The crypto market just had one of its worst days in months, and Trump might have felt the heat too.
In a recent video breakdown by The Bulwark, hosts Tim Miller and Catherine Rampell unpacked the crash, what caused it, and why the Trump family’s deep crypto exposure makes this sell-off different from the rest.
Bitcoin fell toward $60,000, with realized losses reaching about $3.2 billion in just one day – the highest daily total ever recorded. It now sits 46% below its all-time high, back to where it was in 2021. Ethereum lost 50% over six months. Dogecoin dropped 66% in a year.
The $TRUMP meme coin took the hardest hit. It currently trades at $3.33, down 95.58% from it’s all-time high just a year ago.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made one thing very clear: the government is not coming to save crypto. That statement sent markets deeper into panic, triggering forced liquidations and stop-loss cascades that made the drop worse.
The bigger issue is the rising long-term interest rates.
Rampell explained it simply: “You want money to be really cheap… when you have long-term rates going up, that tends to be bad for asset bubbles.”
Cheap money fuels speculation. When borrowing gets expensive, assets like meme coins are the first to break.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family’s crypto exchange sold a 49% stake to an Abu Dhabi royal who serves as the country’s national security chief. No one knew about the deal until journalists broke the story.
Rampell raised the concern directly: “We don’t have a lot of visibility into those transactions and whether Trump and his family may be doing lots of shady deals or selling off at various points to enrich themselves.”
While crypto crashed, gold kept climbing.
According to Rampell, that gap challenges the idea that Bitcoin works as a hedge against inflation. She argued that gold has thousands of years of history behind it, while crypto still behaves more like a speculative risk asset tied to cheap money conditions.
Rampell was blunt about who loses the most here: “There are a lot of people who maybe lost their shirts who can’t afford it.”
With this level of political involvement in crypto markets, the questions around transparency and investor protection are only going to get louder.
A combination of high investor losses, a government statement ruling out a crypto bailout, and rising long-term interest rates that reduced cheap money for speculation triggered the sell-off.
Recent trends challenge that idea. While gold rose, Bitcoin crashed, behaving more like a speculative risk asset dependent on low interest rates rather than a stable store of value.
Retail investors often bear the biggest losses, as they may invest money they cannot afford to lose in these highly volatile and speculative digital asset markets.
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