Of all the things that have been said about Trump, and will be said about him in the future for decades to come, his buffoonery will likely be a consistent theme. Enemy, fraud, conman, lazy, dotard, traitor, racist are likely contenders. But among the plethora of vitriol we can rightly throw at the crazy asshole orange man, “enemy of Bitcoin” is another.
Bolton’s new book, The Room Where It Happened, includes a section where Trump ordered Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, to “Go after Bitcoin”.
His rationale? Trump wanted to attack Bitcoin under the pretense of “fraud”.
Trump, long skeptical of cryptocurrencies, attacked Bitcoin back in 2018, ordering his administration to make what ground they could against the growing technology. His administration has since released new guidelines on the trading and selling of cryptocurrencies, which are far from rational in their application of taxes as it pertains to selling.
In the United States, any and all trades of cryptocurrency are taxable events, which is peculiar (and frankly ignorant) given that traders routinely can make hundreds of trades a day in the highly volatile market.
“We want to make sure that technology moves forward, but on the other hand, we want to make sure that cryptocurrencies aren't used for the equivalent of old Swiss secret number bank accounts,” Mnuchin said in February. The message here is clear: the U.S. government hates any and all potential for financial autonomy and anonymity. Cryptocurrencies allow for elements of both, and as such represents threat to the establish banking cartels. Those cartels are part and parcel of modern neoliberal capitalism, which in its attempt to regain an ever-falling rate of profit, pursue strategies of debt as a means of keeping the working classes slavish and servile.
Bitcoin, remaining stead in a relatively stable price range as of this writing, has, like the rest of the world, withstood the orange man so far. We can only hope that as the tech continues to grow, it can find allies in future governments, and if not them, in the real power of the masses of people who can benefit from autonomous financial assets.
