Just a few days after Donald Trump posted a nearly $92 million bond for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll (and then went on to apparently defame her again), the presumed Republican nominee went on CNBC to talk a little bit about his newfound love of cryptocurrencies. “Crazy new currencies” is what he says he calls them now. “I do little things sometimes for fun. You know, make money with it. Have fun with it, too,” he added. Trump, you might remember, has dabbled in digital currencies before. There are the NFTs, depicting him as a glorious leader or in various kinds of ridiculous heroic guises, as a samurai or a cowboy. “I wish I looked as good as I do on those cards — that I can tell you. They give me muscles where, believe me, I don’t have them,” he said in a promotional video.
But Trump didn’t appear on the financial-news network just to give his thoughts on the crypto market — he had moneymaking schemes to talk about, made all the more urgent by his $500 million and rising debt to the U.S. court system. Trump is facing a little bit of a cash crunch at the moment, since the SPAC for his social-media network, Truth Social, appears to be tied up in litigation, and New York attorney general Letitia James has threatened to seize his assets if he doesn’t pay for defrauding the state over the inflated values of his properties.
Trump doesn’t appear to have much interest in HODLing bitcoin, he implied. However, he seems extremely happy to see that people are paying him in bitcoin for his “Never Surrender” gold sneakers, which are somehow both limited edition and made-to-order. “I will sometimes let people pay through bitcoin. I will let people get involved in—if you think of it, it’s an additional form of currency,” he said. Bitcoin broke through new all-time highs, above $72,000, on Monday morning.
He went on: “The last pair sold for $450,000,” he said. “People were going crazy for these sneakers. You probably were, too. Everybody was. Every friend I have had called me for a pair of sneakers. And I noticed that so many of them were paid for with the new currency. It’s a new cryptocurrency. I couldn’t believe the amount.”
Take all that for what it’s worth, but Trump does appear to see the utility that comes with loving crypto — namely, that there are a lot of people who own it and some of those people might vote for him. Elsewhere in the interview, Trump implied he wouldn’t crack down on crypto if he’s returned to the Oval Office. (To the extent that’s different from the Biden administration, under which a slate of bitcoin ETFs recently were approved, albeit reluctantly, is still to be determined.) The crypto lobby has, also, become an electoral force during this election and has already helped defeat California representative Katie Porter in her Senate-nomination bid.
Whatever the reason, Trump may be in need of even more crypto soon. During his interview, he went on to again go after Carroll, calling her “Ms. Bergdorf Goodman,” and said, wrongly, that she had leveled a “false accusation” against him. (He’s appealing.) A lawyer for Carroll told Maggie Haberman of the New York Times that the “statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions is between one and three years. As we said after the last jury verdict, we continue to monitor every statement that Donald Trump makes about our client, E. Jean Carroll.”
