Trump’s Inauguration Revealed Whom He Really Serves: The Billionaires and the Crypto Bros

Presidential inaugurations are a feast of symbolism, from Jimmy Carter’s walk through the crowd on Pennsylvania Avenue to Barack Obama’s post-Bush mediagenic love fest. So it’s fitting that the most prominent image from Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th President of the United States was a photo the first row of the collection of billionaires for his swearing-in ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, along with a group of lesser-known titans of the rentier information age rendered much of the pomp and rhetoric of the day’s MAGA ceremonies meaningless: here, too, were the main beneficiaries of Trump’s second presidency. as a complacent factor that makes Trump’s executive branch a subsidiary of his branding empire. To make sure that the billionaires present are whose total capital exceeded 1.2 trillion dollars— they were allowed to bring their spouses with them, a privilege denied to their hired employers, who are members of Congress.

Four years ago, the scene could have been imagined amid the squalid, hate-fueled wreckage of the failed coup attempt on Jan. 6 and the aftermath of Trump’s second impeachment in the final days of his first term. However, as Cyndi Lauper famously said, money changes everything. All members of Trump’s billionaire family have made seven-figure donations to his inaugural fund — yet another glorified vocabulary that operate under the Trump brand — and are already getting a big return on their investment. Musk alone has seen his unrivaled coffers of wellness grow at breakneck speed since injecting $270 million in dark money into Trump’s re-election bid: with an additional $222 billion in wealth accrued since Election Day, his net worth now stands at approximately half a trillion dollars. Unsurprisingly, an enthusiastic Musk ended his big day in the political spotlight, it would seem delivery a Zig heil salute at the Inauguration Day rally.

In his speech, Trump recited MAGA slogans about “radical and corrupt establishment” who robbed the nation of its birthright while predicting that he had been “saved by God” in an assassination attempt last summer in Butler, Pa., “to make America great again.” But these echoes of Bananatic laments about “American carnage” were formulaic demonstrations of outrage for the masses; real action in the Trump administration has always been reserved for rich and wise insiders.

That was the unmistakable message of Trump’s own pre-inauguration financial stunt: the launch of Trump-branded memecoin last weekend, which briefly gave him a windfall of about $41 billion in market cap at 1 in the evening Monday. (The memcoin union offering for his wife, Melania, brought a market cap of about $8.4 billion over the same golden interval.) True, the volatile form of crypto, both counterfeit products were soon killedwhen Trump disappointed his base of crypto fans by omitting to mention the currency of their enthusiasts during his inauguration speech.

However, this display of inauguration symbolism was also quite telling as crypto promoters are still counting on a number of policy changes to fuel their Trump second term scam. Bitcoin prices rose to a 2025 high of $109,000 on reports that Trump will sign an executive order to reverse Biden’s policy that separated crypto trading from traditional banking operations, as well as an executive order cancel the current accounting system which classifies crypto as a liability on the balance sheets of financial institutions. Trump also plans to replace outgoing Securities and Exchange Commission chief Gary Gensler — a fierce critic of crypto who has led aggressive prosecutions of currency abuses — with crypto enthusiast Paul Atkins, former co-chairman of crypto-promoting group Token Alliance.

For good measure, Trump mentioned the name of David Sachs, a Moscow-based investment banker who was a member of Silicon Valley. PayPal mafia— as his artificial intelligence and cryptoczar. It’s certainly indicative that crypto markets are so volatile that they’re faltering in an inaugural speech, but after seeing his own branding empire briefly collapse on an epic scale with crypto largesse, Trump is sure to keep handing out such handouts on deregulation. that crypto defenders wanted. Crypto deregulation is also a major issue at the recently convened 119th Congress – far from a shocking development as the crypto industry has been the largest source of political donations in the last election cycle.

Crypto boosters may not have been shoulder-to-shoulder with Musk and his fellow tycoons at the inauguration, but they briskly followed the centi-billionaires’ lead. Crypto is included over $10 million in donations for Trump’s inauguration, and hosted an unofficial inaugural ball last Friday featuring a performance by MAGA-friendly rapper Snoop Dogg. (The venue for the crypto ball was the Andrew Mellon Auditorium in D.C., an association that is a bit on the nose for the utterly unproductive crypto sector, as Mellon, a favorite Treasury secretary of the robber barons in the 1920s, Herbert Hoover famously advised “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate” at the start of the Great Depression.)

Trump’s silly proposal for a crypto reserve — a speculation-based rain-day fund to insure against inflation for government spending — would also be a colossal gift to the industry. He had an unofficial financial priority sparked an earlier rally in crypto pricesfollowed by a traditional reality-adjacent collapse. Still, these market convulsions are of little concern to the insider financiers who will be running things under the new Trump administration. It’s not just the inauguration that’s filled with billionaires, after all, Trump’s White House team has 13 billionaires in its ranks (although one of them, Vivek Ramaswamy, seems to get it rushed the homeless Scaramuccimanaging to alienate scores of federal colleagues in his dubiously official role as co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency even before Trump took office).

Market fireworks will mostly wreak havoc on rubes that entered the market too late to make a swing-and-dump or carpet-pulling windfall. In this respect, the crypto representation is similar to the carnage that predicts doomsday for the deep state and its agents. In the end, the only crypto message that matters is Trump’s assurance gave to his crypto patrons during the campaign: From now on, all rules “will be written by people who love your industry.”