Donald Trump, the Bitcoin Evangelist, Has Upended the Federal Government's Stance Toward Cryptocurrency

David Bailey, a longtime Bitcoin investor and evangelist, had tempered expectations in early 2024 when he first pitched Donald Trump's campaign

Early in 2024, David Bailey, a longtime Bitcoin investor and evangelist, began tempering expectations when he first pitched Donald Trump’s campaign on the political upside of embracing cryptocurrency.

Even after Trump pledged over the summer to make the U.S. a Bitcoin haven and the industry spent tens of millions of dollars supporting his presidential bid, Bailey suspected Trump’s overture might be a fleeting appeal for crypto voters rather than a lasting commitment.

Yet since returning to office, Trump has upended the federal government’s wary stance toward cryptocurrency just as he said he would. Earlier this month, he signed an executive order directing the Federal Reserve to hold Bitcoin alongside gold—a move long sought by crypto advocates and once considered improbable.

“If a year ago you put me into hypnosis and said, ‘Describe to me your deepest dreams of what could happen,’ this would be straight-up fantasy,” said Bailey, who owns the Bitcoin conference where Trump first stepped out as a pro-crypto candidate. “I never would have believed it could happen.”

Trump’s return to power was achieved in part through an unorthodox coalition-building strategy. He courted groups who might’ve been overlooked by Republican candidates, like Bitcoin enthusiasts, making direct appeals with policy promises tailored to specific audiences.

For those who played along, the rewards have come swiftly.

The Lumbee Tribe in North Carolina, for instance, had reliably voted Democratic in presidential elections for decades. But an eight-year pursuit by Trump for the battleground state’s predominant native group — culminating with his promise last fall to grant the tribe much-coveted federal recognition — appeared to resonate at the ballot box. In Lumbee-rich Robeson County, where Barack Obama twice won handily, Trump secured a 28-point victory, his largest margin across three races.

Three days after taking office, Trump signed a memorandum declaring it U.S. policy “to support the full federal recognition” of the Lumbee Tribe, the strongest statement to date from the Oval Office.

Transactional? Perhaps, but that’s politics, said Lumbee Tribe Chairman John Lowery, who told CNN, “It feels good to be courted.”

“Everyone is in their lane and they’re not going to get out of it. You’re either hardcore this or that,” Lowery said. “We are hardcore for those who are showing the effort and putting in the work to get our vote. And we have a tendency to reward that more than any ideological view. There’s something about good old retail politics. Trump has done that on this issue.”

Trump’s unconventional approach extended to union workers, a longtime Democratic stronghold. Amid the outreach, and with many of his members increasingly leaning toward Trump, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien stunned Democrats by delivering a primetime address at the Republican National Convention (getting a lukewarm response from the GOP audience). Later, the union withheld an endorsement in the presidential race for the first time in decades, a considerable blow to the Democratic ticket.

The strategy paid off for Trump: He won 45 percent of the vote from union households, according to a CNN exit poll, a striking watermark for a GOP candidate.

For O’Brien, the calculated risk proved worthwhile during a Nov. 21 visit to Mar-a-Lago, where he advocated for Lori Chavez-DeRemer, then a Republican lawmaker from Oregon, to lead the Department of Labor. After three hours of intense discussions, Trump agreed to nominate Chavez-DeRemer and, most critically, vowed not to relent in face of expected pushback from business groups who saw her as too sympathetic to unions, O’Brien told CNN. The next day, his transition team announced Chavez-DeRemer as his pick for Secretary of Labor and she was confirmed earlier this month.

The episode solidified the Teamsters as “one of the most influential unions in the country,” O’Brien said.

“We know we got criticized by our peers in organized labor, but we’ve watched our organization do the same thing every single campaign and expect a different result. We didn’t want to take that approach.”

Trump’s early efforts to appease key constituencies comes as his political operation is already plotting how to motivate his unconventional coalition to show up for Republicans in next year’s midterm elections. While some in Trump’s movement have predicted a more permanent political realignment is in the offing, the White House remains concerned that the president’s appeal to certain groups may not translate to GOP congressional candidates.

It’s unclear, for example, whether Libertarian voters and supporters of ex-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can be convinced Trump needs to keep Republican majorities in Congress, a White House official told CNN. Trump appealed to both groups during the campaign — a calculation his political team made early after watching the Libertarian candidate siphon votes from him in 2020.

Trump’s effort to court Libert