President Donald Trump's efforts to push cryptocurrency as an asset for the U.S. government to hold smells rotten, Trump-favoring CNN commentator Doug Heye conceded in a CNN panel on Friday evening.
This comes as Trump hosts a dinner for the top people holding a meme coin from which he personally profits — and as the Senate considers a "stablecoin" bill known as the GENIUS Act that stands to potentially benefit a crypto company partially held by Trump's family.
"Look, I agree with Doug," said fellow conservative panelist Jonah Goldberg. "I agree with everybody here. This is just really gross-seeming, and so unnecessary."
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"The one place I disagree with Doug on this is that I actually think his crypto policies are terrible, too, and that the idea of a strategic reserve of Bitcoin is ludicrous," Goldberg continued. "It's this idea, it's sort of like the sovereign wealth fund stuff, but dumber insofar as we've kind of come up with an alternative currency to the dollar when our entire economic system is based on the idea of us being the reserve currency for the world. And he says, well, let's come up with this other thing that — there's no reason for the United States government to stockpile Bitcoins or any of this stuff. And so I think in some ways this is much better for political fights and all that kind of stuff. But the policy itself, I think, is ludicrous."
Heye had little pushback on that specific point.
"I will say not all of Donald Trump's policies are always well thought out, and on strategic reserve, I don't disagree," said Heye. "But clearly the previous administration was — they were bad crypto, they were bad crypto at all. You know, no crypto, none of the time. Obviously, he's opened the door to this in some ways that are good on policy. The personal on this is obviously not just bad optics but bad priorities."
