In an unexpected twist of political fate, a would-be strongman, Donald Trump, has embraced the very technology—Bitcoin—designed to resist authoritarian control. This document explores how this seemingly contradictory alliance could, through a form of 'digital jujitsu,' inadvertently lay the groundwork for a more democratized financial future, or conversely, usher in a new era of centralized power.

I usually avoid writing about politics. I study how students and schools accumulate what I think of as "academic capital." I've come to see that academic capital is just one form of digital capital alongside social and financial capital. These different forms often follow similar rules: they can be accumulated, transferred, frozen, or weaponized by those in power.

Consider Bitcoin. I'm constantly in awe of it—not for the price charts, but because it feels like a democratic miracle that such a system even exists: a truly decentralized financial network, owned by no one and controlled by no government OR corporation, that has achieved mainstream adoption while maintaining its core properties. That shouldn't be possible—and yet here we are. When I first heard of it, I was sure it would quickly fail like earlier forms of digital finance. If only I had bought some back then!

The democratic power of Bitcoin becomes clearest when you look at how it's being used by those fighting for freedom around the world. In authoritarian regimes, financial systems have become instruments of control—used to surveil, silence, and punish dissent. When Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation had its bank accounts targeted by Putin's regime, it turned to Bitcoin in 2016 and has since raised millions in donations that the Kremlin cannot freeze or confiscate. In Nigeria, when the Feminist Coalition organized nationwide protests against government brutality in 2020, authorities froze all their bank accounts—so they pivoted to Bitcoin and kept their movement funded. Similar stories have emerged from Belarus, where opposition activists use Bitcoin to support pro-democracy movements, and from Hong Kong, Cuba, and Togo, where dissidents have found financial refuge in a system no dictator can control.

This is what Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, calls "freedom money"—a censorship-resistant way to transact that governments cannot manipulate, freeze, or use for surveillance. As Gladstein documents in his recent essay in the Journal of Democracy [1], around 4.2 billion people live under authoritarian regimes that weaponize traditional banking systems against their populations. For these billions, Bitcoin isn't about speculation or getting rich—it's about preserving basic financial freedom and the ability to support democratic movements. Bitcoin's design makes it uniquely powerful: transactions don't require personal identification, accounts cannot be frozen, and value can be transferred across borders without permission from any authority.

Trump and Bitcoin

On a CoinDesk podcast recently, Eric Trump told a story so wild it sounds like farce: Michael Saylor—a Bitcoin evangelist—urged Eric to mortgage Mar-a-Lago to buy Bitcoin. [2] Eric didn't do it, but he loved Saylor's audacity—mostly because of the grievance he read into it. In his telling, big banks had "weaponized" finance against the Trump family, so crypto became their escape hatch. "It actually is what drove us toward cryptocurrency," he said, because "you realize that cryptocurrency was a lot faster, more transparent, and cheaper." [2] 

Trumpworld is spinning a classic martyrdom narrative about being "de-banked." In March, the Trump Organization (with Eric as a plaintiff) sued Capital One, accusing the bank of wrongfully closing more than 300 Trump-related accounts for political reasons. (Capital One flatly denies this, calling the claims "false" and saying it only shuts accounts for legitimate legal reasons—and that the Trumps have provided no concrete evidence to the contrary.) [3] Regardless of who's right, the tale has taken hold: in Trump's world, banks are portrayed as woke censors, and bitcoin as the refuge for the "cancelled."

That grievance has now been financialized. Over the summer, Trump Media & Technology Group disclosed in SEC filings that it had accumulated roughly $2 billion in bitcoin as part of a new "bitcoin treasury" strategy—in plain terms: one of the president's family businesses has bet big on Bitcoin, putting it on the company balance sheet. [4] It's not just the media company. Eric Trump co-founded a Bitcoin mining venture—American Bitcoin Corp—that went public in September. On its first trading day, the stock doubled and Eric's roughly 7.5% stake ballooned to well over $1 billion in value. [5] More revealing are the sweetheart deals behind the curtain: SEC filings show American Bitcoin got unusually generous terms from the Chinese tech firm Bitmain to buy 16,000 mining machines. Instead of paying cash up front, Eric's company can pay Bitmain later in "pledged" bitcoin—with up to two years to settle the bill at a fixed price. Industry insiders say Bitmain doesn't offer such long payment windows to anyone else. [6] In short, the Trump family isn't just dabbling in bitcoin; it's entwining itself with the very plumbing of the bitcoin economy.

Here's the twist: the very properties that make Bitcoin attractive to the Trumps also make it a potential check on presidential power—including Trump's power. For decades, we couldn't build such a financial system because big banks blocked any alternative to their monopoly. They print money through fractional reserve lending while paying depositors virtually nothing. Could Trump, of all people, become an unlikely partner in democratizing finance? After you swallow the vomit in the back of your throat at the thought of helping Trump make more money, think this through with me.

Bitcoin is not crypto

To grasp the profound implications of Trump's foray into bitcoin, one must first understand a critical distinction: Bitcoin is not 'crypto.' Unlike the myriad of cryptocurrencies, often controlled by individuals or corporations, Bitcoin stands alone as a truly decentralized financial network, owned by no one and beyond the manipulation of any single entity—be it politician or corporate titan. This fundamental difference is the bedrock of its 'freedom money' potential.

I certainly agree that it seems silly to run computers all over the planet and consume tons of electricity just to make bitcoin tamper-proof. But if you think gold is less silly than bitcoin, consider that several tonnes of gold are flown across the planet every single day in the cargo holds of passenger planes. There are tonnes of gold in the air right now. Flying blocks of metal (which are decidedly not light!) in airplanes, then loading them into armored trucks with armed guards, is at least as energy-intensive as using electricity to secure the bitcoin network. When you account for all the activities required to use gold as a treasury asset—mining, refining, transporting, vaulting, and securing—the gold system consumes roughly twice the energy of bitcoin mining (320-370 TWh vs. 140-190 TWh annually). Gold mining is also heavily reliant on diesel fuel and causes significant environmental damage, while bitcoin mining now runs on majority renewable energy (around 52%). Security requires energy whether digital or physical, and it always feels rather silly when you step back and look at it. Unless you're going to abolish private property altogether, this is a necessary cost of securing valuable assets—and it's still far more efficient than physically shipping pallets of $100 bills around the world every time value needs to transfer internationally.

Crypto advocates—the "crypto bros" who helped get Trump elected—fundamentally believe in the Bitcoin ethos. They backed Trump because they thought he'd fight for open, permissionless financial systems. They also played an important role in many State races such as Sherrod Brown in Ohio. If we accelerate bitcoin adoption, and he follows through and passes legislation that actually instantiates those principles (openness, self-custody rights, limited supply), resulting in universal access to hard money that the government cannot control (or print more of). That would be a major victory for democracy.

If, on the other hand, Trump rejects the bitcoin ethos in favor of his own digital currency, he reveals himself as a bitcoin fraud who was just using crypto to enrich his family. In this case he will have to re-embrace the big banks and try to cut a deal with them to block bitcoin adoption. In this case, the crypto community turns on him—and that helps Democrats win the midterms, which also curbs his power. Either way, he either locks himself into a system with real constraints, or he loses political capital and we get a chance to do it ourselves.

That is the Jui Jitsu bind we put him in if: (1) Dems can understand why bitcoin is not crypto, and (2) Dems support bitcoin, specifically, for digital wealth storage or "hard money" as an alternative to gold. Eric is way bought in at this point and he would have to do a major turnaround or split with his father if the administration did not support this push for freedom money. 

Trump says he wants to make the big banks irrelevant. Let’s take him at his word before he realizes what he is saying.

The People in Charge

Trump didn't just wake up one morning and decide to embrace Bitcoin. He's surrounded himself with people who actually understand the difference between bitcoin and crypto—people whose careers and reputations now depend on getting this right. Look at who's running the show.

Scott Bessent landed at Treasury, and his job description includes overseeing something that shouldn't exist in a traditional administration: a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Think about that for a moment. The United States Treasury—the institution that prints dollars—is now tasked with managing a reserve of an asset specifically designed to be outside government control. Bessent's mandate includes figuring out how to acquire Bitcoin in a budget-neutral way, which means he can't just print money to buy it. The White House executive order and Treasury's own press releases make this explicit. This isn't a side project; it's institutional policy.

Then there's Howard Lutnick over at Commerce. His department has been specifically named to help devise those budget-neutral Bitcoin acquisition strategies. But what makes this interesting isn't just the policy role—it's that Lutnick has a history here. He's been on record as a Bitcoin maximalist, someone who gets why Bitcoin is different from every other digital asset. When Commerce is involved in acquisition strategy, you're not just talking about financial engineering; you're talking about legitimizing Bitcoin as a strategic national asset.

The rollout was led by David Sacks, Trump's White House AI and Crypto Czar. Sacks is the one who announced that "the war on crypto is over," and he didn't just say it—he divested from his personal crypto holdings before taking the job to avoid conflicts of interest. That matters. You don't divest if you're planning to run a grift. The Washington Post and CNBC covered his divestments extensively; these weren't token gestures. Sacks has been clear about his remit: Bitcoin gets specific policy attention, while crypto more broadly gets a regulatory reset. The distinction matters, and he's made it repeatedly.

And then there's Paul Atkins at the SEC. Now, Atkins isn't Bitcoin-specific in his mandate—he's dealing with the entire crypto landscape—but the changes he's pushing have direct implications for Bitcoin market access. He's working on frameworks for custody arrangements, alternative trading systems for non-securities (which includes Bitcoin), and generally trying to make it possible for institutions to interact with Bitcoin without regulatory terror. The SEC put out press releases about this, Reuters covered the policy shifts, and CNBC documented the Crypto Task Force roundtable where these frameworks are being hammered out.

What you're seeing here is not a haphazard collection of crypto enthusiasts. It's a coordinated institutional commitment to making Bitcoin infrastructure part of the U.S. financial system. These four people—Treasury, Commerce, the White House, and the SEC—represent the core financial architecture of the federal government. And they're all, in their different ways, building the rails for Bitcoin adoption at scale. That is the power of the bitcoin lobby and Trump depends on their support for the midterm elections. If we get out of the way and support accelerated bitcoin adoption, we can use the momentum to get the administration in a financial headlock.

By embracing Bitcoin technology in this institutional way, they might actually be laying down infrastructure that limits executive overreach in the future. The move they believe empowers them could become a restraining move on them. If they cut a deal with the very banks they've been raging against, the "open system" could collapse into something worse than corporate banking. The opportunity is massive for democracy, as is the risk. But we have no choice but to fight, because he is moving forward, regardless. Let’s fight with financial Jiu Jitsu by helping him instantiate freedom money as the reserve currency that backs the US Dollar and our financial system, broadly.  

The Danger

If we fail to actively champion democratic forms of digital wealth, the fall of the big banks may only pave the way for a new oligarchy, with the Trump family at its forefront. This new open financial infrastructure, if captured, could grant an authoritarian far greater control than today's banks ever wielded. That's the catch.

Trump is moving full force forward regardless. If we do nothing, the big banks fall only to be replaced by big tech—with the Trump family among them, printing their own crypto currencies for grift. Trump could use crypto to mint his own money, as he has already done, and these new open financial rails could be captured by a new oligopoly.

We're at an inflection point. The Trump administration needs to appease the bitcoin community that helped get him elected, and they're willing to challenge the big banks to do so. This creates a choice: if we fight for the Bitcoin ethos (open, permissionless, censorship-resistant, limited supply), we could be at the start of a democratic renaissance in finance—a system where no institution can make money from money while telling individual users they're not allowed to do the same. But if we let Trump and his allies take down the banks and then capture the infrastructure that replaces them, we're trading one oligarchy for another. An authoritarian with control over the new financial rails could do far more damage than today's banks ever could.

This pre-midterm window is fleeting. For the moment, what's good for bitcoin is good for Trumpworld. His appointees need to deliver on the promises they've made. The timeline matters because once the midterms pass, the calculus changes. If Trump's power is secure, his incentives flip—he'll prefer protective rules that cement his advantages and shut out rivals. He will favor crypto and start turning on bitcoin. There's a fleeting window where the political energy exists to codify openness—to lock in pro-pluralism measures before the window slams shut.

Facing the Inevitable "But Crypto…"

I can almost hear the retort: "But crypto is bad for X, Y, Z reasons!" So let me be clear about what this argument is not. It's not in any way a support of crypto. It's not overlooking the scams, the pump-and-dumps, or the wild volatility that can hurt ordinary investors. It's not suggesting we hand the keys of the financial system to Coinbase or Binance or Trump Jr.'s latest coin project. In fact, it's saying the opposite: Dems need precision in their strategy to support bitcoin as an alternative to gold. That's all. A laser focus on causing that to happen with velocity to prove whether Trump is pro-bitcoin or not.

Trump-branded meme tokens or get-rich-quick schemes deserve all the skepticism and scrutiny they're getting. Consumer protection remains absolutely critical; the SEC should go after fraud and abuse just as hard as ever. We can take our time to regulate these coins—knowing that with appropriate regulation will come more security and sanctity.

The point is, Dems should be able to walk and chew gum here. If they distinguish between the elements that increase democratic values (i.e., decentralization) and those that decrease it; between custodial intermediaries (which should be regulated, examined, insured—the whole nine yards) and non-custodial software or personal wallets (which should be as free to develop and use as, say, encryption software or personal computers or TCP/IP).

If you squint, this is really about preserving a space for bottom-up innovation and dissent, even as we police top-down malfeasance. And that's not such a foreign concept: it's the story of democracy, of every social movement, including the student organizers building digital credentials that got me interested in all this in the first place. Keep the playing field open for the little guys, even as you enforce rules against abuses.

Donald Trump likes to boast that banks made their "biggest mistake" by pushing him toward crypto. He might be right—but not for the reason he thinks. If lawmakers seize this moment to wire in openness, self-custody rights, and limited token supply, then the very crypto rails Trump is laying down will end up constraining him—and anyone who tries to follow in his footsteps. That's the jujitsu: using the strongman's own momentum to lock him in a hold.

The window is open right now. We should climb through it before it slams shut.

References

[1] Gladstein, Alex. "Why Bitcoin Is Freedom Money." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 36, No. 4 (October 2025). Johns Hopkins University Press.

[2] Eric Trump on "De-Banking" and Bitcoin — CoinDesk (May 2025)

[3] Capital One "de-banking" lawsuit — Banking Dive (March 2025)

[4] Trump Media's $2B bitcoin treasury — CBS News (July 2025)

[5] American Bitcoin Corp goes public — NBC News (Sept 2025)

[6] Bitmain's deal with American Bitcoin — Axios (Oct 2025)

[7] Bitcoin donations to Navalny — Reuters [URL pending]

[8] GENIUS Act (stablecoin law) — Congress.gov (July 18, 2025)

[9] Warren warns of "crypto corruption" — Business Insider (May 2025) [URL pending]