Former President Trump told Stuart Varney on Fox Business today that Bitcoin is a scam.
"Bitcoin just seems like a scam," he said, adding, "I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar. I want the dollar to be the currency of the world; that's what I've always said."
During his time in the White House, Trump was similarly critical of Bitcoin, describing it—and other cryptocurrencies—as assets that are "not money" and whose value is "highly volatile and based on thin air."
But if you ask former White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci (we did), Trump didn't even write that tweet in the first place. Scaramucci suggested to Decrypt that Trump had been told he needed to opine about Bitcoin, and the tweet was crafted for him.
"I could tell very quickly when Trump himself was writing a tweet, they were loaded with malapropisms and misspellings and a lack of commas, just this stream-of-consciousness ranting," Scaramucci told Decrypt.
"I think the Bitcoin thing was written by somebody else. I think the Bitcoin thing was written by governmental bureaucrats that don't want to see Bitcoin rise," he added.
This time, it was definitely Trump speaking. And in any case, his views align pretty well with that old tweet.