After rumors that he might contemplate ending his bid for the White Home, impartial presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on the offensive in Nashville on Friday, taking swings at former President Donald Trump and highlighting his plans to strengthen the U.S. greenback with a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
Talking lower than 24 hours earlier than former Trump is scheduled to look on the Bitcoin2024 Convention at Nashville’s Music Metropolis Heart, Kennedy applauded Trump’s new evolution on the digital foreign money, however urged skepticism as to its legitimacy.
“I understand that tomorrow President Trump may announce his plan to build a Bitcoin Fort Knox and authorize the U.S. government to buy a million Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset,” Kennedy mentioned.
“I welcome President Trump’s new enthusiasm for Bitcoin. But he’s only weeks into the Bitcoin dialogue,” he mentioned.
Touting his lengthy historical past as a Bitcoin holder, Kennedy reminded the group of Trump’s repeated skepticism of Bitcoin, calling him “openly hostile” to Bitcoin in December 2020, when People suffered hits to their revenue from lockdowns, and declining buying energy due to cash printing in the course of the pandemic.
“In 2021, President Trump doubled down and declared that Bitcoin just seems like a scam. I don’t like it because its another currency competing against the dollar,” Kennedy mentioned. “I’m happy that President Trump has had this evolution. I’m proud that I helped blaze a trail that made it easier for other political leaders to follow.”
However he cautioned the group to stay skeptical of Trump’s new stance.
“Bitcoin is about our souls. It’s about our values,” Kennedy mentioned. “President Trump needs to explain how his personal values align with those of Bitcoiners. If he doesn’t do that, then we don’t really have any insurance, do we, that his support of them is not another ephemeral monetary policy fad du jour.”
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Kennedy famous rumors that Trump could also be contemplating JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon for Treasury Secretary, if elected, sparking an enormous boo from the group. Trump mentioned this week that he has thought-about Dimon or BlackRock CEO Larry Fink for that place.
Kennedy shared some criticism for the Biden administration, asserting that each his opponents within the presidential race “allowed the FBI and spy agencies to suppress our right to free speech by working with social media companies to deplatform people who criticize government policies.”
He mentioned Trump had 4 years to pardon Russell Griffin, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden however didn’t accomplish that.
“We need to ask ourselves why?” he mentioned, pledging to pardon all three.
Snowden spoke to Bitcoin attendees just about simply earlier than Kennedy took the stage.
RFJ Jr.’s day 1 pledges
Kennedy informed an enthusiastic crowd that if elected, he would signal an government order on his first day in workplace to switch the 200,000 Bitcoin held by the USA to the U.S. Treasury to be held as a strategic reserve asset.
He additionally pledged a second order to direct the U.S. Treasury to buy 550 Bitcoin every day till the U.S. Treasury is in possession of a reserve of 4 million Bitcoins, to convey the U.S. Bitcoin reserve to the identical proportion that the U.S. at present maintain of the world’s gold reserves.
“The cascading impacts of these actions will effectively move Bitcoin to a valuation of hundreds of trillions of dollars,” he mentioned.
Kennedy additionally pledged to signal an government order directing the IRS to deal with Bitcoin as an eligible asset for 1031 Alternate into actual property — making transactions unreportable and by extension nontaxable — which prompted a roar of approval from the group.
“Transactional freedom is just as important as freedom of expression and the First Amendment,” he mentioned, criticizing the Canadian authorities’s transfer to freeze financial institution accounts of truckers who protested Canadian vaccine mandates.
“None of these truckers was charged with anything, and yet the government was able to shut down their bank accounts,” he mentioned. “They couldn’t pay their mortgages.”
Bitcoin to repair the system ‘currency of hope’
On the marketing campaign path, Kennedy mentioned he’s heard from older People slicing their prescription drugs in half to make them final, and others “choosing between gasoline, home heating oil and food.”
With out implementing insurance policies to cement the worth of the greenback — like shopping for a Bitcoin commonplace, he mentioned — the U.S. economic system will proceed to deteriorate.
“Americans today are being forced to make these purchases because our money is broken,” he mentioned. “Bitcoin is a technology for freedom, or optimism or independence or democracy and transparency: it is the currency of hope.”
Echoing the impartial basis of his marketing campaign, Kennedy pledged his loyalty could be to ideas, not social gathering, if elected.
“I don’t think of myself as red or blue or even purple — those are the colors of political parties,” he mentioned. “Instead, I think of myself as orange — that is the color of freedom.”
Big cheers rang out from the group, which stood in approval.
“It’s true that President Trump has orange hair,” he said, prompting a laugh from the crowd. “I can only admire him for that from afar. I’ll never be able to match him on that. That is a really great start. But I have an orange heart.”
Vivian Jones covers state authorities and politics for The Tennessean. Attain her atvjones@tennessean.com or on X at @Vivian_E_Jones.