It has long been suspected that cryptocurrencies would be the subject of electoral propaganda for the 2024 US presidential elections, and indeed yesterday Donald Trump brought them into the heart of the campaign.
Today, in particular, a video is circulating online that is a clip from a speech given by Trump yesterday in which the former president, now running for re-election, urges crypto supporters to vote for him.
Summary
Crypto news: Donald Trump’s election campaign
The 2024 presidential elections in the USA will take place on November 5th, so now the electoral campaign is really heating up.
The two main candidates are the current president Joe Biden, candidate for the Democratic Party, and the former president Donald Trump, candidate for the Republican Party.
For reasons not yet entirely clear, many members of the Democratic Party are opposed to the use of cryptocurrencies, so much so that there is even a third candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is a staunch bitcoiner.
It is possible that Donald Trump’s election propaganda is trying to steal votes from Kennedy, since the latter does not seem to have real chances of winning, also because it does not seem that there are many bitcoiners who could vote for Biden.
Actually, during this election campaign, the current Democratic president did not strongly attack the crypto sector, although the SEC president, Gary Gensler, whom he appointed in 2021, is doing so.
Democrats vs. Republicans
In the USA there are only two major parties that have been winning all presidential elections for over a century, more or less alternately.
The last president who was neither democratic nor republican was actually Millard Fillmore, who in 1850 succeeded Zachary Taylor, elected in the distant 1849 in the ranks of the Whig Party. However, it should be remembered that the Republican Party was the one that took the place of the Whig.
The last independent to win the elections in the USA was John Tyler in 1841.
Even this time there doesn’t seem to be any real possibility that someone other than the Democrat Biden or the Republican Trump could win, even though Kennedy enjoys some minimal consensus.
During the democratic administration of Biden, a strong aversion to the crypto sector has spread among various Democratic Party politicians, perhaps mainly in reaction to the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried first financed many Democratic politicians, and then turned out to be nothing more than a scammer. In fact, the biggest crypto scammer in the entire USA.
Until 2021 inclusive, in fact, it seemed that there was even a bipartisan agreement in parliament to approve a new framework law on cryptocurrencies, but in 2022 this agreement fell through.
Since then, the Democrats have increasingly positioned themselves against it, while Republicans seem to be generally more permissive on average.
Donald Trump’s invitation to crypto lovers during his election campaign
Despite all this, Donald Trump’s invitation to cryptocurrency supporters to vote for him should currently be considered only as a typical electoral propaganda gesture.
Actually, Trump seems to have changed his mind about it.
It should not be forgotten that, when he was still in office as president of the USA during the crypto bullrun, Trump declared that he would ban Bitcoin if its price rose to $100,000.
However, he later changed his mind, and that promise must now be considered completely unfulfilled.
Actually, first he launched some of his NFT to finance his new electoral campaign, and then it was discovered that he owns several million dollars in cryptocurrencies in his wallet.
Now Trump has also stated that he accepts donations in cryptocurrencies for his election campaign, and that he will stop hostilities towards the crypto sector in the USA, and that he will embrace this new technology.
In reality, he has already embraced it himself, and what he is doing now is promising that his potential government will be much less strict towards the crypto sector than Joe Biden’s was.
The chances of success
It is worth noting that the failure of FTX, due to the fraudulent strategies of Sam Bankman-Fried, occurred during the democratic administration of Joe Biden, so it seems really difficult for Democrats to attract the votes of bitcoiners and cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
However, this may not play a fundamental role in the outcome of the November elections.
Actually, until recently it was thought that Trump had a strong advantage over Biden in terms of approval, but the gap seems to have narrowed in recent months. Probably the legal issues that the former president is facing are weighing heavily, and they could indeed cause him to lose some consensus.
At this point Trump could indeed want to appropriate Kennedy’s votes, who also presents himself as independent but comes from the Democratic party. So in theory Kennedy should take votes away from Biden, and Trump would want those votes to go to him.
However, it must be said that even a possible victory by Biden may not have a particularly negative impact on the crypto sector, because in almost four years of his government the only real problems caused by the USA to the crypto sector are those related to SEC complaints.
Actually, the SEC, for example, sued Ripple at the end of 2020, when Biden had not yet taken office, and the two court rulings that declared XRP is not a security, and that the SEC had to approve Bitcoin spot ETFs, arrived in 2023 right under the Biden administration.
Therefore, if the outcome of the elections is still uncertain, with Trump still slightly ahead, in any case it does not seem very likely that the future US government will be able to sink the crypto sector.
