This presidential season has featured some truly shameless attempts to buy votes and sell policy. This spring, Donald Trump promised a room of oil and gas executives that if they raised $1 billion for him, he’d roll back a slew of environmental regulations on their behalf. Elon Musk has been paying Pennsylvanians $100 to register to vote, and now, as an additional enticement, he is delivering a giant, million-dollar check to one new voter who signs his petition in support of the First and Second Amendments, every day until the election. These are signs of the increasingly conspicuous billionairification of American politics, which I will tackle in this week’s and next week’s newsletter.

But for me the most naked pander of this presidential campaign season came at this summer’s Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, when first Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (whom Trump has said would have a job under him) and then Trump took the stage to promise that a Trump administration would simply direct the U.S. Treasury to buy up or retain cryptocurrency, helping secure its value for investors. Kennedy, who’d previously said he wanted to put the entire federal budget “on blockchain,” pledged the administration would buy enough Bitcoin to reach a reserve of four million — injecting perhaps $250 billion of federal spending into the crypto market. Trump, who has since announced his own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, and joked that he could pay off the entire U.S. debt with crypto, promised to create a “strategic national Bitcoin stockpile” running well into the billions and make the United States “crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world!”

Kamala Harris did not appear at the conference, though rumors had briefly circulated that she would. Instead, she told a Wall Street fund-raising event that as president she’d actively support “digital assets” and dispatched Chuck Schumer to participate in a Crypto4Harris event in which he promised ostensible pro-crypto legislation by the end of this year. (“Why are we here today?” Schumer asked. “Because we all support Vice President Kamala Harris to be our next president, and we all believe in the future of crypto.”) More recently, Harris has deployed a kind of outreach team to crypto investors, enlisted the help of Mark Cuban in courting crypto and, in a targeted appeal to Black men, named protecting crypto assets as one of five key policy priorities.

This was all pretty cringe — politicians of both parties nakedly sucking up to a constituency they don’t really understand by endorsing an asset class intended to evade and undermine the U.S.-led global financial order. It was also, as a matter of political calculation and timing, simply strange. Crypto investors have often defined themselves in terms of financial separatism, angling not just to avoid taxes on new fortunes but toward a more complete exit from the burdens of citizenship. As recently as the last election, neither party was touching crypto with a 10-foot pole. Even Trump, the mercenary opportunist and political avatar of America’s declining social trust, wrote in 2019 that “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.” In 2021 he told Fox Business that Bitcoin “just seems like a scam,” one that looked to him like “potentially a disaster waiting to happen.”

There hasn’t exactly been a bull run since. In the intervening years, crypto endured a spectacular crash, embarrassing scores of celebrities who had been paid to promote it, and though its value has recovered since 2022’s crypto winter, it has not yet even reached the level of its market-cap peak in 2021. At the time of the last presidential race, advocates could at least pitch the idea that crypto represented the future of American technology and the leading edge of Silicon Valley innovation. Today, artificial intelligence clearly occupies that space instead, with blockchain more like yesterday’s news, if not quite as much a discarded relic of the free-money, zero-interest-rate era as SPACs, NFTs and the metaverse. The high-profile frauds and scandals proliferated so widely that it stopped being so fun to make jokes or podcasts about them. The sector’s most famous figure is still Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced FTX founder currently sharing jail space with Diddy.

So what happened? What explains crypto’s sudden political salience and the bipartisan pandering that flows from it? You can tell the story in personal terms, with Trump’s three sons and Kamala Harris’s surrogate Mark Cuban tugging their respective candidates along. There are still a few true believers, imagining blockchain-use cases beyond speculative trading, and lobbyists talk about the rise of the crypto voter. But while perhaps 15 percent of Americans own some amount of Bitcoin, there’s little indication that many of them are voting based on obscure matters of regulatory policy. (In one recent poll of young men, often described as the natural audience and constituency for such appeals, cryptocurrency ranked dead last in importance among 27 political issues.)

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