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During the summer of his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made a wish to the cryptocurrency industry: elect it and the United States would become the “crypto capital of the planet.” That winter, after donations from the crypto industry helped secure Trump’s place in the White House, digital assets began to appreciate rapidly — and the president-elect was happy to take credit. When Bitcoin crossed the $100,000 mark, he simply posted: “YOU ARE WELCOME!!! »
To get an idea of how much money has evaporated from the crypto industry since then, look at bitcoin. On October 6, the price of a single bitcoin reached an all-time high north of $126,000; today its value is closer to $69,000. The global market capitalization of all coins has lost more than $2 trillion during this period, and fewer traders are dabbling in meme coins and derivatives. After a relatively successful 2025, crypto venture capital operations have collapsed in recent months. Commentators are now beginning to wonder whether the president, who has spent the last two years positioning himself as the industry’s protector and hype man, might launch a crypto bailout.
But wasn’t Trump’s election already a kind of rescue plan? His explicit promise on the campaign trail was that America would lead the way, but his implicit promise was that the prices would be to go up. Since taking office, Trump has established himself as the face of crypto thanks to his blatant promotional tactics (remember those limited-edition orange bitcoin sneakers?), his sweeping deregulation efforts, and, of course, his family’s investments in digital assets. The Trumps have now made hundreds of millions of dollars from cryptocurrencies, according to recent estimates. Despite these ties, the fate of crypto is not solely tied to the Trumps. There is no single cause for the current slowdown, but it demonstrates that intervention by a president – even one as consistent as Trump’s – can do little to keep cryptocurrencies afloat.
Throughout its 17 years of existence, bitcoin has been defined by boom and bust cycles that are sometimes explainable and sometimes not. This volatility partly explains why the president himself once considered bitcoin a “scam.” It’s driven by both a built-in technical feature called “halving” (which I’ll refrain from explaining but is worth delving into if you want) and the natural rise and fall of global attention. The year 2021 gave us a historic bubble, fueled in part by venture capital funding and NFTs. The bubble burst in 2022 thanks to the collapse of two crypto stalwarts, Do Kwon and Sam Bankman-Fried, and the regulatory crackdown that followed. After that, there was a deep freeze in investment activity, a so-called crypto winter, and a slow but steady recovery. Trump’s remark on “crypto capital” for 2024 came as the sector began to emerge from hibernation. Morale was, if not as low as it is now, far from what it was a few years ago. The crypto optimism sparked by Trump’s election likely helped push prices higher, but it was no guarantee against future instability.
The president’s public support for the industry is inseparable from his family’s personal investments. Trump’s empire encompasses crypto firms World Liberty Financial and American Bitcoin, as well as the crypto-adjacent Trump Media & Technology Group, which at one point held about $2 billion in bitcoin. There are also the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, the former of which made the president a crypto-billionaire just before his inauguration and has since lost about 95% of its value.
The administration has also made life easier for cryptocurrencies more generally, championing industry-backed regulations such as the GENIUS Act, a new framework for stablecoins that was signed into law last summer. He also, separately, abandoned Joe Biden-era investigations into big business. The White House is now full of crypto enthusiasts, including venture capitalist David Sacks, who is now special advisor for AI and crypto, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has dubbed Trump the “crypto president.” Together, this team worked to establish a crypto-forward White House, including creating a “strategic Bitcoin reserve.”
These moves likely accelerated the real gains crypto made throughout 2025. But these gains weren’t entirely attributable to Trump, either. Over the past few years, cryptocurrencies have appeared in BlackRock exchange-traded funds and mainstream brokerage apps. A side effect of crypto’s integration with existing financial institutions is that Bitcoin began trading like a regular tech stock: Bitcoin’s rise last year coincided with broader dynamics in the tech industry. The fact that it’s currently collapsing doesn’t necessarily suggest complete decoupling (some parts of tech, particularly software stocks, are currently being crushed), but the downward trend is a reminder that crypto isn’t governed by simple Silicon Valley earnings calls. Moreover, the industry is even more international than Trump would like; prices are determined by traders around the world.
A crypto-friendly White House has never been a panacea, but the scale of the recent crash is remarkable. The global crypto market capitalization – that is, the approximate value of all its tokens – has entirely erased the gains made since Trump’s inauguration, despite this so-called regulatory golden age. If Democrats return to power in 2028, they likely will not share this administration’s permissive attitude. And commentators who wonder whether Trump would bail out crypto will likely be disappointed. When asked at a congressional hearing last week whether the administration would order private banks to buy more bitcoin, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisted the government had no authority to do so.
Bitcoin was once seen as an alternative to a corrupt system, completely independent of governments and big banks. In 2026, the world’s most powerful politicians and financiers have gone all-in. An asset that was once anti-system has now effectively become the system. There is no doubt that this has benefited crypto in some ways. (On the one hand, institutional adoption has made it more resilient; crypto is not beyond recovery and it will likely bounce back.) But because no single player has unilateral control over the future of the sector, the prices of these coins remain as volatile as ever.
Trump has long believed he has the power to solve even the most intractable problems. He told voters in 2016 that the system was broken and “only I can fix it.” But volatility is inherent to crypto; not even the “president of crypto” can solve this problem.
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Today’s news
- Top Trump administration immigration officials testified before the House Homeland Security Committee in a hearing following the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by immigration agents in Minneapolis.
- Newly released documents show that President Trump told police in Palm Beach, Florida, in the mid-2000s, shortly after the Jeffrey Epstein investigation became public, that “everyone knew” about Epstein’s actions.
- An immigration judge has ruled that the Trump administration has no legal basis to deport Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University who was arrested last year after co-authoring a pro-Palestinian opinion piece in the campus newspaper. The judge ended the deportation proceedings against him, although the government could appeal.
Evening reading
The poet laureate of madness
By James Parker
Appointing a new healer is a risky moment in the life of a tribe. Get it wrong, choose the wrong person, and your deepest spiritual illnesses will remain not only untreated but undetected. Get it right and you’ll at least have a chance of getting an accurate diagnosis. Surprisingly, the Victorians got it right. In fact, for all their pomp and solidity and heaviness of soul, and for all their talkative religiosity, they succeeded. They chose as their national poet a wandering, depressed semi-atheist from a family of crazy people. They chose Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Tennyson was already famous, largely thanks to his bestselling elegy, In memorywhen Queen Victoria made him her poet laureate in 1850. But it was with the haunted, chaotic poet of pre-fame – the shaggy, craggy, germinal genius wandering in his cloud of tobacco smoke and melancholy, bent over his physics and chemistry books – that Richard Holmes The unlimited depths is mainly concerned. Subtitle Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Beliefit traces this character’s metabolic absorption of the most disturbing and inappropriate ideas that contemporary science had to offer; their effect on his personality; and their manifestation in his poetry.
Read the full article.
More than The Atlantic
Cultural break
Watch. A new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heightscaptures the grotesque beauty of the story, writes David Sims.
Read. If anyone could write good fiction about the American immigration debate, it would probably be Lionel Shriver. Instead, her latest novel is going off the rails, says Adelle Waldman.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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