Trump family says US dollar needs an upgrade, and they are the ones to do it
- CNBC's Eamon Javers spent the day at the the World Liberty Forum at Mar-a-Lago.
- Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, in an interview, said USD1 stablecoin will "preserve dollar hegemony."
- The Trump brothers also sat down with CNBC's "Squawk on the Street."
Since the [dollar] was created in 1792, U.S. presidents and their families have generally been content with the status quo of effectively giving the national government a monopoly on issuing [currency] and outlawing the use of foreign currency.
Consider the launch of the dollar the country's Initial Coin Offering. Back when the U.S. government was hustling to surpass the dominance of the Spanish pieces of eight then in common circulation throughout the country.
When presidents have said anything about the dollar itself, it was generally to reiterate the U.S. government's "strong dollar" policy.
That continued more or less uninterrupted through 46 presidencies — until last March, when a company partly owned by President Donald Trump and his family began to market an alternative to the dollar, a [cryptocurrency]
Now, the president's two oldest sons are telling CNBC on the sidelines of a day-long crypto event they hosted why that should change.
Marketed as a stablecoin, USD1's value would track the dollar, much as the dollar when it was created in 1792 was initially pegged to the value of the then-dominant Spanish silver dollar.
The Trumps' company, , touts USD1 as an improvement on official U.S. currency. The firm's website brands its stablecoin as "The Dollar. Upgraded." And it calls the coin "still the US dollar, but for a new era."
On Wednesday, the firm held its first [World Liberty Forum] at Mar-a-Lago, the club owned by President Trump and operated as his winter White House.
The event, coming just before the first anniversary of the release of USD1, brought together financiers, technologists, television personalities, the president of the world soccer organization FIFA and the artist Nicki Minaj.
From a Mar-a-Lago ballroom stage beneath an enormous stylized golden eagle sculpture, the message to attendees was that the old U.S. dollar needs to be modernized, that the private sector is the place to drive that innovation, and that stablecoins will help taxpayers by creating structural demand for U.S.
In fact, World Liberty backers argue, the new cryptocurrency they are building is not a threat to the dollar at all, but will help ensure the dollar remains dominant in global crypto finance – because USD1's value is pegged to it.
But one big question is why, if the dollar needs modernizing, should that be done by the private sector.
And why should the venture be in the private hands of the president and his family, and not in the hands of the [U.S. Treasury]
CNBC put those questions to the president's sons, World Liberty Financial's co-founders, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, in a small event space just off Mar-a-Lago's swimming pool.
"This is actually going to preserve dollar hegemony," Donald Trump Jr. replied.
"There's crypto companies that are the top five buyers in the world," he said. "That's going to actually stabilize the US dollar and do all the things that we need to."
He argued the federal government — and the big Wall Street banking system — simply aren't nimble or innovative enough to drive the needed changes.
"We're going to lead the way as Americans," Eric Trump said. "You're going to leave that to who, JPMorgan, to do? You're going to leave that to the federal government to do?"
Eric Trump sees Wall Street as overly complacent – and therefore ripe for technological disruption.
"Do you think big banks will actually do this?" he asked. "And the reason I say this is, I mean, it's been 50 years, where bankers are working six hours a day. They have a two-hour lunch break. They're typically out of the office at four o'clock in the afternoon."
Eric and Donald Jr. make it clear the animating force behind their venture is not the inventor's glee at building a better mousetrap or the insider's frustration at legacy companies that can't or won't adapt to the future.
Instead, what's driving them is a raw sense of retribution.
The Trump brothers see the wider financial system as part of an establishment that unfairly ostracized them after their father left power in 2021, when, after the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, the banking system broadly declined to do business with the Trump family.
"You know, we didn't get into crypto because we were on the leading edge," Donald Trump Jr. said in an interview Wednesday with CNBC's [Sara Eisen] "We got into it out of necessity. They basically forced us into it."
[Eric Trump told Eisen] "We were the most cancelled people in the world in 2020, 2021 and it's really great to almost have this retribution where all of a sudden we start pushing an agenda."
"Our agenda was to modernize finance, to allow that to never ever, ever happen to anybody again," Eric Trump said.
Donald Trump Jr. said he concluded that the traditional banking system is a "Ponzi scheme."
"They created this monster," Trump Jr. said, pointing to the moment when he claimed "when you had every big bank in the world, for doing nothing wrong," "debank" Trump accounts and those of other conservatives, "just based on the fact that we all wore a hat that said 'Make America Great Again.'"
Eric Trump recalled his father's time out of the White House between presidential terms as a traumatizing period for the family.
"These are commercial buildings, residential buildings, golf courses around the world. These aren't political entities, and they were pulling these accounts from us like we were absolute dogs," Eric Trump said.
"We couldn't pay our vendors, we couldn't pay our employees. And so we said, listen, there has to be a better way."
To Eric Trump, the message is that the Trump family will always counterpunch: When social media companies kicked his father off their platforms, President Trump created his own Truth Social media platform. And when the banking industry declined Trump family business, the family took matters into their own hands.
And that's why a president's family, for the first time since 1792, is creating an upgraded American currency.
Call it Truth Dollar.