David Yaffe-Bellany and Kenneth Vogel of The New York Times provide an interesting account of how crypto lobbyists won over President Trump. Here are some key excerpts:
Just over a year ago, while sitting around a table in an ornate meeting room at Mar-a-Lago, David Bailey and a group of top Bitcoin executives made a pitch to Donald J. Trump.
They were looking for a savior.
For years, cryptocurrency companies had endured a sweeping crackdown in Washington — a cascade of lawsuits, regulatory attacks and prosecutions that threatened the industry’s survival.
Since Mr. Trump’s election, the price of Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency, has skyrocketed to over $100,000, enriching executives who supported his campaign. Crypto advocates who were shunned in Washington during the Biden administration now enjoy astonishing access to the Trump White House, which has quickly unwound the regulatory crackdown. And the federal government has embraced sweeping pro-crypto policies that could upend the U.S. financial system for decades.
All of that resulted from one of the great lobbying free-for-alls in recent history. For months, industry executives, paid lobbyists, campaign operatives, and Trump business partners and family members orchestrated a diffuse but stunningly effective influence operation that turned Mr. Trump from an outspoken Bitcoin skeptic into crypto’s most important supporter.
Virtually every step of Mr. Trump’s transformation has been steered by the industry. Lacking much knowledge of its intricacies, Mr. Trump embraced crypto when he saw it could generate huge profits for himself or his political groups, while outsourcing the details to industry advisers with their own business ambitions, according to documents and audio recordings, as well as interviews with more than 50 people involved in Mr. Trump’s crypto plans.
Now he is deeply enmeshed in an industry his administration regulates — one that was founded as a renegade alternative to the big banks. He and his sons unveiled their own crypto business last fall, the start of a blitz of new ventures that has grown to include four Trump-branded digital currencies and even a Bitcoin mining company.
At some points, the only meaningful check on the industry’s power has come from rival crypto interests jockeying against one another to influence Mr. Trump. The competition has at times resembled a bidding war.