'They came after us viciously': Eric Trump cites debanking and cancel culture in family’s embrace of crypto

Autonomy, debanking and cancel culture are the three big reasons why the Trump family has been doubling down on their exposure to the crypto industry, Eric Trump, the second-oldest son of the sitting president, said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on FOX Business.

“I never thought I’d fall into the world of crypto until every bank began cancelling us for absolutely no reason other than the fact that my father was in politics,” Trump said on Tuesday while discussing the "weaponization" of banks against the Trump family. “They came after us viciously. It wasn’t until that time that I realized how important crypto was.”

Trump’s statements come on the heels of a partnership with Hut 8, which is taking a majority ownership position in a Trump-backed crypto mining operation called American Bitcoin. This is the Trump family’s latest foray into crypto, which also includes the World Liberty Financial DeFi protocol, the TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins and several NFT series. 

President Trump, a former crypto critic, came around to the industry while running his reelection campaign, which was financially backed by some of the crypto industry’s most visible personalities. As part of his first official acts as president, Trump called upon regulators and lawmakers to draft guidance and legislation that would set the U.S. up as the “crypto capital” of the world. 

“Everyone wants guidelines,” Eric Trump said Tuesday.

In addition to lauding crypto’s censorship-resistant qualities, Eric Trump noted that the technology is a vast improvement over contemporary finance systems. It is “cheaper, faster, more transparent,” he said. There isn’t “a single thing” banks can do that crypto cannot do better. 

In particular, Trump argued that stablecoins will help bolster the U.S. dollar while radically transforming what “finance and banking” will look like in the coming decades.