On a much-anticipated podcast episode released on Sunday, presidential candidate Donald Trump spent three hours talking to host Joe Rogan — but cryptocurrency or bitcoin weren’t mentioned once.
This contentious topic has been raised more frequently by both Trump and Kamala Harris as election day looms. Recently, Harris’ attempts to win the votes of Black males backfired among the crypto community.
Some were quick to point out that her administration has failed to produce concrete crypto regulations, instead alienating top firms with seemingly baseless litigation.
Meanwhile, Trump has made explicit attempts to rally the Bitcoin community. He has been involved in several NFT collections and, most recently, crypto project World Liberty Financial. Rogan has also spoken positively about bitcoin and NFTs in the past.
So, punters on crypto betting platform Polymarket believed that there was up to a 50% chance that Trump and Rogan would mention crypto or bitcoin during the podcast.
Why didn’t it happen?
Trump’s recent crypto project flopped hard
World Liberty Financial may be the first time a former US president has endorsed a project that promises to disrupt the “stranglehold” of traditional financial institutions. Despite Trump’s promotions, however, the project flopped on launch.
Not even 5% of its token offering has sold as of Friday, and the 20 billion tokens on sale were a massive reduction from what the project originally promised. Additional issues, ranging from scams to tech issues to concerning centralization, have plagued the project, revealing it to be an opaque money-grab by Trump.
So, perhaps it’s understandable that Trump and Rogan chose to sidestep the issue altogether. After all, Rogan has also appeared to distance himself from crypto in recent months. In an episode published three weeks ago, he called crypto “weird f*cking imaginary money.”
Polymarket punters were right about other topics, though. Trump’s mini McDonald’s gig was mentioned, along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., trans issues, and aliens.
