Trump Cares More About Money Than the Presidency! | Anthony Scaramucci

And the president has to accept certain guard rails on his family and himself. And he doesn't want to do that because he really likes to make money more than he likes running the presidency. You give me $1,000, I put it on my bank account. You know, in two years it's got $700 worth of purchasing value. So that's not fair to me. US dollar has lost 28% of its value in 6 years. Is that fair to the non-asset holder? Is there any wonder why there's a populace outcry in the country? There's a half of the people don't even have money in a bank account for an emergency. Is that fair? Now those young kids are looking around and saying, 'Oh, wow. The system is completely rigged. I have little to no chance to make any money in this country.' There's going to be an American president in 15 years that's staring down the barrel of a $55 trillion budget deficit. You just look at the math. I mean it's just a runaway train. Nothing ever stops this train of ridiculous spending and fiat currency printing and you know that's going to continue and Bitcoin will be with us and people of your ilk will own Bitcoin long after I'm gone.

Great to be on. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Well, we had a growing economy. Most things were moving gradually upward and inflation was moving gradually downward. And then Donald Trump came into office about 18, 19 months ago and kicked over the economic progress by putting the tariffs on and then he added the forever war in Iraq. And so the combination of those two things have upset the apple cart. And so now we have the spectre of near-term inflation which has created some uncertainty. We have spectre of energy supply depletion which is again long-term uncertainty but generally things are trending well because you've got productivity gains, capital spend and AI and you've got banks printing profits and things like that. So, we're in a full-on bull market. If you want to dial it specifically into crypto, the cryptobear market started in October of 2025, it was a shallow bull market from crypto perspective and by Bitcoin's perspective, and it's been thus far a shallow bear market. So, if you're telling me we're going to go peak to trough down 50, and then we bottomed, then that's a pretty shallow bear market. You know, we should go down another 25, possibly 30% to really complete a full bear market. But again, that's the macro. How does it resolve itself? That's the real question. And so, we'll know by the end of the summer if the Clarity Act doesn't pass or it fails in the Senate and again, definitionally it needs filibuster proof 60 votes. It doesn't have that. Guys like Mike Novogratz think they're going to get there. Maybe, but then the president has to accept certain guard rails on his family and himself and he doesn't want to do that because he really likes to make money more than he likes running the presidency. So, that's where we are right now. But I'm in the Lyn Alden camp where Bitcoin doesn't need a narrative. I mean, Bitcoin has its own narrative. One of the greatest pieces of technology ever invented. And Bitcoin will be with us long after you and I are gone. Nothing ever stops this train of ridiculous spending and fiat currency printing. And that's going to continue and Bitcoin will be with us and people of your ilk will own Bitcoin long after I'm gone.

Okay. So this is the central question, right? So obviously I don't know the answer. I can only give you what I think the answer is and then 5 years from now you'll invite me on the podcast. I'll either be broke and will have gotten this wrong or I will have been vindicated. But I think the answer is that you're in a four-year cycle and Bitcoin is basically — how can I say this? It's been buffered by the ETF transactional activity. It's been buffered by some retail spend. It's been buffered by some institutional buying on the margin. Offset against that, there's been massive whale selling into what I think is the $100,000 number. Guys said, 'Hey, if Bitcoin ever gets to 100,000, I'm unloading a good piece of my bag into that.' And so you're in that transition. So now as the supply tightens up, as you get to the back half of the halving cycle, I do think you go back on offense and I do think you'll see Bitcoin retrace through its all-time high. Now, the acting CEO Richard Teng of Binance believes that. It's interesting. CZ and I have talked about this. I mean, he sees a super cycle coming. He sees Bitcoin going pretty quickly to 750. You know what I mean? But I don't see it. In the absence of that intellectually is what's going on in AI. And so if you said to me, okay, we're going to get clarity and the Genius Act passed in 2025, there's no Trump meme coins blowing up four billion dollars worth of capital where the president and his family's earning 700 million of it, I'm saying okay yeah Bitcoin's probably $125,000 right now and it wouldn't have overly corrected into the four-year cycle. But it is where it's always meant — it doesn't have the governmental sponsorship yet. Yes, it does have an ETF approved, sure. But there's no clarity. The definition of the legislation is clarity. And again for viewers and listeners outside the United States, regulation is the administrator writing the rule as opposed to the legislator. Why is that important? Because when the administrator changes, he erases the rules that the prior administrator wrote and he writes new ones. If it comes from the legislature, then they don't have a lot of room. These are the guidelines from the legislature. This is the room. This is the window. You see what I mean? So we don't have that yet. And maybe we get that, but I'm not an optimist on that. So if you said to me, gun to my head, is clarity going to get passed? I'm going to say no because you need the 60 votes and there's a lot of Democrats that won't vote for it because they hate Trump. So you won't get it passed. And if you don't get it passed, then this is out five years because Congress is not formulated. It won't be architected in the way that you need to get something like this passed. So it's either now or never for the next four or five years. And by the way, I'm not a pessimist. But I'm just telling you that this is how shit goes down in America. The country is not ready for this from a governmental perspective. They showed some leniency when Trump won in '24, but the country is really not ready when Jamie Dimon has a hatchet out and he's trying to impale the forehead of founder and CEO of Coinbase Brian Armstrong, trying to hit him over the head and split his forehead with the hatchet. He represents that bell curve regulator inside the government.

No. I mean, it's shitty for altcoins. Look, if clarity passes, you'll see a rally in Ripple. You see a rally in Solana. I sort of feel like Ethereum and Bitcoin are on their own path. If you look at tokenization, Ethereum has gotten most of the market share. If you look at the users, it's Ethereum and Solana. So to me, Ethereum and Solana, they've got their own path. No matter what the government does, they'll be around and fairly vibrant. Bitcoin, I think, has won the intellectual debate as a digital store of value, irrespective of where the government's going to go on it. I just think that again, these are my opinions. If it gets passed, then you're going to see the age of tokenization. But remember, you have this thing called Hyperliquid, you have perpetual futures, you had an announcement by NASDAQ, and you had an announcement by Kraken that they were merging and they're going to do overnight trading 24/7 of the markets, and there was going to be tokenization. And then Terry Duffy came in from the CME and said, 'Fuck that, we don't like that.' And he's got a lot of muscle and a lot of force. And he blocked and stalled the perpetual futures market. So again, very reminiscent of what happened with Uber. And just to remind everybody, no government official wanted Uber, no city hall person wanted Uber, no taxi licensing official in any major city wanted Uber. And so, they did everything they could to block Uber. But you know who wanted Uber? The people. The people wanted Uber. And so, the people won out. And Uber won its ability to operate in all those major cities including London by the way where it was unbelievable resistance in London.

And by the way, if you told me it was as ubiquitous as Uber, these politicians would have been steamrolled by now. You know, they got scared in 2024 when Moreno beat Sherrod Brown. $240 million went into the different elections. Trump got a couple hundred million dollars from the crypto bros to beat Kamala Harris and people said, 'Okay, on the margin, if I was a political consultant, but I'm not, but let's say I'm playing one on your podcast, I would tell the people that are against crypto to relax. There's no anti-crypto voter.' When Elizabeth Warren says, 'I'm building an army of anti-crypto voters,' there's no army. It's her and Bernie Sanders.

Oh, I think Bitcoin is up there. Remember something about Bitcoin. We have created this mechanism called money. The mechanism basically allows us to transfer goods and services with each other as opposed to bartering. But there's a flaw in the system. We're getting the money from a third party. And the third party has generally been a bad actor. And so throughout history, the third party, which is frankly other human beings that we call the government, we don't like or trust each other. So we go to a third party and we say okay you give us something that both of us don't have to like or trust but that will be our species that will be our transactional currency. But the person making that is making more of it and they have an infinite supply of it or an infinite number of blocks for the US dollar. So now you have this system that's been put in place and it's unhackable. I mean, it's not going to be — the quantum stuff we'll get to. That's more wallet related, and could it eventually crack Bitcoin? Possibly. But the Bitcoin core developers will create quantum resistance in it. So to me it is a phenomenal piece of technology that creates this discrete, immutable, fully distributed, fully transparent spreadsheet that we can transact on. And people that don't understand it don't get that their bank is a spreadsheet. They don't get that their pocket is a spreadsheet if they've got $300 bills in their pocket. Their pocket's a spreadsheet. They're going to eventually give some of those to somebody in exchange for something just like the bank. And so if you tell me, 'wow, I have this thing that I can use that I don't need any third party permission for and I've got this thing that I can use that is immutable.' It becomes very valuable. But to me, you don't need the government to tell you what to do. Look, the Chinese cracked down on Bitcoin mining and they made it verboten to transact in Bitcoin. Okay, big deal. 10, 11, 12% of the mining's happening in China. At least 15% of the transactions related to Bitcoin are happening in China. Which just goes to show you, unless you're going to shut the whole internet down, and you're telling me we're no longer going to have electricity on this planet, okay, then we're not going to have electricity on the planet. We've got bigger problems than whether or not Bitcoin is going to exist. But to me, I think AI is yes, no question. But Bitcoin is right up there because we need something to help the working poor and the lower middle income people to store value because if you put $1,000, let's say I work 10 hours $100 an hour, you give me $1,000, I put it on my bank account, you're raping me. In two years it's got $700 worth of purchasing power. So that's not fair to me.

Well, this is obviously hypothetical and speculative, but I would say probably yes, because that computer programming team, remember, after the financial crisis started and the bank said, 'Look, there's only one way out of this. I'm going to print unlimited amounts of money.' And to quote Ben Bernanke, if I have to helicopter $100 bills into the street of every major city to get spending going, that's exactly what I'm going to do. And literally he said that, I'm not making that up. And so the computer programming guys looked around and said, 'Okay, wow, that's really bad. We have the technology and we have a proof of work capability to create a system where nobody could break the system and maybe it would replace it.' And so yeah, if you told me we had a tight gold standard or you told me we had a handle on this stuff — listen, the US dollar, go to truflation.com. US dollar has lost 28% of its value in six years. Is that fair to the non-asset holder? Is there any wonder why there's a populist outcry in the country? There's a half of the people don't even have money in a bank account for an emergency. Is that fair?

No. Can I tell you why?

Because if you're denominated in US dollar, you're going to print more dollars. What difference does that make? Yes, that's marginally better, but it's not the answer. You know what would be the answer? If the government of the United States accept Bitcoin as a currency the way El Salvador has, then you're stuck and then you have a hardened currency, you have a hardened asset. The volatility in Bitcoin is based on lack of full adoption, lack of understanding, it's based on governmental resistance. Saylor's right when he says Bitcoin would be worth multiple millions of dollars per coin and we'd be trading it in satoshis if the government accepted it, but we don't have the government accepting it. So the government is resistant to it. And so it's only a $1 trillion market cap. Micron Technology, Alessandro, has the market capitalization of one of the greatest pieces of technology that's ever been created. Bitcoin has no owner. Bitcoin has no master. But Bitcoin could be the standardized ledger that we transact on. And so, look, Saylor's looking at it and saying, okay, the government's going to eventually have to accept this because it's going to default on its own currency and they're going to hyperinflate like a Weimar Republic and no one's going to believe the currency anymore. And to really understand Bitcoin is to go to Africa or to go into South America and to talk to the people there who have been wildly corrupted by their governments in terms of their money. They don't trust their money, and nor should they. And so what are they doing? They're either dollarizing or they're using Bitcoin or some other form of currency because the government is hyperinflating in the most ridiculous and absurd way.

The cleanest shirt in the laundry basket, I think, is what Brent Johnson says.

Are we on that path?

Yeah. I think it takes a decade. I think people that are 30 right now have to be 40. And I said when they go from 30 to 40, they will be in positions of power and positions of an ability to allocate. And as a result of which the older people, the 70 year old right now that absolutely hates Bitcoin will be in retirement at age 80 most likely. And so some of that incremental money that would go into gold is going to go into Bitcoin. So let's say nothing changes. Let's say that the government never accepts it. The Clarity Act never passed. We're gonna have an antiquated transactional non-tokenized system because the gerontocracy has won. Okay, let's say that that's the case. So then this will be half the market capitalization of gold. Tell me what gold is in 10 years. I'll tell you if gold is $50 trillion, Bitcoin will have a $25 trillion market cap. And if you bought it here at a trillion, you're going to go 25 to 1 on it and it'll be a very healthy position. It'll be a million, a million and a half dollars or something like that. And people say, 'Well, why is it that?' Well, look at the inflation numbers and look at the rampant spending. There's going to be an American president in 15 years that's staring down the barrel of a $55 trillion budget deficit. You just look at the math. I mean it's just a runaway train. So if you're telling me that's going to happen, Bitcoin's going to have a role. And again, if I'm wrong, I'm too conservative. I'm saying half the market capitalization of gold in 10 years. If you get the Clarity Act passed, you start the tokenization process. You mentioned AI. If you get full agentic AI, they're not going to let the AI open bank accounts. So the AI is going to start with cryptocurrency. The AI is going to say, 'Alessandro, I just paid your dry cleaning bill with XYZ satoshis. Alessandro, you wanted to rent that car. The robotic car is coming over to your driveway tonight at 1:00 in the morning, paid for by Bitcoin that was in my Bitcoin ledger that I wired over to the AI that was operating the Hertz rental car kiosk.' And that's what's going to happen. I mean, you can't sit there and look at the situation and say, 'I'm a huge believer in AI and I'm a huge disbeliever in Bitcoin.' You can't do that. They're conjoined.

Again, I'm not a BS-er, so I'm not going to sit here and give you a whole thing. I can just tell you what I expect to happen. I think that 10 years from now, there'll be a Republican or a Democrat that says, 'Hey, the rest of the world is — we're going to pass Clarity or not. If we don't pass it, the world's going to run over us. Everyone else is going to have much better infrastructure, financial rail systems than us, and at some point we're going to have to say, 'Geez, we got to do this.' The weird thing about all this is, and this is something I applaud Scott Bessent for, I don't agree with a lot of stuff that Trump spouts, but they're sitting there saying, 'Wow, the stablecoin industry, lo and behold, the bulk of it, if not 99% of it, is denominated in US dollars.' And so that's another leg on the stool of dollar supremacy and maintaining the US reserve currency status. Said differently, Tether and Circle have more US Treasuries on their balance sheet than Japan and Germany. And so weirdly, if I help these guys and I get the propitious regulation in place, it's going to further ensure another possible century of dollar supremacy, right? And so it's very hard to understand why we're not doing that. But let's say we don't do that. What will end up happening is US markets will continue to flourish because there's lots of entrepreneurs and innovation here. The agentic AI will pick up some of the Bitcoin activity which will improve Bitcoin's price. And we'll be sitting here where AI will be embedded in every part of our businesses, every part of our appliances, our education system, everything. And we'll be talking about something hotter than AI like immunotherapy where you take a shot and your knee gets better or you fix your kid's ADHD with genetic mRNA editing. I don't know. There's so many things coming and there's such great things about to happen to the world. The number one thing is we got to drop the ape shit. 2001: A Space Odyssey lives on, right? It was made in 1968, but the scene where the apes are beating the hell out of each other and then you fast forward into outer space where you're talking to the AI computer, that's exactly where we are right now. So let's stop the ape nonsense and stop hitting each other over the head with rocks and transact.

Well, you remember what he said?

What did he say?

So it would require a different type of leader. It would require a postpartisan, posttribal leader. So you would have to have some luck. The Roman Empire benefited from Marcus Aurelius. They were on the way down. And he basically figured out a way using his leadership skills to cheat history and it provided another several hundred years of empiric growth for Rome. But it was on the way out. And so we are flickering now. The lights are flickering. And the question is, can we get a transformative generational leader in place to create a patience or to create a process that would lead to patience that we don't currently have. But unfortunately, now there's a feeding frenzy at the top. These politicians want to make money. They're insider trading. Trump is the best. He's buying Apple two days before the Department of Justice drops their FTC probe on Apple. He's the best. He's got a 927-page disclosure document as the president of the United States. Barack Obama had a seven-page disclosure document. Trump's got a phone book. This guy's the best. So, is that going to continue? Weirdly, you could say the next president, Trump has given them a playbook for reform where they could say, 'Okay, everything that Trump did, we're going to now legislate and regulate away so no future president can do that.' Or a very self-interested person grabs the playbook and says, 'This is great. He made $10 billion. I'm going to shoot for $5 or I'm going to shoot for $30.'

He's created such cynicism and the corruption is so bold-faced that young kids — I grew up with no money, but I was looking upward and I said, 'Oh, wow, these young kids like me have an opportunity in this country.' Now those young kids are looking around and saying, 'Oh, wow. The system is completely rigged. I have little to no chance to make any money in this country.'

And Trump has taken it to a whole new level. By the way, he'll pardon all of his family members because Joe Biden pardoned his family member. They gave him the license. So one side's calling out the other side, but I think that's a bunch of malarkey.

Higher.

Well, without clarity it'll probably trade 75,000. It's very resilient right now. It likely grinds higher because there's so little interest in it and it's so bearish that any little blip of information grinds it higher.

We didn't really even have a robust bear market. Let's see.

Rates are going to be lower.

More of what you see right now. Maybe Hyperliquid makes it in there because I think it's got a pretty interesting business model around it. But I'm going to say it's Bitcoin and ETH. It's Tether. Binance will continue to have its run, USDC and Circle. Could Ripple or Sol get in there? Possibly. But I would bet more on Sol than Ripple in terms of the actual use cases. What's interesting is Hyperliquid is right now 10 on the list and it's gotten to 10 pretty quickly. If we're going to transact and tokenize, that's going to be a pretty attractive story.

It's a good question.

I'm going to say that stablecoins are going to have a higher market cap.

Also, if you remember, the two big coins, Tether and Circle, they're larger than ETH now.

SpaceX or Bitcoin 10-year hold from there.

It's a really good one. I'm going to go with Bitcoin. I'm going to tell you something about Bitcoin. Look at Bitcoin over the last five years and look at the market capitalization of the MAG 7 and you tell me what did better over the last five years including the latest swoon in Bitcoin.

Not market cap. I'm talking about percentage performance. So if you put a dollar in the MAG 7 and you put a dollar in Bitcoin, how did you do? Over five years. I've analyzed Bitcoin against most all those things individually. So I guess

I think as well, people often take a snapshot in Bitcoin and they're like, 'Over the last four years it's not above its old four-year position.' But with Bitcoin, you have to understand you need to take the average. What was its average in 2020? What was its average in 2021? Bitcoin is trading above its 2021 high. If I said 10 years, I think you and I would both agree it has been the best performing asset.

Great to spend time with you. Let's see if we're right. You got to invite me back if I'm getting my ass kicked. I'm usually very good when I'm down. If Bitcoin's at $300,000, you probably shouldn't invite me back because I'll be in 'I told you so' mode and I'm a really obnoxious 'I told you so' person. I'm a humble getting my ass kicked person. So invite me back. And if we're at $300,000, you're like, 'Oh my god, this guy's going to be insufferable.'

I appreciate you having me on, man. Pleasure. Guys at home, thank you so much for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Cheers.