The news arrives like a gunshot in a cathedral: Donald Trump, the man who once sold steaks from a catalogue and called Covid a democratic hoax, has reportedly pocketed a $1bn windfall from a cryptocurrency venture. The chattering classes are aghast, demanding transparency, demanding regulation, demanding that the global financial order summon the spirit of Gladstone and impose order on this digital Wild West. But let us not pretend this is about reforming finance. It is about the decadence of a ruling class that has swapped substance for spectacle, and it is a story that would make Gibbon weep.
Consider the historical parallel. The late Roman Empire was not undone by barbarians alone; it was corroded from within by a senatorial class that abandoned civic duty for personal enrichment, that traded the solidity of land and legion for the ephemeral gains of tax farming and venal office. Trump’s crypto windfall is the 21st-century equivalent: a man who once commanded the nuclear codes now gambles on digital tokens named after cartoon dogs, and his acolytes cheer because they mistake vulgarity for genius. The $1bn is not merely money; it is a testament to the collapse of any shared notion of value. When a pyramid scheme can make a former president a billionaire, we are not living in an economy. We are living in a circus.
And the cries for UK-led transparency standards? Noble, of course, in the same way that a Victorian temperance campaigner was noble for wanting to close the gin palaces. But the problem is not that the crypto markets are opaque. It is that they are parasitic. They offer no productive capacity, no civic good. They are the financial equivalent of a ghost: insubstantial, haunting, and ultimately destructive. The City of London, which once financed the railways that built an empire, now spends its days brokering the sale of digital nothingness. To demand transparency is to demand that the ghost show its face. But the ghost has no face. It is a symptom of a deeper rot: the intellectual decadence that mistakes cleverness for wisdom, and novelty for progress.
We ought to look to the Victorian era, not for its prudery but for its sense of public duty. When the British establishment faced the scandals of railway speculation in the 1840s, they did not merely demand more disclosure. They passed laws that reined in the speculators and redirected capital toward projects that actually built things. They understood that finance is a servant, not a master. Today, we have reversed this. We have made a fetish of liquidity, a god of the algorithm. And so we have a former president who can make a billion from a joke, while the steel mills rust and the bridges crumble. This is not a failure of regulation. It is a failure of culture.
The calls for UK-led standards are thus a distraction. They allow the establishment to pretend it is acting, when in truth it is complicit. The same politicians who now cluck their tongues over Trump’s crypto millions have spent decades deregulating the very markets that made them possible. They have embraced a globalised, abstracted economy that values the virtual over the real. A true response would be to abandon the fantasy that we can have an orderly digital casino. It would be to demand that capital be deployed only for productive ends, that wealth be earned through labour and ingenuity, not through speculation and hype. It would be to restore a sense of national interest, of shared endeavour, of the common good.
But I am a contrarian, and I know such talk is heresy in an age that worships disruption. So let me be blunt: Trump’s $1bn is a mirror held up to our time. It shows us a world where the biggest winners are the biggest hucksters, where the concept of value has been so thoroughly corrupted that a digital token can outrank a factory. The Victorian era, for all its faults, understood that a nation of shopkeepers must also be a nation of builders. We have become a nation of gamblers, and the British establishment’s talk of transparency is the equivalent of a casino owner calling for better lights at the tables. It changes nothing.
We need not more oversight. We need a moral revolution. We need to stop pretending that cryptocurrencies are the future and start admitting they are the past: a tawdry, decadent past that Rome would recognise, and that Britain, once the exemplar of industrial virtue, should be ashamed to lead. Instead, we crave a role in policing this farce. Let the Americans have their Trump and his digital millions. Let us have something better: a vision of an economy that serves the public, not the speculator. But that would require thinking, and thinking is hard. So we fall back on demanding transparency, and we pat ourselves on the back for our virtue. History will not be kind.
