CNN
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Longtime Bitcoin investor and evangelist David Bailey calmed expectations in early 2024 when he first pitched Donald Trump’s campaign with the political advantage of embracing cryptocurrency. Even after Trump pledged to make the US a Bitcoin shelter over the summer, the industry spent tens of millions of dollars supporting his presidential bid, he suspected Trump’s overture was not a lasting commitment, but a fleeting appeal to crypto voters.
But since taking office, Trump has, as he said, overturned the federal government’s vigilant stance on cryptocurrencies. Earlier this month, he signed an executive order directing the Federal Reserve, instructing him to hold Bitcoin along with gold.
“If you hypnotize a year ago and say, ‘Explain your deepest dreams about what will happen,’ then this will be a straight fantasy,” said Bailey, who owns the Bitcoin Conference, where Trump first stepped down as a pro-crypto candidate. “I wouldn’t have believed that could happen.”
Trump’s return to power was partially achieved through an unorthodox coalition building strategy. He courted groups that may have been overlooked by Republican candidates like Bitcoin enthusiasts, and directly appealed with policy promises tailored to a particular audience.
For those who played with the rewards came quickly.
For example, the Randy tribe of North Carolina had certainly voted for Democrats in presidential elections for decades. But Trump’s eight-year pursuit for the dominant native group of battlefield states – culminating in his promise last fall, giving the tribes a massive federal recognition appeared to resonate in the ballot box. In Randyrich Robson County, where Barack Obama won twice, Trump secured his biggest margin of 28 points in three races.
Three days after taking office, Trump signed a memorandum of understanding declared the strongest statement from the oval office, the Lumbee Tribe’s US policy of “fully supporting federal recognition.”
transaction? Perhaps, but he said it was politics, he told CNN.
“Everyone is in their lane and they’re not going to get out of it. You’re either this or that,” Lowery said. “We’re hardcore for those who are working to show their efforts and get the vote. And we tend to reward it more than any ideological view. There’s something about good old retail politics. Trump did that on this issue.”
Trump’s unconventional approach has been extended to union workers, a longtime democratic hub. With many of his members increasingly leaning towards Trump, Teamster President Sean O’Brien surprised Democrats by giving a primetime speech at the Republican National Convention (which gives him a warm response from the GOP audience). The union then took a significant blow to Democrat tickets, with the first presidential election support in decades.
The strategy paid off for Trump, according to the CNN exit poll, an impressive watermark for GOP candidates.
For O’Brien, the calculated risk proved valuable during his visit to Mar-A-Lago on November 21. Mar-a-Lago defended Lori Chavez-Deremer, then a Republican lawmaker in Oregon, and led the Department of Labor. After three hours of intense debate, Trump agreed to nominate Chavez Deremar and, most importantly, vowed not tolerating in the face of the expected pushback from a business group that saw her as too sympathetic to the union, O’Brien told CNN. The next day, his transition team was confirmed earlier this month when Chavez Delemer announced his choice of Labor Secretary.
The episode solidified Teamster as “one of the nation’s most influential unions,” O’Brien said.
“We know we’ve been criticized by our peers in organised labor, but we see our organization do the same thing with each campaign and expect different outcomes,” he said. “We didn’t want to take that approach.”
Trump’s early efforts to appease major constituencies are because he already plans to motivate his unconventional coalition to show up to Republicans in next year’s midterm elections. While some of the Trump movements predict that a more permanent political restructuring will be in the future, the White House is concerned that the president’s appeal against certain groups may not be translated into GOP Congressional candidates.
For example, it is unclear whether supporters of libertarian voters and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can be convinced that Trump needs to maintain a Republican majority in Congress, White House officials told CNN. Trump appealed to both groups during the campaign. His political team is a calculation that he made early after seeing libertarian candidate Siphon vote from him in 2020.
Trump’s efforts to bring libertarians to justice last summer – including a speech at the national convention – he endured the boo before he promised to forgive Ross Ulbricht, the founder of an illegal online market called the Silk Road. Libertarian tickets have earned the lowest share of votes since 2008. A day after taking office, Trump fulfilled his pledge to forgive Ulbricht.
Similarly, Trump will be appointed Kennedy’s Secretary of Health and Human Services shortly after the election after vowing a prominent vaccine, with skeptics likely to have a role in overseeing health issues in his administration.
Angela McCardle, then-Libertarian Party chair, has publicly argued that giving Trump a platform for the convention paid off her members.
“Don’t expect perfection,” she posted on X this week. “win!”
But not everyone is happy with this arrangement. Current party chair Stephen Nehira called Ulbriccht’s tolerance “a good deal from the libertarian movement,” but added that libertarians are naive if they thought Trump wanted “more than our vote.”
“It’s even more naive to think that we can’t throw away when Rep. Thomas Massey is no longer in line and we are no longer convenient,” Nehaila said.
Trump’s early actions on cryptocurrency have attracted several criticisms, including from supporters within the industry who have fallen into the heightened economic benefits of digital assets. Trump’s tone change last year, once a vocal opponent for Bitcoin, came when his family launched a crypto venture that spearheaded his son. A few days before his inauguration, Trump used his name to announce a new meme coin, presenting a new conflict to more presidents than his modern predecessor.
When Trump announced his family’s new digital assets business, Nick Carter, a crypto investor who supported the Republicans, said, “At best it’s an unnecessary distraction, and at worst it’s a source of great embarrassment and (additional) legal trouble.”
Bailey spoke to CNN on his way to dinner at the White House for the donor, dismissing the conflict as an example of Trump’s “entrepreneurship.” Anyway, Bailey believes the former president forced the political class to take the cryptocurrency community seriously.
“Our voter block is big and growing rapidly,” he said. “And it’s up to the parties to talk to us.”
Trump’s early actions have won praise from the groups his campaign targeted, but their leaders also suggest that there is more to be done to fully fulfill his commitment to them. Trump, for example, has yet to say whether Federal Reserve Bitcoin should be stockpiled. Teamster is closely watching the labor fares in the National Labor Relations Commission’s early decision under Trump and whether his administration supports union provisions in existing federal contracts.
The Lumbee people still need Congressional actions to access federal benefits granted to other federal authorized American Native Americans. Lowry said he was “cautiously optimistic,” but Trump can defend legislative push, but if Republicans who fully control the government can’t reach his desk, Randy’s voters might turn to Democrats.
“You need to remember us,” Laurie said, “And you don’t take us for granted.”
