If, like me, you have avoided paying attention to Donald Trump’s plan for a “strategic crypto reserve” because you don’t understand crypto, fear not. You only need to understand that it’s a(nother) huge rip off designed to secretly benefit Trump.
Like so much of Trump’s blather, a “strategic crypto reserve” sounds like something good, like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But as Paul Krugman explained, the crypto reserve consists of nothing other than “a hackable string of ones and zeroes on servers,” i.e. a speculative, virtual currency that is “almost always” involved in criminal activity such as money laundering or paying ransom. The sad thing is that Trump’s scam seems perfectly legal.
Forget the confusing details of how crypto works. Pay attention to what Trump is doing with it. Sen. Chris Murphy calls the crypto reserve the “clear winner when it comes to the contest for the worst of the [Trump] corruption. … It’s all just a shameless scheme for Trump to legalize large scale bribery, and shockingly, very few people seem to have taken notice.”
