Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Crypto Grift Is Imploding

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Tim Miller and Catherine Rampell give their takes on the crypto crash, why Bitcoin and meme coins are plunging, and what the sell-off says about speculation, interest rates, and the broader economy. They break down why crypto hasn’t held up as an inflation hedge, how rising rates are squeezing risky assets, and why Trump-world’s deep exposure to crypto and speculative stocks suddenly looks a lot more precarious.

Hey, everybody. It's Tim Miller from the bulwark here with Catherine Rampel, our economics guru, writer of the receipts newsletter. And I had to grab her because, Catherine, I've got a, I got a friend in town visiting. And I don't know if you've anybody like this in your life, but he's, he's kind of down about the state of affairs. You know, he's pretty angry about things that are happening in the news. And he's mentioning that to me. And there have been only two things this week. I've been able to mention to him that brought a little up the glimmer back into his eye. The first, Have you seen the video of the people shouting, fuck ice at the wrestling match? I have, yes. Let's pull that up for everybody else really quick. Now the face in the eyes of the champion. A little glimmer of hope there. That's nice. That makes you feel good, doesn't it?

Like a wrestling match. That feels like the message is penetrating. I will say the people who go to wrestling matches are not necessarily like the hardcore tree-hugging, far-la. comedy types that I wouldn't expect. Not trying to stereotype wrestling viewers, but like, you know, it's not the Whole Foods crowd. Yes. It's a little bit more of a mixed demo. So that's encouraging.

That made him smile. The other thing, now this one's a little bit more in the Sean and Freud space is just the absolute crash of Bitcoin and other and other cryptocurrencies and other cryptocurrencies and other cryptocurrencies and you know, if we have some Bitcoin holders out there, apologies. but, you know, I mean, I think that for some of us to watch ungodly wealth amass among some of the stupidest people in the world. And a lot of criminals, including the president and his family, that's been a little disheartening. And so to see some of that get clawed back is nice. So I'm not asking you to comment on that. I'm just speaking for my friend. He was happy to see that.

And but that led me to try to figure out what is happening. happening. The Bitcoin price, just to give people the top line here, it dropped below 64,000. It's down 13% today. It's down 46% off of its all-time high. And we're back down basically to where it was at its high around 2021. So, you know, there was a period of time where chart just went up for Bitcoin. It kind of had, it was volatile, you know, but like. So you're saying that it's a good thing that we didn't develop the strategic Bitcoin reserve. At when it was priced, at an all-time high. It's good for my laughs. Yeah. Oh, you meant like it wouldn't have been good for our finances as a country to have invested in a strategic break. Exactly.

Yeah. That does seem like that would have been a risky bet to drop 46%. Did we do that? I thought we did. We made some Bitcoin investments, didn't we? Did our country? Yeah, they did an executive order, but, but, you know, those aren't real. Yes, exactly.

So anyway. What is the law? Yeah. So, yeah, I think it's a good thing that we didn't do that. Look, I am not, to be clear, like a crypto-fintech guru. I don't give financial advice. I can tell you my basic understanding of what's going on here to the extent that it's not just like animal spirits. So long-term interest rates are up. And that's bad, generally, for speculative assets of all kinds. You want money to be really cheap. You want borrowing to be very cheap. If you want to have these inflated asset bubbles when you have long-term rates going up, that tends to be bad for asset bubbles. You have Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, saying, I think yesterday that there was not going to be any sort of bailout for crypto. So when you already saw things taking a nosedive,

that made them nosedive further. You know, there was also like a tech sell-off that was probably pretty significant, you know, some forced liquidations and stop orders that had already been put in place. So again, it's like Klein sort of builds on itself and becomes self-perpetuating. So I think there's some of that. If you ever thought that crypto had some use beyond just a speculative asset, I think we have seen time and again that that has not been borne out. You sort of alluded to the fact that it's crypto is being used by like criminals and kidnappers and drug dealers and other people who were trying to hide transactions.

I think we've known that for a while. But it's also like it hasn't really been a great hedge against inflation, which I think people thought. You know, when you've seen gold prices go way up in the last year or so. and silver prices until recently. But crypto has not held up. You know, it looked like that might be the flight to safety, but then it was tested when we invaded Venezuela. And, you know, you did not like to safety in the form of crypto.

So I think there are a few different things here. I'm looking to see. I had written some notes. Yeah. How do you understand the divergence of gold and crypto? Can we talk about that golden crypto divergence a little bit more? I does seem to undermine their core arguments. Yeah, it does.

And, you know, gold's been around for thousands of years since, like, the dawn of human civilization. So maybe it's just that more people view it as a safe harbor against inflation than is the case with crypto. But, you know, I think it's also about interest rates that when interest rates are low, or money is cheap. These sort of unproven speculative assets are more appealing. And it has like obviously some commercial uses as well, but it's not really what I mean. I just mean that it's like the thing that since the dawn of human civilization people went to. I don't know.

Well, I'm happy because I have a little gold taste written up in the book coin. Just for those that want to engage in some Schaden Freud, I've pulled up a couple of coins just to kind of see how things are going. For example, like Elon's favorite Doge coin, that is down now at about nine cents. That's down about 40% over the past month, 56% over the last six months, 66% over the past year. So that's not good. The Trump coin. Ooh, bad year for the Trump coin, if you got in on that. That's down to three bucks, three and a half bucks, 77% down over the year, over the past 24 hours, down 15%.

So that's a bad day. Ethereum over the last six months. Ooh, that's down 50%. Down 13% today. Fart coin, maybe there's good news for fart coin. Let's look. Oh, no. That's down 57% over the last month, down 16%.

16.90, 17% today. So those are just a couple I picked at random, but it does seem like a broad-based sell-off. There were some currencies that were like Bitcoin that were initially supposed to take the place of the U.S. dollar. Like it was going to replace the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. And there was this fantasy, I guess, that it would have some function other than as a speculative asset. And then you had a bunch of these other kinds of crypto currencies that were really just supposed to be like meme coins, jokes, shit coins, whatever you want to call them. and those really depended on very low interest rates.

Yeah, it seems like both are down. I should just throw over in the real stock market, just again picking another stock that has some crypto exposure. The Trump Media and Technology Group, DJT stock, that hasn't been a great little period for that either, down 33% over six months, down 24% over a month, and down, oh, let's see, about 12.5% on the day. So, you know, pretty soft across the board.

And I wonder, and that takes me to kind of my final question. You've been kind of alluding to this, Catherine, some of the sell-off on some of these stocks, including Trump's own stock and Trump's own crypto, might be related to just the fact that, like, people are less interested in speculative assets when the economy is bad. And I'm wondering if there's, like, a recession indicator a little bit here. Because, like, the last time Bitcoin came down,

It really was like in that contraction that happened with that big inflation period post-COVID, and people just like didn't have as much cash sitting around to mess around with. And I do wonder if there are any broader economic signals we can take from the Schadenfreude analysis of the Trump coin. I think it's possible, certainly, that if people are feeling less flush for other reasons, like they're still seeing prices go up, they're worried about whether they're going to lose their jobs, they're worried about whether we're going to have a recession. And there are certainly some red flags in the economy about all of those things that they may not be willing to be as risky with their money because they want to conserve it. You know, what if they do lose their job?

They need to have some sort of nest egg. They don't want to just gamble it away. So that's certainly possible. I would also point out that on the Trump coin stuff, we don't have a lot of visibility into those transactions. and whether Trump and his family may be doing lots of shady deals or selling off at various points to enrich themselves or to do, you know, they're selling off to people who want some kind of favor from them. There was that big explosive story in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, I think it was, or maybe late last week, about how their crypto exchange sold a 49% stake to, a royal from Abu Dhabi, I believe it was, like the guy who's in charge of national security there. So, like, that was secret, that we only found that out because they were investigative reporters.

So that's just one shady transaction. We don't know about the rest. You know, so it's really hard to say what's going on with his stuff. And I would kind of put that to the side, you know, put that in isolation from what's happening the rest of the market. Okay. Well, you know, this hasn't been investment advice for everybody. Sorry. No, no, that's fine.

we're not here to give people investment advice. We're just here to observe that it's been a rocky, rocky day and a rocky month in the crypto markets. And given that our president and a lot of his biggest supporters are highly exposed to those markets, we can observe that that happened. That was something that's maybe not great for them. And, you know, if you're out there, one thing I consider, again, not investment advice, just one man's idea.

Maybe invest in things like, add value to the economy. That's one idea. You know, thinking about that, you know, there's usually a little bit more stability in products and companies and assets that offer some tangible value to the rest of the economy. I don't know. You're the expert, Catherine. That's just one idea that I would be clear. That is certainly an idea. And to be clear, like, I am not cheering on the fact that probably a lot of unsophisticated investors lost a lot of money in recent weeks. Like, I am fine with the Trump's losing some significant value of their wealth. But the worry is that, particularly with this president who's been talking up speculative assets,

who loves to milk his voters and the general public for all their worth, that there are a lot of people who like maybe lost their shirts who can't afford it. And you can have your shot in for it and say they should have deserved it. They should have invested in something more wholesome or more tangible or whatever. But like, there are innocent people who got hurt. Sorry to. There are. There are innocent people that got hurt.

That's true. And we don't like that. We don't want that to happen to anybody. We really don't. We do not want that to happen to anyone. All right. We'll be keeping an eye on what's happening in the crypto markets. And, you know, and in the other speculative assets, the Trump family is forcing us to care about.

I appreciate you, Catherine Appel. She's working on another good newsletter. Go check her out. Sign up at theblerc.com for receipts. We'll see you all back here soon.