Donald Trump Jr. says his family went “all in” on crypto after being debanked:
Donald Trump Jr.: “The reason we got into crypto, and we’re all in on crypto, and we’re doing American Bitcoin and we have World Liberty Finance and USD1, was because there was a time—I’d probably been on this show—where I could call any single banker in New York City, they’d pick up the phone, I’d be able to get a loan for whatever real estate project I was doing across the street. Then we got into politics, and all of a sudden they wouldn’t take your call, you couldn’t get financing, we were debanked. What I realized, and my brother realized, because we were the recipients of every subpoena imaginable, was that we were actually just the top of this sort of pyramid scheme that we didn’t realize we were a part of, that the financial system was totally undemocratized because we had a certain balance sheet, and whatever, we could kind of do whatever we wanted while the regular guy was messed up. Now we were all of a sudden in the shoes of the regular guy that wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the markets. So we said, ‘What’s the solution for that?’ The answer is crypto—these decentralized platforms where you’re not beholden to this, where you create efficiencies. As a guy that did real estate, why am I paying points in and out for title insurance that could be done on the blockchain? So we got into crypto not because it was like, ‘Hey, this is the next cool thing.’ We got into it out of necessity, we got into it because we understood just how quickly we could be turned off, even as an incredible developer from New York City. I mean, I don’t think anyone would argue that we didn’t change the skylight of New York City, but that disappeared in an instant. I mean, we’re getting sued by the New York State AG for half a billion dollars for paying back loans on time with interest. These aren’t fair markets. There’s nothing egalitarian about any of that. So we actually, as innovators, as people who understand these things, we went all in on a concept that makes total sense because we had actually been the recipient of how quickly that can be shut off.”