Former President Donald Trump announced his family’s latest project live on X last Monday: World Liberty Financial, which intends to function as something of a crypto exchange.
Trump’s embrace of this nascent, often beleaguered sector is not a particularly new development. In fact, it’s highly predictable because for about a decade, the basic premise of cryptocurrencies depended surprisingly heavily on right-wing political thinking.
The relationship between crypto and the right stems in large part from how crypto seeks to move financial transactions beyond the reach of centralized democratic systems. The right-wing nature of this pivot has been noted by everyone from left-leaning scientists and academics to right-leaning venture capitalists such as Marc Andreessen, who noted that crypto is “literally a right-wing technology that is much more aggressively decentralized and much more comfortable with entrepreneurship and free voluntary exchange. “
For roughly a decade, the basic premise of cryptocurrencies relied surprisingly heavily on right-wing political thinking.
I came slowly to recognize this political rapprochement. I graduated college right into the housing crisis, when mistrust of banks and the politics around them reached critical mass thanks to movements like Occupy Wall Street. Cryptocurrencies—specifically Bitcoin—arrived at this time as well. Like countless others of all political affiliations, I was curious about cryptocurrencies, eager to entertain the philosophies and technologies that promised better answers to how to distribute wealth and, by extension, money itself.
Interesting projects would emerge in industries such as journalism and healthcare, often more related to blockchain than cryptocurrencies. And yet cryptocriticism from this early era has outlived most of these projects themselves. When these projects failed, autopsies revealed not mind-blowing plots with new liberating financial processes, but rather predatory practices that sought to get marginalized groups to “drink the crypto Kool-Aid.”
If Trump’s embrace of cryptocurrency seems like some new development, consider the very title of the late David Golumbia’s brilliant book, published weeks before the 2016 presidential election, “Bitcoin Politics: Software as Right-Wing Extremism.” For the remaining years of his life, Golumbia argued that while democratic and financial processes might be messy and unsexy, they were more trustworthy than cryptocurrencies, which sought to bypass such regulatory processes entirely. In addition, Golumbia has regularly claimed that “the economic framework on which cryptocurrencies depend is based on right-wing and often anti-Semitic 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 the seminal article “Old Utopias, New Tax Havens: Bitcoin Politics in Historical Perspective.” Eich’s basic argument is persuasively and clearly stated: “The attempt to remove money from political control is itself a highly political act that raises profound questions of legitimacy.”
So what’s the surprise that an entity based on removing one’s assets and actions from political scrutiny has emerged in the Trump universe. What a surprise that Trump ended up in a sector full of political acts that raise, in Eich’s words, “profound questions of legitimacy.”
Since the announcement of World Liberty Financial, there has been a rush to compare the Trump family’s new crypto venture to the various steakhouses and universities littered with the ex-president’s compendium of shady financial activities. The comparison is apt and it’s not hard to see how World Liberty Mutual could be another way to pour MAGA money into Trump’s pocket. As cryptocritic Molly White wryly noted on X: “fair access to finance is if we piss you all off equally.”
Personally, I think the Supreme Court’s July immunity decision is a more apt comparison than his list of tacky fraudulent products. The court essentially said that presidents are immune from prosecution and cryptocurrencies have almost no regulatory oversight. So!
Many scholars have seen this. For some time, cryptocurrencies have been called a solution in search of a problem, and now it seems that they have been useful in answering this question: what sector has a rabid base and a right-wing bent that could help give authorities the ability to “remove money from political control?”
Problem solved.