Trump’s Inauguration Revealed Whom He Really Serves: The Billionaires and the Crypto Bros
In front of Trump stood a handful of CEOs whose combined wealth topped $1.2 trillion. They and the crypto scammers are the true beneficiaries of Trump’s second term.
Economy / January 20, 2025
In front of Trump stood a handful of CEOs whose combined wealth topped $1.2 trillion. They and the crypto scammers are the true beneficiaries of Trump’s second term.
Billionaires’ row.
(Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP Photo / Bloomberg via Getty Images)Presidential inaugurations are pageants of symbolism, from Jimmy Carter’s walk through the crowds on Pennsylvania Avenue to Barack Obama’s mediagenic post-Bush lovefest. It’s fitting, then, that the most notable image from Donald Trump’s inauguration as the United States’ 47th president was a photo of the front-row mustering of billionaires for his swearing-in ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, along with a clutch of lesser-known titans of information-age rentiership, rendered much of the pomp and rhetoric of the day’s MAGA ceremonies pointless: Here were the prime beneficiaries of Trump’s second presidency, as well as the smug enablers making Trump’s executive branch a subsidiary of his branding empire. To drive the point home, the billionaires in attendance—whose combined net worth topped $1.2 trillion—were allowed to bring their spouses along, a perk denied their leased retainers who serve as members of Congress.
Four years ago, the scene would have been unimaginable amid the squalid, hate-fueled wreckage of the failed coup attempt of January 6 and following Trump’s second impeachment during the final days of his first term. Yet, as Cyndi Lauper famously proclaimed, money changes everything. The members of Trump’s billionaires’ row had all made seven-figure donations to his inaugural fund—another glorified slush fund operating under the Trump brand—and are already enjoying lavish returns on their investment. Musk alone has seen his unrivaled storehouse of pelf escalate at a stupendous rate since pouring $270 million in dark-money donations into Trump’s reelection effort: With an additional $222 billion in wealth clocked since Election Day, his net worth now stands at roughly half a trillion dollars. No wonder a stoked Musk capped off his big day in the political spotlight by seemingly delivering a Sieg Heil salute at an Inauguration Day rally.
In his speech, Trump delivered rote MAGA slogans about the “radical and corrupt establishment” that had pillaged the nation’s birthright, while prophesying that he had “been saved by God” in last summer’s Butler, Pennsyvania, assassination attempt “to make America great again.” But these echoes of the Bannonite lamentations over “American carnage” were boilerplate shows of outrage for the masses; the real action in Trump’s government has always been reserved for the wealthy and wised-up insiders.
That was the unmistakable message of Trump’s own pre-inaugural financial stunt: launching a Trump-branded memecoin over the weekend that briefly netted him a paper windfall of some $41 billion in market capitalization by 1 pm Monday. (An allied memecoin offering for his wife, Melania, produced a market cap of around $8.4 billion over the same golden interval.) True to volatile crypto form, however, both fake products soon tanked, as Trump disappointed his crypto fanboy base by neglecting to mention their hobbyhorse currency during his inaugural address.
Yet this display of inaugural symbolism was also quite revealing, since crypto promoters are still banking on a bevy of policy changes to favor their grift in a second Trump term. Bitcoin prices rallied to a 2025 high of $109,000 on reports that Trump will sign an executive order to reverse Biden policies that severed crypto trading from traditional banking operations, as well as an order to override the current accounting system that classifies crypto as liabilities on the balance sheets of financial institutions. Trump is also planning to replace outgoing Securities and Exchange Commission head Gary Gensler—a fierce critic of crypto who pursued aggressive prosecutions of the currency’s abuses—with crypto cheerleader Paul Atkins, the former cochair of the crypto-promoting group Token Alliance.
For good measure, Trump has named David Sacks—the Muskovite investment banker who had been a charter member of Silicon Valley’s PayPal mafia—as his AI and crypto czar. It’s of course telling that crypto markets are so erratic that they flounder on a snub in an inaugural speech—yet after seeing his own branding empire briefly goosed on an epic scale by crypto largesse, Trump is certain to continue delivering just the sort of deregulatory handouts that crypto barons have craved. Crypto deregulation is also a prime order of business in the recently convened 119th Congress—far from a shocking development, since the crypto industry was the biggest source of political donations in the last election cycle.
Crypto boosters may not have been shoulder to shoulder with Musk and his fellow wealthy edgelords at the inauguration proper, but they briskly followed the example of the centi-billionaire class. Crypto accounted for more than $10 million in donations to the Trump inauguration, and hosted an unofficial inaugural ball this past Friday featuring a performance by MAGA-friendly rapper Snoop Dog. (The venue for the crypto ball was DC’s Andrew Mellon auditorium—an association that’s a bit on the nose for the profoundly nonproductive crypto sector, since Mellon, the robber barons’ pet treasury secretary during the 1920s, famously advised Herbert Hoover to “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate” at the onset of the Great Depression.)
Trump’s daft proposal for crypto reserve—a speculation-driven rainy-day fund to hedge against inflation for government expenditures—would also be a colossal giveaway to the industry. That unofficial financial priority had touched off an earlier rally of crypto prices, followed by the traditional reality-adjacent collapse. Yet these market convulsions are of little concern to the insider financiers who’ll be running things during the new Trump administration. It’s not just the inauguration that’s studded with billionaires; after all, Trump’s White House team counts 13 billionaires in its ranks (though one of them, Vivek Ramaswamy, appears to be getting the Scaramucci bum’s rush, having managed to alienate a slew of federal colleagues in his dubiously official role as the cochair of the Department of Government Efficiency even before Trump took office).
The market fireworks will mostly wreak havoc for the rubes who have entered the market too late to bring off a pump-and-dump or rug-pull windfall. In that respect, the crypto pitch is parallel to the carnage-speak prophesying the day of judgment for the deep state and its enablers. The only crypto message that matters, in the end, is the assurance Trump gave his crypto backers during the campaign: From here on out, all the rules “will be written by people who love your industry.”
Keep ReadingChris LehmannChris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).
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