Trump targets crypto industry votes
Donald Trump has spoken at one of the biggest annual cryptocurrency events, saying that if he is re-elected, he will fire the chairperson of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on his first day back in office. The former president was the keynote speaker at Bitcoin 2024, a gathering of key figures in the industry in Nashville in Tennessee.
The Republican presidential candidate used the event to win voters and call for campaign donations from the tech and crypto communities. Cryptocurrency has become something of a political battleground for Republicans as the former president claims that his opponent, Democratic Party nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris was “against crypto.”
The audience was “at its most animated” according to the BBC when Trump announced “on day one I will fire Gary Gensler,” referring to the SEC chair appointed by current president Joe Biden. The crowd cheered loudly and chanted his name after he said this.
Gensler has led a crackdown on the crypto industry, having previously said that crypto is fille with what he called “hucksters.” It was the SEC which brought charges against the so-called King of Crypto, Sam Bankman-Fried, who was given a 25-year sentence for stealing billions of dollars from customers of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
Trump spoke for 45 minutes as he outlined some of his ideas for the sector. He declared that he will make America the cryptocurrency capital of the world. This marks a turnaround from 2021 when he told Fox Business that he saw bitcoin as a “scam” that affected the value of the US dollar. He even told the crowd in Nashville that he would keep all of the bitcoin that the government holds or acquires and that he would create a “national bitcoin stockpile” as well as appointing bitcoin and crypto presidential advisory council “immediately.”
