aggressively decentralized and far more comfortable with entrepreneurialism and free voluntary exchange.”
For roughly a decade crypto’s underlying premises have relied, to a surprisingly heavy degree, on right-wing political thought.
I came around slowly to acknowledging this political alignment. I graduated college directly into the housing crisis, when distrust in banks and the politics surrounding them reached a critical mass thanks to movements like Occupy Wall Street. Cryptocurrencies — Bitcoin specifically — arrived at this moment, too. Like countless others of all political affiliations, I was curious about cryptocurrencies, eager to entertain philosophies and technologies that promised better answers for how to distribute wealth and, by extension, money itself.
Intriguing projects would pop up in sectors like journalism and health care, often more related to the blockchain than crypto. And yet, the crypto critiques from this initial era have outlasted the majority of these projects themselves. When these projects failed, the autopsies did not reveal oh-co-close brushes with new liberating financial processes but, rather, predatory practices that sought to get marginalized groups “drinking the crypto Kool-Aid.”
If Trump’s embrace of crypto seems like some novel development, consider the very title of the late, brilliant David Golumbia’s book, published weeks before the 2016 presidential election, “The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right Wing Extremism.” For the remaining years of his life, Golumbia would argue that, messy and unsexy as democratic and financial processes may be, they were more trustworthy than cryptocurrencies, which sought to sidestep such regulatory processes entirely. Moreover, Golumbia regularly argued that “The economic framework on which cryptocurrencies depend emerges from right-wing and often antisemitic conspiracy theories about the nature of central banking.”
I found simpler, less technical perspectives from writers like Stefan Eich, a political theorist and author of what for me was a crucial article, “Old Utopias, New Tax Havens: The Politics of Bitcoin in Historical Perspective.” Eich’s basic argument is convincing and plainly stated, “The attempt to remove money from political control is itself a supremely political act that raises profound questions of legitimacy.”
What a surprise, then, that an entity founded upon removing one’s assets and actions from political scrutiny would wind up in the Trump universe. What a surprise that Trump would eventually come around to a sector full of political acts that raise, in Eich’s words, “profound questions of legitimacy.”
Since the World Liberty Financial announcement, there has been a rush to compare the Trump family’s new crypto venture to the various steaks and universities that dot the ex-president’s resume of shady financial pursuits. The juxtaposition is apt, and it is not difficult to see how World Liberty Mutual could be yet one more way to funnel MAGA cash into Trump’s pocket. As noted crypto critic Molly White wrote ironically on X: “equitable access to finance is when we screw you all over equally.”
Personally, I think the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling from July is a more apt comparison than his roster of tacky ripoff products. The court essentially said presidents are immune from prosecution, and crypto has almost no regulatory oversight. Voila!
Many scholars saw this coming. For a while, cryptocurrencies have been called a solution in search of a problem, and they now seem to have been useful in answering this question: what sector has a rabid base and a right-wing lean that could help grant an authority figure the ability to “remove money from political control?”
Problem solved.