Trump's commitment to cryptocurrencies is in line with the sector's right-wing philosophies

Former President Donald Trump announced his family's latest project in a livestream on X last Monday: World Liberty Financial, which will function as a kind of crypto exchange.

Trump's commitment to this emerging, often scandal-plagued sector is not a particularly new development. In fact, it was very predictable, as the fundamental premises of cryptocurrencies have been based to a surprising degree on right-wing political thought for about a decade.

The relationship between crypto and the right stems in large part from the fact that crypto seeks to move financial transactions out of the purview of centralized, democratic systems. The right-wing nature of this shift has been noted by everyone from left-leaning scholars and academics to right-leaning venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen, who has noted that crypto is “literally right-leaning technology that is much more aggressively decentralized and much more comfortable with entrepreneurship and free voluntary exchange.”

I've slowly become accustomed to accepting this political orientation. I graduated in the midst of the housing crisis, when distrust of banks and the politics surrounding them reached critical mass thanks to movements like Occupy Wall Street. Cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin in particular – were also emerging at this time. Like countless others of all political stripes, I was curious about cryptocurrencies and eager to engage with philosophies and technologies that promised better answers to the question of how to distribute wealth, and by extension, money itself.

In sectors like journalism and healthcare, exciting projects emerged that often had more to do with blockchain than crypto. And yet, the crypto criticism from those early days has outlasted most of these projects. When these projects failed, the autopsies revealed not just close encounters with new, liberating financial processes, but rather predatory practices aimed at getting marginalized groups “on the crypto Kool-Aid.”

If Trump's commitment to cryptocurrencies seems like a novel development, consider the 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 rest of his life, Golumbia argued that democratic and financial processes, however messy and unattractive, were more trustworthy than cryptocurrencies, which sought to circumvent such regulatory processes entirely. Moreover, Golumbia regularly argued, “The economic framework upon which cryptocurrencies are based derives from right-wing and often anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the nature of central banking.”

I found simpler, less technical perspectives from authors like Stefan Eich, a political theorist and author of what was for me a defining article: “Old Utopias, New Tax Havens: The Politics of Bitcoin in Historical Perspective.” Eich’s basic argument is compelling and clearly stated: “The attempt to remove money from political control is itself a highly political act that raises profound questions of legitimacy.”

What a surprise, then, that an institution based on removing one's wealth and actions from political control ends up in the Trump universe. What a surprise that Trump ends up turning to a sector where there are many political actions that raise, in Eich's words, “profound questions of legitimacy.”

Since World Liberty Financial's announcement, the Trump family's new crypto company has been eagerly compared to the various steaks and universities that grace the ex-president's shady financial activities. The comparison is apt, and it's not hard to see how World Liberty Mutual could be another way to funnel MAGA money into Trump's pocket. As noted crypto critic Molly White wryly wrote on X, “Equal access to finance means we rip you all off equally.”

Personally, I think the Supreme Court's immunity ruling from July is a more apt comparison than its list of tawdry rip-off products. The court essentially said presidents are immune from prosecution and cryptocurrencies are subject to virtually no regulation. Voilà!

Many academics have seen this coming. Cryptocurrencies were seen for a while as a solution in search of a problem, and now they seem to have helped answer this question: What sector has a fanatical base and a right-wing tendency that could give an authority figure the ability to “take money away from political control”?

Problem solved.