Bitcoin2024 Nashville: RFK Jr. pledges to be a Bitcoin president
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at the Bitcoin2024 conference at the Music City Center in Nashville. | Reuters
After rumors that he may consider ending his bid for the White House, independent 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. dollar with a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
Speaking less than 24 hours before former Trump is scheduled to appear at the Bitcoin2024 Conference at Nashville’s Music City Center, Kennedy applauded Trump’s new evolution on the digital currency, but 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 said.
“I welcome President Trump’s new enthusiasm for Bitcoin. But he’s only weeks into the Bitcoin dialogue,” he said.
Touting his long history as a Bitcoin holder, Kennedy reminded the crowd of Trump’s repeated skepticism of Bitcoin, calling him “openly hostile” to Bitcoin in December 2020, when Americans suffered hits to their income from lockdowns, and declining purchasing power because of money printing during 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 said. “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.”
But he cautioned the crowd to remain skeptical of Trump’s new stance.
“Bitcoin is about our souls. It’s about our values,” Kennedy said. “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 noted rumors that Trump may be considering JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon for Treasury Secretary, if elected, sparking a big boo from the crowd. Trump said this week that he has considered Dimon or BlackRock CEO Larry Fink for that position.
Kennedy shared some criticism for the Biden administration, asserting that both his opponents in 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 said Trump had four years to pardon Russell Griffin, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden but did not do so.
“We need to ask ourselves why?” he said, pledging to pardon all three.
Snowden spoke to Bitcoin attendees virtually just before Kennedy took the stage.
RFJ Jr.’s day 1 pledges
Kennedy told an enthusiastic crowd that if elected, he would sign an executive order on his first day in office to transfer the 200,000 Bitcoin held by the United States to the U.S. Treasury to be held as a strategic reserve asset.
He also pledged a second order to direct the U.S. Treasury to purchase 550 Bitcoin daily until the U.S. Treasury is in possession of a reserve of 4 million Bitcoins, to bring the U.S. Bitcoin reserve to the same proportion that the U.S. currently hold 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 said.
Kennedy also pledged to sign an executive order directing the IRS to treat Bitcoin as an eligible asset for 1031 Exchange into real property — making transactions unreportable and by extension nontaxable — which prompted a roar of approval from the crowd.
“Transactional freedom is just as important as freedom of expression and the First Amendment,” he said, criticizing the Canadian government’s move to freeze bank 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 said. “They couldn’t pay their mortgages.”
Bitcoin to fix the system ‘currency of hope’
On the campaign trail, Kennedy said he’s heard from older Americans cutting their prescription pills in half to make them last, and others “choosing between gasoline, home heating oil and food.”
Without implementing policies to cement the value of the dollar — like buying a Bitcoin standard, he said — the U.S. economy will continue to deteriorate.
“Americans today are being forced to make these purchases because our money is broken,” he said. “Bitcoin is a technology for freedom, or optimism or independence or democracy and transparency: it is the currency of hope.”
Echoing the independent foundation of his campaign, Kennedy pledged his loyalty would be to principles, not party, if elected.
“I don’t think of myself as red or blue or even purple — those are the colors of political parties,” he said. “Instead, I think of myself as orange — that is the color of freedom.”
Huge cheers rang out from the crowd, 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 government and politics for The Tennessean. Reach her at vjones@tennessean.com or on X at @Vivian_E_Jones.