What do you do after you’ve been jettisoned from both the White House and Breitbart? If you’re Steve Bannon, you turn to cryptocurrencies.
President Trump’s ex-chief strategist is focusing his attention to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, viewing them in a similar, game-changing light to the way his former boss approaches politics. Bannon has a “good stake” in bitcoin, he told the New York Times on Tuesday, and outlined why he’s betting on the nascent industry.
“It’s disruptive populism,” Bannon told the NYT. “It takes control back from central authorities. It’s revolutionary.”
At the same time, Bannon has been talking to investors and hedge fund managers about launching new coins. He threw out the idea for a “deplorables coin” — playing off the dig Hillary Clinton took at half of Trump supporters in 2016 — recently at Harvard University.
Bitcoin’s true believers look at the banking system with a wary eye, blaming it for financial crises like the 2008 collapse of the housing markets. Digital currencies have also attracted libertarians and others dubious of regulatory oversight of the monetary system — something that Bannon seems to side with.
“It was pretty obvious to me that unless you got somehow control over your currency, all these political movements were going to be beholden to who controlled the currency,” Bannon told the NYT.
Bannon was cryptic on the details of his upcoming cryptocurrency plans, fearing his name would be toxic for the projects he’s working on. Bitcoin, trading at about $6,600 per coin on Thursday, is down more than 50 percent on the year.
Read the full NYT report here.