It’s difficult to know where to begin with something this absurd, but perhaps the most honest place to start is the tale of a giant golden statue.
An actual, towering, 15-foot, gold-colored colossus of Donald Trump. It was commissioned by a group of cryptocurrency investors, aka "crypto bros,” to promote the $PATRIOT memecoin.
If you didn’t understand that, neither did I.
But if we thought homages to our Dear Leader couldn’t get any worse, I give you an obnoxious two-story Trump with his fist raised, following in the diabolical dictatorial footsteps of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Kim Jong-un
Apparently, the Trump family is trying to scuttle quietly away from the statue. But not because it’s offensive. To the contrary. The Trumps aren’t thrilled with the people who commissioned it.
They may be scumbags, as Trump himself might put it, but the irony is that these scumbags are in the muckety-muck with the Trump family.
Regardless, it’s hard to imagine Trump wouldn’t love to marvel at himself so large, even if the colossal statue would be the only thing that is large about him, other than his ass, stomach and bulbous head.
The “Donald Colossus,” as it’s called, is the kind of eyesore historians will hold up and ask, “WTF were these people thinking?”
Yet in that statue, grotesque, gilded, and hollow as it is, you can see the arc of the crypto industry’s Trump-induced delusion.
Tacky and tumultuous, authoritarian in aesthetic, reeking of desperate flattery — the statue and the crypto industry both. The statue is a perfect metaphor for an industry that mistook accessibility to power for stability. Already wobbling under its own contradictions and convoluted logic, Crypto decided the answer was to tie itself to a man whose entire adult life is a tutorial in how to extract value without creating it.
The symmetry is haunting.
As the crypto market shed more than $2 trillion in value, Bitcoin crashing under $61,000, the decentralized blockchain Ethereum crumbling, fear and greed indices collapsing, Trump and his family were not victims of such volatility.
They were beneficiaries of it. While retail investors fled, institutions pulled back, and regulators circled, Trump-branded crypto ventures had already done what Trump ventures always do — get in early, hype relentlessly, cash out strategically, leave others to absorb the damage.
It’s been Trump’s strategy since the 1980s. Some call it “the art of the steal,” instead of the bogus “art of the deal.”
Trump did not merely endorse crypto. He tossed the metaphorical coin into the pond of the presidency. He has erased the line between public office and private enrichment. And the GOP Congress feels no need to stop him.
He’s all over World Liberty Financial. The $TRUMP memecoin. Licensing arrangements. Token allocations. Ownership stakes are accumulating loudly before our eyes. Estimates of the Trump family’s crypto haul suggest upwards of $1 billion, figures so large and so murky that even seasoned financial analysts struggle to pin them down.
That ambiguity — the lies on top of lies — is Trump’s speciality.
Crypto’s great promise was decentralization and transparency. What it got instead was the most centralized, opaque, personality-driven grift apparatus imaginable, run through a president whose brand has always been leveraged without liability.
While the market absorbed inflation shocks, market volatility, withdrawals, and regulatory fear, among other things that are partially understandable, Trump incurred none of the downside.
His wealth ballooned as confidence drained from everyone else. If this sounds familiar, it should to anyone who has the least bit of understanding of Trump.
Everything Trump touches follows the same routine: hype it up, cheat investors early and often, walk away when it collapses. Atlantic City casinos, an airline that never took off, steaks no one ate, vodka no one drank, cologne no one sprayed, suits no one wore. A sham university and foundation. Media companies, real estate investors and the average Joe laborer, all screwed in the end.
Crypto didn’t break that pattern. It’s just the latest failure. And it was always out in the open.
The industry probably told itself that this time would be different because Trump was president. That his power would translate into regulatory and financial protection. That volatility could be managed if the right man’s backside was kissed long and hard enough. Hence the vomit-inducing statue. Oh, and don’t forget the flattering memes and money.
But Trump’s involvement did not flow back to the market.
The wreckage is no longer abstract. Trump Media collapsed by roughly 70 percent. Trump-branded meme coins disintegrated, some losing more than 90 percent of their value, others effectively evaporating.
World Liberty Financial shed nearly half its value. A Trump-backed mining venture stumbled almost immediately. The insiders, i.e. flunky Eric Trump, were insulated. Those faithful to the Trumps were not.
Trump does not build industries or sectors. He deflates them. He sells access, not profit. He monetizes false belief. Unless they are morons (One of Trump’s favorite descriptors), crypto leaders couldn’t possibly have failed to understand Trump’s record. They just chose to ignore it. How foolish.
Say what you want about their volatility, markets do have a way of smoking out a skunk. When you attach a dubious industry to an equally dubious man, his history written in bankruptcies and burn outs, the bottom-line eventually becomes clear.
Crypto’s collapse is being blamed on a litany of factors and fears. But the deeper failure is that it is an industry built on a history of skepticism that banked its legitimacy on the most self-serving “serial fail-preneur” in American finance history.
The result was a foregone conclusion, obvious to everyone except these desperate crypto bros. Trump did to them what he has always done. He got rich. Others paid. The only real mystery is why anyone expected a different ending.
