This long-time Trump figure was pivotal to his orange-pilling
It took months of educating Trump’s team on bitcoin before ever meeting at Trump Tower
President Donald Trump | noamgalai/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
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Trump didn’t take a direct route to Bitcoin — having sold three NFT collections on Polygon long before he met with bitcoin mining executives at Mar-a-Lago last June.
And Trump is obviously no maxi. He and the First Lady have their own memecoins on Solana, not to mention his DeFi project World Liberty Fi has actively courted crypto teams for token swap deals and other types of partnerships.
Still, something clearly happened last year that changed his tune toward bitcoin, which he’d initially called a “scam against the dollar” in the thick of the 2021 bull run.
Turns out that thing was Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort.
On this week’s episode of Empire, David Bailey, CEO at BTC Inc, gave host Jason Yanowitz the inside scoop on how he and two other Bitcoiners were able to orange-pill Trump heading into election season.
“I was hanging out in Puerto Rico with a friend of mine that lives here and we were sitting around — this is in January 2024 — and like, we’re a company but we are all in on bitcoin, all in emotionally, spiritually, financially. Our mission is hyperbitcoinization and we actually [wonder] all the time, “how do we accelerate hyperbitcoinization?”
“And so, we were sitting around like ‘damn, if we could just get in front of Trump, like we could pitch bitcoin to Trump and get him bought in on it, and it’d be huge for bitcoin.’”
By happenstance, Bailey’s friend could make that connection — through her sister, whose godfather is Manafort. “So she was able to get a call set up with Paul, and so that’s how it got started.”
From there, it took months of Bitcoin education with Trump’s team before getting all the way to the big man, who had one key concern that hadn’t yet been resolved: Bitcoiners say bitcoin is going to destroy the dollar.
Trump likes the dollar — so what gives?
“And we’re like, ‘well, you know, America built Fort Knox and stored the world’s gold in Fort Knox — that didn’t undermine the dollar; it made the dollar stronger than ever. And if you want the dollar to stay strong into the future, then we got to build the digital Fort Knox and need to have the world’s digital gold stored in America as well. That’s how we get another 200 years of the dollar being relevant.’”
According to Bailey, Trump instantly understood and agreed to the next step — meeting in person at Trump Tower. And the rest is history.
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