The last US presidential election featured the highest voter turnout in the nation’s history. The candidates received a combined 155.4 million votes with just over seven million separating them. That’s a margin of about 4%.
By that math it would seem like incredibly poor judgment if a candidate were to intentionally disrespect a group of people representing as much as 20% of the US adult voting population.
Enter the 45th president of the United States of America, Donald Trump.
Despite his numerous social media bans, the twice-impeached former US president’s been making the rounds on popular media over his bombastic comments as of late.
We reported on his mind-bogglingly odd confession yesterday when he admitted that he chose not to regulate Facebook and Twitter while in office because Mark Zuckerberg was nice to him.
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But, bitter breakup feelings aside, Trump’s falling out with social media’s done little to tarnish his reputation among his core voters. Arguably, it’s galvanized them – who doesn’t love a good billionaire martyr story?
However, the former president’s been talking about things he clearly doesn’t understand lately. That’s not an insult, it’s an observation he made himself.
Speaking to the Fox Business Network earlier this week, the former president said:
The way you stop (cyberattacks) is you go back to a much more old-fashioned form of accounting and things.
You know, I have a son who is so good with computers. He’s a young person and he can make these things sing and when you put everything on internet and on all of these machines – you never see a piece of paper – I really think that you have to go back to a different form of accounting, a different form of compiling information.
As a young person, my 15-year-old son is, you know, he’s just a genius with this stuff. And you have people that are going to break into systems. I think you have to go back and you have to be much more reliant, there has to be much better security.
Getting rid of computers is a bold strategy for our technological future, but Trump’s not exactly deviating much from similarly Luddite comments he made back in 2016, so we’re going to assume this won’t matter either.
It was the next part, however, that either made you wince or giggle as a US voter (depending on your affiliation).
When pressed on the recent Colonial pipeline cyberattacks, the one-time president admitted he didn’t understand how the attackers got paid. And when he was informed it was through Bitcoin, he told Fox Business how he really felt:
That’s another beauty. The currency of this world should be the dollar. And I don’t think we should have all of the Bitcoins of the world out there. I think they should regulate them very, very high.
Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam. I was surprised, you know. With us it was at $6,000, much lower. I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar. Essentially, it’s a currency competing against the dollar.
It seems like the old POTUS is making a brand out of telling people he’s not sure what’s going on. As numerous pundits have pointed out, calling Bitcoin both a scam and a currency in the same breath while claiming it competes with the US dollar is a stretch few in the fintech industry are willing to make.
Trump’s comments are thought to have been at least partly responsible for a subsequent 8% drop in BTC value. As of Monday it sat at just over $33K but has since rallied to $36.4K as of the time of this article’s publishing.
The volatility has been attributed to Trump’s larger-than-life influence on the GOP and potential 2024 presidential bid.
And the estimated 46 million US adults holding Bitcoin right now have to ask themselves what another Trump presidency would mean for cryptocurrency in the US and around the world.
How important is money to GOP voters?
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