Jacob Ward's Warning | The History of Trump's Crypto Grift
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When did crypto shift from a 'noble' equalizer to a grift in politics?
there was a time when talk about crypto was pretty high-minded the people in my world who were talking about it really had these very noble goals for it i have a friend who was very a very moral person and He was very concerned with social justice issues and issues of equality, especially the differences between how people in the United States get to live and how people in less stable and more corrupt countries get to live. And he thought of crypto as one of these solutions. He basically said, you know, I think the idea is that people in other countries should be able to use this untraceable digital currency to access opportunities that typically have only been reserved for countries that have stable economies like ours.
He really thought of it as this great sort of leveler. But of course, that's not how we're thinking about crypto anymore, especially after this dinner last Friday in which President Trump took in millions and millions and millions of dollars in exchange for access to him at his Virginia golf club and access to him granted to people, most of whom seem to have been from other countries. Now, we've known for a time, right, that crypto had the opportunity, you know, had the sort of offer the opportunity to people to launder money. I once spent some time in Humboldt County in far Northern California, which is a big marijuana growing place. And I was doing a documentary about people trying to make the transition from illegal marijuana to then legal marijuana, and could they make that jump?
And one thing, you know, it's funny to go spend time with people who do that for a living because they live an entirely cash life. They can't bank at all because their stuff has been illegal all this time. And so the places, these places are just awash in stuff that they can buy in cash, motorcycles and guitars and all these hobby sort of things.
How did early supporters imagine crypto solving social and financial inequality?
And everywhere, not only would I bump into these sort of hobbyists, these really intense hobbyists, I would also bump into people giving money. a huge amount of attention to crypto. They were looking... I'd see these cards everywhere from various crypto companies trying to say, hey, here's a good place to put your money. And clearly, this opportunity to turn this cash into untraceable digital currency was something big for them. That was when I first started to get a hankering of just how helpful crypto could be to people who were trying to escape scrutiny from regulators. And until... really only a few years ago, President Trump was not into crypto. He used to talk about it as being worthless and based on thin air as recently as 2019, that was the line he took.
But he then got to be part of an NFT sale. Do you remember non-fungible tokens? This was like digital art that you could buy that was protected by this or sort of registered by the same kind of technology that crypto uses. It was, you know, these, these silly cartoons of apes and stuff that you could buy. Well, Trump offered one and, uh, this was when he was out of office and he, he, you know, these $99 pieces of art of Trump that were showing him really jacked up and muscles. Ridiculous. But he took in, the estimate is about $20 million on that sale. And people watching him and the crypto space say that that's really when things seem to have turned around. Suddenly, this guy was intrigued. Like, what is this thing in which I can cook $20 million out of nothing, literally out of thin air?
And NFT, as you know, doesn't give you actual ownership over anything. You just are registered as having paid for it. That's really all it is. So- That seems to have gotten Trump thinking about it. And that's when crypto people begin to try and get in front of him. And among them was a guy named Justin Sun. Justin Sun was an early crypto entrepreneur who did a huge amount of work trying to get in front of people who could help crypto be taken more seriously. And Justin Sun turns out to have been the top investor in the Trump coin that got him entrance to this dinner that took place last week.
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