The news that President Trump made $1bn from cryptocurrency in his first year back in office is not a story about wealth. It is a story about the collapse of institutional authority. And as always, the British financial regulators are late to the party, wringing their hands over ‘renewed digital asset rules’ as if a few more paragraphs in a white paper will tame the beast.
Consider the facts. A man who once dismissed Bitcoin as ‘a scam’ has now personally profited to the tune of a billion dollars from the very asset class he derided. This is not hypocrisy. This is the natural outcome of a political system that has abandoned any pretence of moral leadership. Trump did not invent crypto, but he has become its avatar: brash, volatile, and utterly indifferent to the old rules.
The reaction from the City of London is predictable. The Financial Conduct Authority issues stern statements about consumer protection and market integrity. They demand ‘renewed rules’ as if the problem is a lack of regulation rather than a fundamental shift in the nature of money itself. But this is the same crowd that missed the 2008 crash, that failed to foresee the 2016 populist wave, that now stands blinking in the headlights of a fully digital, post-national financial system.
We have seen this before. In the late Roman Empire, emperors debased the currency to fund their excesses. Eventually, people stopped trusting the state’s coinage and turned to barter, to local credit networks, to gold. Today, the state’s monopoly on money is ending not because of debasement (though inflation helps) but because of technology. Cryptocurrency is not a fad. It is a return to a pre-state form of value exchange, dressed up in encryption and blockchain.
Trump’s billion is the canary in the coal mine. If a septuagenarian populist can net that much in a year through a volatile asset class, what does that say about the effectiveness of the regulatory state? It says that the state has become a spectator. It says that the real power now lies with those who understand that trust is no longer vested in institutions but in code.
The British regulators’ call for ‘renewed digital asset rules’ is a symptom of intellectual decadence. They believe that tweaking the law will restore order. They do not see that the law itself has been outflanked. The Fall of Rome was not caused by barbarians at the gate but by a loss of faith in the system from within. Today’s barbarians are not tribes but tokens.
And yet, there is a certain Victorian irony in all this. The Victorians believed in progress, in a stable gold standard backed by the Crown. They would look at Trump’s crypto billion and see the ultimate vulgarity: money without substance, wealth without work. But the Victorians also understood that empires fall when they fail to adapt. The British Empire collapsed because it clung to ‘rules’ while the world moved on.
So here we are. The former president has made a billion from digital nothingness. Regulators scramble to catch up. And the rest of us are left to wonder: is this the beginning of a new financial order or the death rattle of an old one? Perhaps both. History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And this rhyme sounds a lot like a dirge for the regulatory state.
Arthur Penhaligon
