The Atlantic

After its demoralizing defeat in November, the Democratic Party has undertaken an agonizing, months-long self-autopsy to determine how it lost some of its core voters and how to move past an entrenched, older generation of leaders. Zohran Mamdani, the presumptive winner of yesterday’s New York City mayoral primary, might provide some of the answers—to a point.

Mamdani, a 33-year-old, relatively unknown state assemblyman, ran an invigorated, modern campaign while embracing progressive—and in some cases, socialist—ideas to upset former Governor Andrew Cuomo. He is now on the precipice of leading the nation’s largest city. According to some Democrats, Mamdani—charismatic, tireless, optimistic, a master of social media—could be a new leader in a party that is desperate to move on from overly familiar faces.

Republicans hope they’re right. The GOP is eager to make Mamdani a national figure and hold up some of his ideas (city-run grocery stores! free buses!) as evidence that the Democrats are far to the left of the average voter.

[Michael Powell: The magical realism of Zohran Mamdani]

There are, of course, risks to drawing national lessons from a local primary election, particularly one in a city where Democrats make up almost two-thirds of the electorate. Moreover, Cuomo had singular, deep flaws and ran a listless campaign. The incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, wasn’t on the ballot, relegated to an independent run after facing allegations of corruption and allying himself with President Donald Trump. But for Democrats desperate to make sense of why their party is so unpopular, Mamdani’s win could at least provide a burst of energy, and a few ideas about how to move forward.

Democrats have been consumed with questions about what went wrong a year ago. Why didn’t more in the party realize that President Joe Biden was too old to win again? How did Trump make inroads with young voters and with the Black and brown voters who have been Democrats’ bedrock for generations? How did Trump make gains in some of the nation’s biggest and traditionally bluest cities? Did the party move too far to the left, or not far enough? And why was a billionaire ex-president promising tax cuts for the rich seen as the better bet than his opponent to lower prices for working- and middle-class Americans? Since Trump’s return to Washington, Democrats have managed to rally around their opposition to Trump’s tariffs, DOGE cuts, and hard-line immigration policies. But they have struggled to put forth a coherent positive vision, and to find the right messenger.

Few looked to New York City for hope. The mayor’s race at first seemed destined to be defined by Adams’s scandals. When Cuomo made his entry into the race, many expected that his name recognition and his support from wealthy backers would give him an easy win over a series of well-meaning but uninspiring challengers. Cuomo positioned himself as someone who would stand up to Trump and urged voters to look past his own scandals—he resigned in 2021 after a series of sexual-harassment allegations, which he denied—and to recall instead his level-headed COVID briefings. Of all the candidates, he argued, only he had the management skills to revive a city that has just seemed off since the pandemic.

But Cuomo ran a desultory campaign, limiting his exposure to reporters and, more important, to voters. His long-held ambivalence toward the city was evident, as were the rumors that he viewed Gracie Mansion merely as a stepping stone to higher office. He couldn’t shake his humiliating exit as governor. A late endorsement from former President Bill Clinton only reinforced the notion that Cuomo represented an aging, tarnished generation of Democrats. “Cuomo relied on older establishment endorsements that no longer hold weight in the city,” Christina Greer, an associate political-science professor at Fordham University, told me. “Cuomo also underestimated the extent to which New York voters are tired of disgraced politicians using public office as their contingency plan for life.” (Bill de Blasio, the former New York City mayor who has feuded with Cuomo for years, told me that he ran a “grim, fear-based campaign with no authentic big ideas.”)

[David A. Graham: How voters lost their aversion to scandal]

To categorize Mamdani at the beginning of the race as an afterthought would have been an insult to afterthoughts. He has served not even five years in the state assembly, and has little of the experience generally thought needed to manage a civic workforce of more than 280,000 people and a budget of $115 billion. (The New York Times’ editorial board deemed him unqualified for the job.) But Mamdani did have energy and charm, and no shortage of ideas that were quickly turned into easy-to-digest slogans such as “Free buses” and “Freeze the rent.” He relentlessly focused on affordability and economic issues, a welcome message in a city with an extraordinarily high cost of living and stark income stratification.

Mamdani revealed himself to be remarkably adept at communicating his message, mastering social-media memes and delivering powerful speeches that evoked far more of Barack Obama’s loft than Biden’s whisper. He said yes to seemingly every interview and every podcast, tossing aside the caution traditionally preached by the focus-group-wielding political-consultant class. He tapped into liberal New Yorkers’ anger over Gaza. He resonated with young people, including young men, who not only turned out for him but also volunteered for his campaign, creating an enthusiastic army of believers that created a noticeable contrast with Cuomo’s support from donors, unions, and establishment figures. In the race’s final days, a cheerful Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan, a metaphor for the tirelessness he brought to the race.

“The Democrats nationally need to start doing what Zohran just did. When we metaphorically sit at the kitchen table and empathize and offer passionate solutions, we win,” de Blasio told me. “We didn’t do that in 2024, and that was a big reason we lost.”

Mamdani did what so many Democrats failed to do last fall: He excited new voters, focused on economic issues, and communicated his story well. And most of all, he won, including in racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. As of this writing, it appears that there will be no need to rely on multiple rounds in New York City’s new ranked-choice voting system; although Mamdani did not crack the 50 percent threshold last night to win the nomination outright, he surpassed Cuomo by about eight points, and the former governor conceded.

“Mamdani created a movement around his candidacy, and the big lesson for Democrats is that young voters are looking for a larger social-political movement and not just an anti-Trump party,” Basil Smikle, a New York–based political strategist who has worked for Cuomo and Hillary Clinton, told me. “His victory suggests there’s a needed reformation of the Democratic coalition, and repudiation of incrementalism but also a more wholesale shift from establishment politics.”

But the reverberations from Mamdani’s candidacy aren’t all reassuring ones for Democrats. Republicans have mocked his socialist ideas by evoking the barren supermarkets of the Soviet Union. They’ve seized on his previous calls to “Defund the police” (Mamdani called for reducing the NYPD budget in 2020; he was the only candidate in the Democratic field this year to not pledge to hire more cops). A few Republicans have trotted out racist and Islamophobic stereotypes (Mamdani is of Ugandan-Indian descent and is Muslim). Some Democrats, too, are leery of Mamdani’s call for new taxes on businesses and the rich, warning that such policies could lead to a wealth exodus from New York. Republicans have pointed to the sinking poll numbers of Chicago’s progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson, as evidence that liberals can’t govern. Last night, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on social media, “Congratulations to the new leader of the Democratic Party,” tagging Mamdani. Trump today went one step further, posting that Mamdani was a “100% Communist Lunatic.”

Mamdani’s depiction of Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide threatens to unnerve some members of the city’s large and politically active Jewish population. Within hours of Mamdani’s acceptance speech, Republican Representative Elise Stefanik of New York sent a fundraising appeal calling him a “Hamas Terrorist sympathizer.” Mamdani has defended the pro-Palestinian slogan “Globalize the intifada” but has denied accusations that he is anti-Semitic. He has said that he supports an Israel that provides equal rights to all of its citizens, but he has repeatedly dodged questions about whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state.

[Jonathan Chait: Why won’t Zohran Mamdani denounce a dangerous slogan?]

“Mamdani is a gift to Republicans. They will link every Democrat to his far-left policy proposals,” Susan Del Percio, a Republican strategist who worked in Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral administration, told me. “As mayor of New York City, every single thing he does will be held under a microscope by Democrats and Republicans alike. And some of these things are really out there.”

When the mayoral race began, the conventional wisdom was that the Democratic primary would be the de facto general election. That is no longer quite the case. Before last night, Cuomo had previously signaled that if he lost the primary, he might run in November on another ballot line, believing that the glow around Mamdani might wear off with more time and scrutiny. (Those close to Cuomo think that an independent run, though possible, might now be less likely given the margin of his defeat this week.) And while the Republican nominee, the anti-crime activist and radio-show host Curtis Sliwa, seems to have little chance, Mamdani’s win might open the door again for Adams; in a remarkable plot twist, the mayor has told associates that he can now position himself as the steadier choice to keep the job. A person close to Trump told me that the president might enjoy wading into the race in his former hometown and would consider endorsing Adams, though he might opt against it out of concern that it would hurt Adams more than help him.

Still, the Democratic nominee will be considered the favorite. If Mamdani wins, there will be only so much that his fellow Democrats can learn from the specifics of the race, given New York’s liberal tilt. But maybe there will be some lessons that are less about ideology and more about tactics—having energy, communicating clearly and frequently, and focusing on personal economic issues. “I’ve already heard from some Democrats who worry that this guy is going to get us all labeled as socialists,” the Reverend Al Sharpton, the civil-rights leader and Democratic stalwart, told me. “But he hit on something; he connected with something. Mamdani kept showing up. Democrats need to keep showing up.”

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

American Masters, an award-winning documentary series in its 39th season on PBS, promises to tell “compelling, unvarnished stories” about the nation’s most important cultural figures. The program’s most recent story, though—Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, about the cartoonist-author of Maus, the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel depicting the Holocaust, and a self-described “poster boy for books being censored”—seemed to need a bit more varnish on its approach to Donald Trump. In April, two weeks before it aired on PBS stations, a 90-second segment of the film in which Spiegelman referred to the president’s “smug and ugly mug” was cut from the film at the behest of public-media executives. (The details of this incident were first reported by Anthony Kaufman for Documentary magazine.)

PBS has been under attack by the Trump administration since January. By the time Disaster Is My Muse was aired in shortened form, the network was already under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission, and the White House had a plan to claw back $1.1 billion in federal funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which passes money on to PBS. “Their attempt at preemptively staying out of the line of fire was absurd; it wasn’t going to happen,” Spiegelman told me this week. “It seems like it would be better to go out with dignity.”

Alicia Sams, who co-produced the film, told me that she received a call from the executive producer of American Masters, Michael Kantor, at the beginning of April. It was less than a week after a contentious congressional hearing in which the network was accused of being a “radical left-wing echo chamber” that is “brainwashing and trans-ing children.” According to Sams, Kantor said that Disaster Is My Muse would need one further edit before it could be shown: The filmmakers had to remove a short sequence where Spiegelman reads aloud from the one of the few comic strips about Trump that he’s ever published, in a zine associated with the Women’s March in 2017. There was no opportunity for negotiation, Sams said. The filmmakers knew that if they refused, they would be in breach of contract and would have to repay the movie’s license fee. “It was not coming from Michael,” she told me. “It was very clear: It was coming from PBS in D.C.”

[Read: PBS pulled a film for political reasons, then changed its mind]

Kantor deferred all questions to Lindsey Horvitz, the director of content marketing at WNET, the producer of American Masters and parent company of New York’s flagship PBS station. (Sams told me that in her understanding, WNET leadership had agreed with PBS about the cut.)  Horvitz provided The Atlantic with this statement: “One section of the film was edited from the theatrical version as it was no longer in context today. The change was made to maintain the integrity and appropriateness of the content for broadcast at this time.” A PBS spokesperson said, “We have not changed our long-standing editorial guidelines or practices this year.” (The Atlantic has a partnership with WETA, which receives funding from PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)

Molly Bernstein, who co-directed Disaster Is My Muse with Philip Dolin, said this was “absurd.” She told me that the team had already been through discussions with PBS over how to make the film compliant with broadcast standards and practices. A few profanities are spoken in the film, and some images from Spiegelman’s cartoons raised concerns, but the network said that these could stand as long as the film aired after 10 p.m., when laxer FCC rules apply. “We were delighted that was an option,” Bernstein said. A bleeped-and-blurred version of the film would not have worked. “It’s about underground comics. It’s about transgressive artwork.”

The team did make one other change to the film, several months before its broadcast: Some material featuring Spiegelman’s fellow comic-book artist Neil Gaiman was removed in January after a series of sexual-assault allegations against Gaiman were detailed in a cover story for New York magazine. (Gaiman denies that he “engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.”) The filmmakers say they did this on their own, to avoid distractions from the subject of the film. But they also said that Kantor told them PBS would likely have had that inclination too.

In any case, to say the snipped-out material about Trump was “no longer in context today” is simply false. Spiegelman’s commitment to free speech is central to the film. So are his repeated warnings about incipient fascism in America. (“That’s what I see everywhere I look now,” he says at one point.) They’re also clearly relevant to the forced edit of the broadcast. Indeed, the censored clip was taken from an event involving Spiegelman in June 2022 called “Forbidden Images Now,” which was presented in association with an exhibit of Philip Guston paintings that had itself been postponed for political reasons after George Floyd’s murder, presumably on account of Guston’s having made a motif of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen.

[Read: Don’t look away from Philip Guston’s cartoonish paintings of Klansmen]

Just a few months before that lecture, Spiegelman learned that Maus had been removed from the eighth-grade curriculum in McMinn County, Tennessee, on account of its rough language and a single panel showing the naked corpse of his mother following her suicide. “The tendencies brought up by this frantic need to control children’s thoughts,” Spiegelman told MSNBC’s Art Velshi in 2023, are “an echo of the book burnings of the 1930s in Germany.”

The filmmakers told me that Spiegelman’s free-speech run-in with the county school board was instrumental in persuading WNET to back Disaster Is My Muse. “When Maus was banned, interest in Art and the relevance of his story increased,” Sams said. Only then did American Masters pledge its full support, licensing the film before it had even been completed, and supplying half its budget. In the lead-up to its broadcast, PBS also chose to highlight Spiegelman’s focus on the First Amendment in its promotional materials. The network’s webpage for Disaster Is My Muse describes him as “a pioneer of comic arts, whose thought-provoking work reflects his ardent defense of free speech.” (Neither PBS nor WNET would explain how a decision had been made to censor footage from a documentary film that is in no small part about censorship.)

A broader “context” for the edit can be found in PBS’s other recent efforts to adjust its programming in deference to political considerations. As previously reported in The Atlantic, not long before Kantor’s call with Sams, PBS quietly shelved a different documentary film, Break the Game, that was set to air on April 7, apparently because it had a trans protagonist. The film, which is not political, was abruptly placed back on the schedule within two hours of my reaching out to PBS for comment. (The network did not respond to questions about why Break the Game’s original airdate had been canceled.)

If these efforts were meant to forestall pressure from the White House, they have roundly failed. Two weeks after Disaster Is My Muse aired—with its reference to Trump removed—the president attempted to dismiss three of five board members at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A few days after that, he issued an executive order directing the board to terminate all funding, both direct and indirect, to NPR and PBS. (Both moves are being challenged.) But just imagine how much harder the administration would be going after PBS if Trump had seen the clip about his “smug and ugly mug”!

“This seems like volunteering to pull the trigger on the firing-squad gun,” Spiegelman told me. The end of Disaster Is My Muse includes some footage from a 2017 free-speech protest on the steps of the New York Public Library, where Spiegelman read out the lyrics of a Frank Zappa song: “And I’m telling you, it can’t happen here. Oh, darling, it’s important that you believe me. Bop bop bop bop.” The political climate has only gotten worse since then, he said. “There’s no checks and balances on this. This is severe bullying and control, and it’s only going to get worse.”

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Early Monday morning, the leader of the free world had a message to convey. Not about the economic turmoil from tariffs, any one of the skirmishes playing out abroad, or a surprise shake-up in his White House staff. Instead, President Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to post about something called the “$TRUMP GALA DINNER,” with a link to gettrumpmemes.com.

A visit to the website paints a slightly fuller picture: Buy as many tokens as you can of Trump’s personal cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, and you could be invited to a private event later this month at the Trump National Golf Club outside Washington, D.C. There, you will get the unique opportunity to meet with the president and “learn about the future of Crypto.” The gala looks very much like a thinly veiled gambit to pump up the price of $TRUMP, a so-called memecoin that is mostly owned by Trump-backed entities. Funnel the greatest amount of money to the president of the United States, and you could win some face time with the big man himself.

In 2021, Trump called bitcoin a “scam.” Now he seems to understand exactly what crypto can do for him personally: namely, make Trump and his family very, very rich. The $TRUMP gala is one part of a constellation of Trump-affiliated crypto efforts that includes Trump Digital Trading Card NFTs, a crypto company called World Liberty Financial, and a bitcoin-mining firm. According to an analysis by Bloomberg, the Trump family has already banked nearly $1 billion from these projects. Long before he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower a decade ago, Trump’s public image was rooted in his business prowess. But compared with his real-estate projects or The Apprentice, crypto is already turning into his most successful venture yet.

[Read: The crypto world is already mad at Trump]

Trump perhaps wouldn’t be president at all if it wasn’t for crypto. During the 2024 campaign, the industry was among his campaign’s biggest donors. That money flowed in from both crypto corporations and individual donors, such as the bitcoin billionaires Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (The identical twins gave $1 million each in bitcoin to the Trump campaign, but had to be refunded because they exceeded the legal donation limit.) In exchange, Trump promised the imperiled industry a fresh start after four years of a Biden-sanctioned crypto crackdown. Last summer, as the keynote speaker at the annual bitcoin conference, Trump promised that if elected, he would make America the “crypto capital of the planet.” The crypto industry is now getting its money’s worth. Consider the crypto firm Ripple, which spent four years squaring off against Biden’s regulators in federal courtrooms and donated $4.9 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Yesterday, the new administration dropped the government’s case, as the White House has effectively stopped enforcing crypto rules.

Trump is still tapping crypto magnates for money. On Monday, he attended a super PAC’s “Crypto & AI Innovators” fundraiser, for which donors shelled out $1.5 million to get in the door. But for Trump, crypto has quickly become about more than soliciting campaign donations and rewarding supporters. In September, Trump announced the launch of World Liberty Financial, a decentralized-finance company to be managed by his sons Eric and Don Jr. and a couple of young entrepreneurs. (One previously ran a company called Date Hotter Girls, while the other is the son of Steve Witkoff, a longtime Trump ally serving as special envoy to the Middle East.) Then, in January, just before Inauguration Day, he launched $TRUMP. Like all memecoins, it has no underlying business fundamentals or links to real-world assets—the point is to just quickly capitalize on a viral trend, conjuring value out of practically nothing. This proved extremely lucrative almost immediately: $TRUMP initially spiked in value before crashing back down, at one point accounting for almost 90 percent of the president’s net worth. (There’s also an official $MELANIA coin, if that’s more your thing.)

With crypto, Trump has found an unnervingly effective way to transmute the clout and power of the nation’s highest office into cold, hard cash. Last week, World Liberty Financial announced that its cryptocurrency, USD1, would facilitate an Abu Dhabi investment firm’s $2 billion stake in the crypto exchange Binance. Eric and Don Jr. are also on the crypto press circuit, with plans to speak at the 2025 bitcoin conference later this month. Some of Trump’s decisions as president, such as creating a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” may also function to inflate his crypto riches, in the sense that a rising tide lifts all boats; promoting crypto as part of the national interest can only support the idea that these coins are worth buying into.

[Read: Trump’s crypto reserve is really happening]

Crypto is a conduit for the self-interest that has defined Trump’s entire political career—an M.O. that has consistently blurred the boundary between public and private, country and party. For the most part, Trump has been especially good to those who line his pockets, rewarding them with all kinds of preferential treatment.

During his first term, Trump enriched himself the old-fashioned way—by way of merchandising deals and real-estate investments across the globe. But with crypto, all of that has ratcheted up in Trump’s second term. In crypto, money is fast, loose, and digitally native—properties that have made his personal dealings in the industry even more galling, and potentially more vulnerable to outside sway. Someone looking to gain access to Trump might have once had to pay thousands of dollars a night for a room at Mar-a-Lago for a chance encounter with the president on the golf course. Now the door is open for influence from almost anyone in the world with an internet connection.

The White House insists that there is nothing to see here. “His assets are in a trust managed by his children, and there are no conflicts of interest,” Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in an emailed statement. Keeping that wealth in a trust may do very little to sever the connection between Trump and his riches, though, depending on the exact conditions of the arrangement. Even when Eric and Don Jr. serve as a buffer, the money stays in the family.

Crypto’s anonymous nature poses unique challenges in understanding exactly what is happening—transactions on a blockchain are typically posted using long strings of numbers known as addresses, rather than verified by legal name. By all accounts, to interact with $TRUMP is to funnel money directly into the president’s pockets, but the campaign-finance laws that caused the Winklevosses’ exorbitant donations to be refunded don’t apply here. Nothing is stopping, say, agents of foreign powers, or tech billionaires looking for favorable tariff treatment, from using $TRUMP to gain access to the highest echelons of government. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are starting to get it: Yesterday, three GOP senators joined Democrats to block a major crypto bill that would serve to benefit World Liberty Financial.

Ironically, Trump’s embrace of crypto is pumping money into the industry while simultaneously damaging it. Since the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried in 2022, the image of crypto as a haven for scams and hackers has loomed large. At a moment when the crypto industry is trying to claw its way back to respectability and legitimization, Trump has taken every opportunity to cement it in the minds of the Americans as nothing more than a vehicle for channeling money directly to him. In crypto, “there are many people who have ethics, and have been working for years to build the system because they believe what they are doing is in the public interest,” Angela Walch, a crypto expert and former law professor, told me. “And what this does is it makes all the messaging that has come from extreme crypto critics about, ‘It’s only a tool for grift,’ and makes it look like that.”

By hitching their wagon to Trump, the industry’s leaders have unleashed a force they can’t control. The moment the president cashed in on crypto, the calculus shifted. Like the hot dogs at Costco, “being the president” is the loss leader; crypto pays the bills.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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In 2019, President Donald Trump asserted that cryptocurrency was “highly volatile and based on thin air.” The description is still highly accurate—but Trump seems to no longer believe it. These days, he praises the crypto community as brimming with “the kind of spirit that built our country and is exciting to watch.”

What happened between Trump’s first and second terms is fairly predictable. Crypto advocates flattered him, and then he and his family personally invested in various crypto-related ventures. Just before his inauguration in 2025, he launched a $TRUMP meme coin, which reportedly has made his family and their partners a lot of money. Trump’s oldest sons recently invested in a bitcoin-mining operation. And they hold majority stakes in World Liberty Financial, making them major dealers in the crypto world. That might help explain why the president has declared that he wants the United States to be the “crypto capital of the world.”

What’s less predictable is how the president’s change of opinion could destabilize the American financial system. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with the Atlantic staff writer Annie Lowrey, who covers the economy and politics, about Trump’s plans to integrate crypto into the government and mainstream banking. What happens when Trump weakens regulation on a notoriously unstable currency? Who benefits? Who is likely to get duped? And when the crypto-induced financial crisis comes, how will it surprise us?

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

News reader: The bitcoin boom persists. The price has not dipped since Donald Trump was elected—skyrocketing 40 percent in just the past two weeks. The president-elect vowing to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet.”

Hanna Rosin: Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have been around for a while now. And headlines about crypto always have a boom-and-bust quality: overnight billionaires and tech entrepreneurs, scams and collapses on absurd scales.

 It wasn’t clear which way the crypto story was headed, because Trump opposed it in his first term, but now he’s made a big turnaround. Trump has become very pro-crypto, pushing to change regulations and create a world where crypto plays a much bigger role in Wall Street and in Washington—all while he and his family stand to profit from crypto investments of their own.

I’m Hanna Rosin. And this week on Radio Atlantic: crypto in the new Trump era.

With so many high-stakes changes coming from the administration, it’s easy to push the crypto story aside.

Annie Lowrey: There’s just so many things going on right now, and people are so excited about some things and so upset by other things.

Rosin: That’s Atlantic staff writer Annie Lowrey, who writes about the economy and politics, and she’s here to tell us why we shouldn’t lose sight of this one, because what Trump is proposing could have real risks for all of us. And the people who are paying the most attention are the ones pushing for it to happen*.*

Lowrey: Crypto legislation is only the No. 1 most salient priority for crypto people. So the people that members of Congress are going to hear from are the crypto people.

Rosin: So let me just start basic: What was the initial idea of cryptocurrency, and how did it evolve over time?

Lowrey: Cryptocurrency initially started as basically a way to create a financial structure outside of governments and outside of the banking system.

Andreas Antonopoulos: Bitcoin is disruption. It’s disruption on a scale that most people haven’t even begun to imagine.

News reporter: In the world of libertarian high techies, skepticism about government-issued paper money abounds.

Jake Tapper: If enough people use bitcoin, it could help bring down the dollar. You think that’s a real possibility?

Lowrey: It was really, really outsidery. It was kind of utopian.

Antonopoulos: Radical disruption. Completely decentralized money with no borders.

Brock Pierce: Every industry in the world is going to be affected, and it’s going to be a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Lowrey: It was very, very techy. And from the very outset, it was simultaneously a currency, so supposed to be a store of value, an investment—perhaps something that you could put money in and get more money back later—and also a financial technology that would allow people to transfer money between each other without having to go through the kind of financial conduits that are controlled by governments and banks.

Don Tapscott: For the first time now in human history, people everywhere can trust each other and transact peer to peer.

Lowrey: So a certain level of anonymity and privacy—that you wouldn’t necessarily have, you know, Uncle Sam looking over your shoulder—and again, just something that was outside the aegis of the system that a lot of early crypto adopters really felt was suspect, something that could be, you know, universal, global.

Antonopoulos: Bitcoin is about the other 6 billion. Bitcoin is about unbanked and borderless.

Lowrey: There were some other kind of kookier ideas out there too, right: that this would come to supplant the dollar; that, you know, this would be a way to rebuild the entire globe’s financial architecture. I think none of that is true at this point. But it was a very heady idea, and I feel like the idea of crypto has in some ways gotten smaller and smaller and smaller.

Rosin: So what evolved? What’s going on with crypto these days?

Lowrey: When I say that the idea has gotten smaller, I think that unless you are a die-hard crypto booster in Silicon Valley or elsewhere, you no longer think, probably, that this is going to supplant the global financial ecosystem, that this is going to lead to the demise of the dollar and the euro and the yen, that this is going to eliminate banking and radically change how we use money.

This is a speculative instrument, right? So I’m going to buy and hold with the hope that it’s going to go up in price. Or, you know, I’m going to bet against it and hope that it’s going to go down. Or I’m going to invest in these crypto companies, and I think this one is going to make a lot more money than that one.

And I would note that I feel like people somehow underrate the degree to which crypto remains a foundational part of black markets, even today, right? It’s been a big part of our regulatory skepticism and legal skepticism of it—is that it is used for human trafficking. It is used for drug trafficking. It is used for terrorism, state sponsored and not state sponsored. And a lot of crypto activity happens outside of the United States precisely because companies cannot or do not want to comply with American securities and banking laws.

Rosin: You said, “speculative instrument.” What does that mean exactly?

Lowrey: I mean, so for a lot of people, it’s a very, very lucrative investment, particularly if you bought early, right?

News clip: He became a millionaire at 24, all by investing in bitcoin.

Lowrey: But we say it’s a speculative asset. You know, it’s a price that is unusual in the sense that it’s completely untethered. So when we think about investments in general—so a stock, right? You know, if I’m going to buy a share of a stock, I’m not just getting the value of the stock itself; I’m getting the money that that company is going to remit to shareholders. The value of the stock and the amount of money that’s going to get remitted to shareholders is based on the company’s core financials, what they’re buying and selling.

Bitcoin is different in the sense that there’s nothing underneath at all. There’s no way in which it’s generating and throwing off cash over time, and there’s literally nothing there.

It’s like a lottery ticket. Even something like gold, which is a really speculative asset in the same way—gold itself does have, like, industrial uses. There are things you can do with gold. You know, there’s really almost nothing like it. You know, even Beanie Babies or tulip bulbs, right? You have the Beanie Baby. You have the tulip bulb.

Here, it’s, like, nothing. It’s a bunch of numbers. That’s it.

Rosin: Right, right. And what’s the significance of that? Like, I know it sounds weird and alarming and virtual, but why is that an important thing to think about? Because money is also nothing. It’s just, like, a thing that we’ve all agreed is worth a certain thing that can be traded for other things.

So why does it matter that there is no there there with bitcoin?

Lowrey: It means that the price is purely speculative and completely and only based—literally only solely based—on interest in the asset.

So imagine that everybody decides, No more bitcoin. We’re all moving to ether or another cryptocurrency. There’s nothing underlying the value of bitcoin. If bitcoin had some beating heart of an investment, right—like, it was an apartment building where you could rent the apartments out, it was a farm where you could eat or sell the apples, any of a million other things I could think of—there would still be some base value to it. And the thing with crypto is that there’s nothing.

And so you’ll see these, you know, smaller cryptocurrencies just completely crash and burn. And so it means that they’re much more volatile, and it also means that they’re harder to assess the value of, because there’s no underlying value. It’s just literally a bet on who’s going to want it at what price.

Rosin: Okay. I think I’m starting to understand, in your voice—you haven’t said this yet—but I think what I’m starting to understand is it’s: The volatility probably makes everything more risky, and people involved in it more vulnerable, and makes it more vulnerable to manipulation.

Lowrey: Absolutely. And so if we were talking about somebody that we wanted to advise to have investments but to have pretty safe investments, usually we talk about, like, a bond, right? And bonds are low risk because they come with these kind of steady income streams—even, like, a government bond, you’re going to need the government to decide not to pay the bondholder in order for that to be a bad investment in some cases. And there’s sort of—I’m simplifying a lot here, right? And with crypto, you might be pretty confident that the price is going somewhere, but there’s no guarantees about anything, and it’s like you’re in a room in which you’re trying to suss out what everybody else is trying to do.

Rosin: Is the riskiness theoretical? How volatile has it actually been?

[Music]

Lowrey: I mean, it has boomed and busted and boomed and busted and boomed and busted, and it’s boomingish right now but kind of busting a little bit at the moment.

If you remember back to just a few years ago, crypto had this big mainstream advertising push. The Staples Center was renamed the Crypto.com Arena. You started to see ads on television challenging people to embrace risk and invest in crypto.

Matt Damon: History is filled with “almosts,” with those who almost adventured, who almost achieved. But ultimately, for them it proved to be too much.

Lowrey: In the 2022 Super Bowl, there were these ads with LeBron James and Larry David that were hawking crypto.

Commercial actor: Like I was saying, it’s FTX. It’s a safe and easy way to get into crypto.

Larry David: Eh, I don’t think so, and I’m never wrong about this stuff.

Lowrey: And just months later, FTX, which was Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto mega-exchange, it collapsed. And that fed a giant blowup in the crypto market, this enormous collapse in prices.

News clip: In less than a year, crypto or digital currencies have now lost $2 trillion in value after peaking at $3 trillion in November 2021.

Lowrey: One thing that I’ve also written about is that, you know, in 2021 and 2022, you had a lot of targeted advertising in Black communities, which were slow to adopt crypto—kind of late to get in. But there was a ton of advertisement basically, you know, kind of making this argument to Black folks who might have been kind of skeptical investors that this was their chance outside of, you know, these stodgy U.S. financial companies that had redlined them and hadn’t treated them fairly—that this was their big opportunity.

And because there’s such great racial wealth disparities in this country, I think that this was a very kind of attractive case, and a lot of Black folks bought in when the bubble was about to burst, right—when the bubble was getting blown up. And then, you know, they bought in when crypto was really expensive, and then they saw the price of their investment crater.

Rosin: So into this boom-bust world of incredible volatility walks Donald Trump. What does his return to office mean for crypto?

Lowrey: So Donald Trump had been a crypto hater for a long time. He was like, I don’t like it.

News clip: Trump tweeted yesterday, quote, “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.”

Lowrey: He’s a real-estate guy, right? These are real assets.

Rosin: Tangible, touchable assets, yeah.

Lowrey: Tangible, touchable assets. But he’s also, you know, part of the scam economy, right? His Trump Steaks and his Trump shoes and his Trump Bibles and his Trump University.

And my sense of what happened by talking to people in this industry is that crypto folks began flattering Donald Trump, and they started sending him a ton of money, and they started setting up business ventures with his family members—with his sons—and all of a sudden, he became wildly pro-crypto, probably more than any but just a couple handful of members of Congress.

Donald Trump: The energy and passion of the crypto community is the kind of spirit that built our country, and it is exciting to watch as you invent the future of finance.

Lowrey: And so he said he was going to make, you know, the United States the crypto capital of the world. He was promising pro-crypto legislation. He said that the Biden administration had basically been strangling this nascent industry and punishing it by attempting to get it to comply with United States securities laws and banking laws. And that’s where we are right now.

Trump: Together we’ll make America the undisputed bitcoin superpower and the crypto capital of the world.

Rosin: All right, so Trump is into crypto now, and I get that that’s risky. You’ve said that. But what if I never want to buy crypto or I never even want to think about it? Why do I care? What does it matter to me?

Lowrey: Right now, you or I or anybody can go buy crypto assets, right? We can go get bitcoin. We can go get any number of crypto assets. And that risk is ours. We can lose all our money on crypto if we want to. Crypto is not really knitted in with the American financial system, although that is changing slowly and is about to change quickly.

And so when these really volatile assets crash, you can have a lot of kind of personal pain. A lot of people could personally get scammed. They can lose a lot of money. But there isn’t broad public risk. Donald Trump is planning on doing a few things.

So first, he’s planning on cutting financial regulations for all financial businesses, so deregulating. He’s reducing financial regulatory enforcement through the SEC and the other alphabet-soup agencies that do that in the United States. He’s thinking about creating a crypto reserve, so using public assets to purchase bitcoin, ether, probably some other currencies. And then he’s promised to sign a bill that would change the regulatory status of crypto, among other things.

At the same time, it’s also worth noting that his family and he are kind of in the crypto business now. They’re staked in a company called World Liberty Financial, which sells tokens. His older sons recently invested in a [bitcoin]-mining operation. And before the inauguration, they launched a $TRUMP meme coin, which cratered in value but appears to have made his family and their partners a lot of money, just from skimming from the transactions.

And so all of these things are happening at once. And the thing that I fear is that you could end up with less price volatility because you have this kind of stable government investment and this government interest—now a public interest—in stable crypto prices.

But you’re socializing risk. It could be the taxpayer that’s called on to bail out crypto businesses, the taxpayer that’s putting, you know, public resources on the line. And I worry that Donald Trump is taking risk away from crypto investors—particularly big crypto magnates—and is putting it on the American taxpayer, on the citizen, in a way that, you know, I don’t know that the taxpayer, the citizen is going to have those benefits redound to them.

Rosin: Okay, that was a lot. Let me make sure I understand that. So before, crypto was in a separate world, and whoever invested in it just took on the risk themselves. It wasn’t integrated in the American economy in any particular way. And was it heavily regulated? Is that one of the things Trump is changing?

Lowrey: So crypto was interesting. And this is all really technical. Basically, there had been an argument from the crypto industry that crypto assets were different than the assets that were regulated by financial regulators like the CFTC and the SEC—basically that crypto needed its own legislation.

American financial regulators, by and large, rejected this argument. And so Gary Gensler, the former head of the SEC, basically said, Almost all crypto assets are securities, and securities are regulated by me here at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and we don’t need new legislation. We need all of you to comply with securities laws, which are quite strict.

News reader: SEC Chair Gary Gensler describing the world of cryptocurrencies as the “Wild West.”

Lowrey: And I think to give the crypto industry some benefit of the doubt on this, there were some questions about, like, Okay, is this a commodity or a security? Who should regulate? How does this rule exactly apply for a bunch of really technical reasons? But that was the world that we’re in.

And from my perspective, it worked fine, right? You know, there were lots of crypto companies in the United States. You know, the financial system was mostly protected from this quite scammy, quite volatile industry. But the industry didn’t like it, in part because Main Street and Wall Street banks declined to do a lot of business with crypto firms, because of questions about how they would be regulated.

If they did that, would it be safe for them? Would they get into trouble with their regulators? And that’s really one of the things that’s changing now that we’re on the precipice of pro-crypto legislation coming out that, I think, is going to dramatically increase risk in the American financial system.

[Music]

Rosin: When we’re back: What does a crypto-doomsday scenario look like? And how worried do we really need to be?

[Break]

Trump: Last year, I promised to make America the bitcoin superpower of the world and the crypto capital of the planet, and we’re taking historic action to deliver on that promise.

Yesterday, I signed an executive order officially creating our strategic bitcoin reserve. And this will be a virtual Fort Knox for digital gold to be housed within the United States Treasury. That’s a big thing, Scott.

[Applause]

Rosin: Okay, one thing you said that isn’t so clear to me: You mentioned a bitcoin reserve. Like, I understand what an oil reserve is. I can visualize it. I can get what it’s for. What is a bitcoin reserve, and why is that interesting to Trump?

Lowrey: I wish I had a great answer for this, because there’s no point. This is a pointless, stupid thing to do, right?

Rosin: Uh-huh. (Laughs.)

Lowrey: Sorry, I don’t know if I should say that.

Rosin: No, I mean, maybe I feel better. Maybe that’s why I don’t understand it. Yeah.

Lowrey: This is a pointless, stupid thing to do on a lot of levels. So the plan, you know—and again, we don’t know yet—but the plan is to take $100 billion or so and to buy bitcoin and ether and a bunch of other cryptocurrencies.

And the U.S. government owns, depending on the day and the market value, roughly $20 billion of cryptocurrency that it has seized as a civil-asset forfeiture or in criminal cases. So they probably put that in there.

And look—the United States has a bunch of strategic reserves for strategically important goods. So petroleum: They will release that when gas prices spike because of crude-oil shortages. We have strategic stockpiles of kinds of pharmaceuticals, certain minerals that are important in defense, that sort of thing.

But yeah, what’s the strategic point of the United States holding crypto? There is none, right? And this is a huge, huge boon—huge giveaway—to the crypto industry, an enormous one.

Rosin: Okay, so you have inched towards answering my big question, which is: Let’s say I never plan to buy or even think about crypto. I listen to this conversation. We talk about weakened regulations, no more enforcement. What risks do I have? Like, what risks am I holding?

Lowrey: Well, there’s two. The first has to do with public corruption. Donald Trump has, you know, taken a stake in this venture where we’ve had a foreign national with involvement with the American legal system, regulatory system effectively buying him off, right? Investing in these tokens, and then Trump gets a stake of that. He gets money from it.

Members of his family or representatives of his family have reportedly been holding talks to take a stake in the U.S. arm of Binance, which is the world’s biggest crypto exchange. That’s a company that pled guilty to violating American money-laundering laws.

Because of those kinds of laws, it runs a smaller offshoot in the U.S. And soAmericans don’t actually access, generally don’t access the big Binance. My favorite fact about Binance is that it will not even name what jurisdiction it is based in.

And the founder of Binance pled guilty to violating money-laundering rules and is reportedly seeking a pardon from Donald Trump.

Rosin: So that’s effectively just another way in which we are becoming a corrupt, banana republic kind of country.

Lowrey: Yes, this is like the Trump Hotel next to the White House on steroids, right?

Rosin: Right, right, right.

Lowrey: So I worry about that. And I worry about President Trump and his agents in office not acting in the public interest in ways that might be opaque.

And so then the second, more material big problem that I’m worried about: So say you don’t have any investment in bitcoin. And so you’re like, Yeah, you know, the government’s getting in on it. But, you know, I’m not personally exposed. The thing that I am worried about is that Wall Street firms, in particular, will take the pro-crypto legislation and they will reformat parts of their business as crypto businesses in order to skirt financial regulations.

You know, this might sound outlandish, right? Maybe you’d say, Oh, wait. But all these Wall Street companies, aren’t they regulated by the CFTC and the SEC and OCC and the Fed and Treasury? And can they really do that? And would they really do that?

And I would say that, yeah, the U.S. financial industry excels in regulatory arbitrage. That’s, like, one of the main things that they do, is figure out how to get out from regulations. And so I worry about them investing in crypto, and crypto showing up on their books. But, you know, volatile crypto prices, I think that that’ll be somewhat self-limiting.

And the thing I really worry about is, you know, a repeat of 2008.

[Music]

Lowrey: I worry about bitcoin being today’s credit-default swap, today’s mortgage-backed security. I worry about it being the instrument that—through its lack of regulation, through its opacity—being, you know, the lit match with a lot of kindling around.That’s really what I worry about.

And that could be affecting people who have nothing to do with crypto, who have no idea it exists, who don’t have crypto investments but have a mortgage or have a retirement account or, you know, want to open a business by getting a small-business loan. Because the financial system, it’s based on trust. And, you know, if we increase risk in an opaque way in the financial system and reduce trust in it, I am terrified.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t sound outlandish to me, and that’s exactly what I was going to say. The reason it doesn’t sound outlandish is because we all lived through the subprime-mortgage crisis, and we understood, eventually, that there were a whole bunch of things happening behind the scenes, like complicated financial arrangements, that weren’t exactly under the radar, but they did turn out to deeply affect the average American, and not just people who are out there speculating.

Lowrey: And that really was a fin-reg problem. And, you know, we had Dodd- Frank in the wake of that, which, you know, really made the system safer and has held up. And now they’re going to gut it.

Rosin: Right. We have a lot of soul searching and response to that, and yet that doesn’t really matter at this moment. Like, we’re not reading the crypto crisis coming in exactly that same way. Why?

Lowrey: I think crypto is seen as this fringy, edgy, hyper-speculative: Oh, it’s boomed and busted before.

Rosin: Ah, okay.

Lowrey: That’s my guess, is part of what is happening here. And I think that history repeats itself and we forget so often.

So one of the things that Dodd-Frank did was it set up this little institution in Washington called the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, because there was a recognition that the many financial regulators that the United States has—from the Fed to kind of obscure ones like OCC and, you know, important ones like FDIC—they’re not really consumer facing.

And so they set up an organization that was really aimed at consumers, would really talk in plain language, and would not just help consumers who are getting ripped off by financial firms but would also watch for problems.

Rosin: Like, Don’t sign that mortgage paper.

Lowrey: Yeah.

Rosin: Exactly, exactly.

Lowrey: And then could communicate those problems to the Fed and Treasury and other organizations that could maybe do something about it. And that agency’s just gone.

Rosin: Right.

Lowrey: (Laughs.)

Rosin: I knew—as soon as you said that, I was like, Right. Of course. Right. That is gone. So we did set up guardrails that are now just destroyed.

Lowrey: Destroyed or in the process of being destroyed. The issue is still in court, but the Trump administration has functionally closed the CFPB. No work is getting done there right now.

Rosin: So aside from the subprime analogy, are there risks that are unique to crypto, like, different from what we saw unfolding?

Lowrey: The other risk with crypto—and in some ways, I think people underrate this—but it’s really scammy. There are a lot of companies that kind of get set up overnight, and they make a bunch of promises, and they target people who might not have a lot of savvy, not a lot of technical knowledge. And these people get ripped off, and they get ripped off in bitcoin, so it’s really hard to get the money back.

And so, you know, if you or I walked into a bank and we said, I want to send $10,000 to somebody in Southeast Asia, that would trigger a bunch of internal flags, both within the bank and also regulatory flags, right? Like, Why are you doing that? You know, Are you sure? Are you absolutely positive you want to do that? Okay. And probably somebody would sort of say, Okay, are you getting scammed? Did you read this pamphlet? Are you absolutely positive? And, you know, the problem—and ultimately, if you did really want to do that, like, it’s your money. You could send it. But there’s guardrails there.

And, you know, with crypto, we now have all of these, you know, older Americans, veterans, people trying to start businesses, people who are just, like, looking for a boyfriend on Hinge or a girlfriend on Bumble who are getting scammed. And this industry is worth, like, billions and billions of dollars. And there’s the kind of, like, little ticky-tacky personal scams, which, you know, people can lose their entire life savings in—you know, the little texts that come up: Hey. It’s Steve. How are you doing?

But then there’s also businesses that get set up that completely misrepresent what they’re doing and scam larger numbers of people. And, you know, we’ve had several Ponzi schemes in crypto.

And so I really, really worry about that too.

Rosin: At the total other end, what about other state actors?

Lowrey: Ugh.

Rosin: Like, is it vulnerable in that way? Did you say—

Lowrey: Yeah, it’s so bad. So, you know, it was just a couple weeks ago. Probably most people didn’t notice this. But, you know, there was a Dubai-based exchange called Bybit that got hacked. And it seems like the hackers, something called the Lazarus Group, which is run out of North Korea—out of the North Korean military dictatorship.

There’s a tremendous amount of state-sanctioned theft, state-sanctioned terrorism that runs through here. And one thing that I quite worry about is: If the United States government is invested in these crypto businesses, and these crypto businesses are sort of being under-regulated in the American system, you know, what happens if China or North Korea or another adversarial country—or just, you know, an adversarial terrorist group that isn’t state sponsored—comes in and decides to screw with the crypto markets?

So one way in which this could happen is something—I’m not going to get into the details of it, because it’s very detailed—but it’s something called a “51 percent attack,” which is that in a given crypto market, if somebody can take over kind of 51 percent of a blockchain, they can control the whole blockchain and kind of change rules within it. And, you know, we haven’t totally seen this happen, because it would be expensive to do. But I don’t know—maybe if you have state resources, it’s not so expensive to do, and maybe you want to do it now that Washington is going all in.

Rosin: Right.

Lowrey: And, you know, going back to what we were talking about before, about, you know, 2007–08 and the global financial crisis: One thing that I worry about a little bit is, you know, one way or another, Donald Trump is not going to be president four years from now, right?

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Lowrey: And it, well, I—

Rosin: From your mouth to God’s ears, Annie. But yes.

Lowrey: (Laughs.) I’m going to put a small—according to current American law, he shouldn’t be president four years from now.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Thank you.

Lowrey: And financial crises tend to take a long time to brew.

Rosin: Ah, okay.

Lowrey: It took a long time for the 2007–08 crisis to really kind of sink in and the conditions to come that, you know, it just all started to fall apart.

And I think that especially if, you know, the U.S. doesn’t go into a downturn, the markets are probably going to be fine for a while. It’s going to take a while for Congress to pass legislation. And, you know, I really worry that it might not be the president after Trump, if current law holds, or the president after that or the president after that—that’s one thing that I really worry about.

Rosin: Wait. That you worry about or have hope in? The idea that they’re, you know—if he’s not president forever, people will reinstate some regulations, some rules. They’ll put a block in the slow brewing of collapse.

Lowrey: That’s a good point, but no. I mean, I don’t think they’re going to bother to reinstate rules afterwards, is my guess.

Rosin: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Lowrey: Who is going to prioritize floor time in the House to make sure that they get all the little Dodd-Frank provisions back? And industries, you know, the stronger they get, the stronger they lobby.

And so if you, all of a sudden, have all of these Wall Street, Main Street banks, crypto companies coming in and saying, like, No, no, no, no. Don’t go back to the old regime. Don’t do that.

Rosin: Right. Right. The motivations run in the opposite direction. Like, they’re suddenly making unregulated money through crypto, and why would anyone have the motivation to stop that train?

Lowrey: I mean, I think it’ll take another financial crisis for them to fix it—

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Lowrey: —is my guess.

Rosin: Well, Annie, thank you for paying attention, and thank you for coming on the show.

Lowrey: Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/podsub. That’s theatlantic.com/podsub.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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