Trump Shows He’s Fully in Crypto Industry’s Pocket With New Nominee

The crypto industry is about to have another friend inside the White House.

In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump announced the appointment of Paypal COO David Sacks to a new position with an influential-sounding title: “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.”

“In this important role, David will guide policy for the Administration in Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency, two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness,” Trump wrote late Thursday. “David will focus on making America the clear global leader in both areas. He will safeguard Free Speech online, and steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship. He will work on a legal framework so the Crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for, and can thrive in the U.S. David will also lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology.”

Trump continued to pile on the praise for his prominent Silicon Valley backer in a follow-up post, promising that the tech executive has the “knowledge, business experience, intelligence, and pragmatism to MAKE AMERICA GREAT in these two critical technologies.”

The new role—and his appointment of a longtime tech billionaire to initiate it—underscores Trump’s growing intent to leverage D.C. to the better benefit of Silicon Valley. A member of the “Paypal Mafia,” Sacks will be the latest associate of Peter Thiel to enter the echelons of the executive branch, following fellow Paypal co-founder Elon Musk and Vice President–elect JD Vance, who has had a long work history with the anti-tax billionaire. Trump has also tapped Thiel’s colleagues to run critical agencies: Jared Isaacman, who financed Musk’s SpaceX initiative, was nominated to run NASA earlier this week.

Sacks is a part of a contingent of tech bros, including Musk and Thiel, who have leveraged their immense wealth, power, and influence to unite conservatives and former leftists behind a cynical and conspiratorial reactionary vision against liberalism. As The New Republic’s Jacob Silverman noted in 2022, Sacks has spent years “quietly becoming the leading practitioner of a new right-wing sensibility that has emerged in the political realignments provoked by Trumpism and the pandemic.

“On foreign policy, it offers a blend of isolationism, Trumpist nationalism, suspicion of the deep state, and the anti-empire realism of John Mearsheimer,” Silverman wrote. “Domestically, the vision is more muddled, a series of angry poses, a politics of pique, much of it playing out on Twitter, Callin, YouTube, Rumble, Substack, and other online media, especially among people who may have once counted themselves on the left but now can’t countenance the sight of homeless encampments.”

But despite his political affinity for Trump’s politics, Sacks hasn’t always been on the president-elect’s side. In the immediate wake of January 6, the longtime Republican said on his podcast, All-In, that Trump was “clearly” responsible for the insurrection because “he is the one who put forth this theory that the election was stolen and was constantly repeating it for the last two months” and had “disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level.”

“If you want to see this mob as a gun, I think he loaded the gun,” Sacks said at the time. “He pointed it in a certain direction, but did he tell them to storm the Capitol? No, not specifically. I think therefore it’d be a very hard case to prosecute, but I think, you know, prosecuting him in a court of law is sort of unnecessary and redundant. I mean, I think that in the eyes of the public, politically, he is—I think most see that he’s culpable.”

With Pete Hegseth’s nomination for secretary of defense is in trouble on Capitol Hill, he still has the support of a powerful conservative backer: Project 2025 architect and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts.

Roberts said Thursday that his organization plans to spend $1 million to lobby senators unwilling to back the former Fox News personality accused of sexual assault.

“It’ll be messaging right now with their constituents about how out of step they are with the Trump agenda,” Roberts told the Associated Press in an interview, saying that “the establishment” was behind the opposition to Hegseth.

The conservative think tank also has a lot of supporters in the Republican Party, and Roberts’s move could sway Republican senators who are put off by Hegseth’s personal views and the allegations against him.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly denied that he had anything to do with the conservative Project 2025 manifesto, despite his running mate JD Vance and multiple campaign staffers having links to the project. Since he won the election, however, Trump has made staff picks with close ties to the policy plan, and his allies have spoken openly about adopting some of its policy proposals, such as eliminating the Department of Education.

If Roberts is openly supporting Hegseth and backing up lobbying efforts with cash, it could signal that Trump’s nominee is Project 2025–approved. It may also be an effort to curry favor with the president-elect in exchange for something else.

With Trump no longer in campaign mode, his administration’s true motives and affiliations no longer have to be hidden or explained away. Likewise, the unpopular people and organizations who support him don’t have to keep their distance. Project 2025 and its leaders are now operating openly to defend the president-elect in exchange for being able to implement their horrific agenda for America.

Tulsi Gabbard’s PAC spent thousands in political funds to help get her personal manifesto on The New York Times bestseller list, Forbes reported Thursday.

Gabbard founded the leadership PAC Defend Freedom, Inc., in March. Although it initially reported having no cash on hand, the PAC would go on to spend $33,000 of its donors’ funds on a bunch of copies of Gabbard’s book.

The book, For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind, debuted in fourth place on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list during the week of May 4, but it was flagged for bulk purchases, as large orders might have affected its ranking. The book stayed on the list for one more week.

At least some of those bulk purchases came from Gabbard’s PAC: On July 11, Defend Freedom made the first of four disbursements for “printing” to BulkBooks, a book wholesaler based in Franklin, Tennessee, that specializes in large orders. The disbursements totaled $33,000.

“For a limited time, Defend Freedom PAC supporters who gave $100 or more received Tulsi Gabbard’s NYT bestselling book For Love of Country,” Gabbard spokesperson Erika Tsuji confirmed.

Authors normally receive royalties for book copies purchased wholesale, which indicates that Gabbard profited personally from the bulk order (rather than if her PAC had requested copies from the publisher directly). Her spokesperson didn’t comment on this when asked over email.

While this is not illegal, it is shady. “She is not a federal candidate or an officeholder, so she is allowed to personally profit when her PAC buys her book with donors’ funds,” campaign finance attorney Brett Kappel explained to Forbes.

Gabbard has shifted hard from an edgy Democrat to an unflinching, QAnon-adjacent Donald Trump loyalist. This book, and the subsequent bestseller scam, is straight from her new alt-right grifter playbook.

Rudolph Giuliani is facing more legal action from two Georgia election workers who successfully sued him for defamation in December last year.

Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss asked a New York federal judge Thursday to impose “severe” sanctions and hold the former Donald Trump lawyer and ex–New York City mayor in civil contempt after Giuliani failed to turn over discovery documents related to the seizure of his property to settle the defamation ruling against him.

Giuliani ignored an October 28 court order to turn over the documents within 14 days and then disregarded a November 22 court order specifying a mandatory four-day window to produce the documents. After the November 26 deadline came and went with no action from Giuliani, Freeman and Moss’s attorneys told the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that “the time has come for Court to hold Mr. Giuliani in contempt for violating both the October 28 and November 22 Orders, and enter a contempt sanction it finds appropriate.”

The MAGA gadfly has desperately tried to delay and disregard the legal proceedings against him for falsely accusing Freeman and Moss of manipulating ballots during the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, resulting in Trump supporters sending the pair death threats, engaging in harassment, and protesting at their homes.

Last month, Giuliani even cited Trump’s upcoming inauguration in a motion to delay his trial, only to be denied by the judge, sending him into a pathetic rant.

“It’s punishment for being the one who revealed first Joe Biden’s 30-year criminality,” Giuliani whined at the time. “He’s been trying to torture me, stop me, take everything away from me since then.” It wasn’t clear if he was complaining about Biden or the judge in the case, Lewis J. Liman.

It’s unclear if Trump will bail out his former lawyer with a pardon, as the president-elect has already stiffed Giuliani on unpaid legal fees. Giuliani has already had to give up some of his prized possessions to Freeman and Moss, including luxury watches, a diamond ring, and a 1980 Mercedes-Benz. He also blew off another legal deadline in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. If Giuliani is held in contempt, the next penalty he faces could be prison.

Senator Tommy Tuberville is willing to do anything he can to make Donald Trump’s transition easier, even if it means completely forgoing one of the most important parts of his job.

Tuberville told reporters from CNN Wednesday that the Senate didn’t need to complete the vetting processes for Cabinet confirmations because Trump already did such a great job of that, even using the controversial Pete Hegseth as an example. Tuberville went so far as to suggest that Democrats who were merely doing their research were actually attacking nominees.

“Who are we to say that [the Senate is] a better vetter and picker of people than Donald Trump?” Tuberville asked CNN’s Manu Raju.

“Advise and consent, that’s your job,” Raju correctly replied, referring to the power vested in the Senate to approve treaties and appointments. Tuberville replied that that was more the Democrats’ job.

“Donald Trump did all the vetting they needed to do on Pete Hegseth,” Tuberville continued. I just can’t believe we even have people on our side that are saying, ‘Well I’ve got to look at this, gotta look at that.’ What they’re doing is throwing rocks at Donald Trump.”

Numerous Republican senators have expressed discomfort over Hegseth, a Christian nationalist accused of rape, assault, and misconduct who is up for defense secretary.

It’s unsurprising that the same senator who couldn’t name the three branches of government has no qualms about shirking the basic constitutional responsibility of his position. If these confirmations are a MAGA loyalty test, Republicans like Tuberville are passing with flying colors.