tariffs

By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

The Trump administration’s economic experiment, rooted in chaos, crony capitalism, and unchecked digital surveillance, is pushing America toward a dangerous new frontier. It is a crypto-driven, cashless society that threatens to erase financial freedom for millions, particularly Black Americans and the working poor.

As the economy contracts and inflation rises, President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff regime has already sent shockwaves through every sector. According to Fortune, Trump’s reckless tariff decisions have wiped nearly seven trillion dollars in market value, decimated small business confidence, and driven consumer prices to levels not seen in decades. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii warned that Trump is ruining the economy on purpose, pointing to middle-class families now paying an average of five thousand dollars more each year for basic goods such as cars, homes, groceries, and clothing. While Americans struggle with higher prices and shrinking savings, the Trump White House has quietly advanced a sweeping new financial system that merges state power, private crypto interests, and invasive data collection. In early 2025, Trump authorized a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, incorporating the volatile cryptocurrency into official United States financial infrastructure. The Conversation reported that this hybrid model privatizes the issuance of money while keeping control of reserves under the executive branch. It undermines the Federal Reserve’s independence and centralizes power in the Oval Office. Trump described bitcoin as freedom money, but in practice, it represents state-aligned crypto dominance and an economy where wealth and access depend on government loyalty.

Behind the scenes, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, once run by Elon Musk, came under scrutiny for uploading massive federal databases containing the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans, including Social Security data, to unsecured cloud servers. A whistleblower revealed that the team requested its activities not be logged and even deleted records of access, behavior that cybersecurity experts compared to criminal hacking operations. Sensitive information tied to union members, workers’ rights cases, and corporate secrets may have been exposed, with traces of suspicious activity linking back to Russian IP addresses. By the spring of 2025, Musk left DOGE and the government under a cloud of suspicion after a public spat with Trump. He has gone mostly silent since his departure, but multiple people believe he took large volumes of data with him. The full extent of what was removed or copied remains unclear, leaving major concerns about the safety of sensitive personal and governmental information.

At the same time, Trump’s allies have opened new financial avenues for the wealthy through Erebor Bank, a cryptocurrency-focused institution backed by conservative megadonors and approved with unusual speed by Trump’s Treasury Department. Its mission is to serve ultra-high-net-worth individuals and tech firms, signaling a parallel financial system that privileges the rich while ordinary citizens are pushed into algorithmic surveillance economies. These developments align with global moves toward digital ID systems such as the United Kingdom’s One Login and digital wallets, which The Telegraph described as a real nightmare that centralizes personal data and is riddled with security flaws. In the United States, REAL ID enforcement now allows the federal government to link biometric data to digital identification across states. Officials claim it enhances security, yet many Black Americans have long viewed REAL ID with suspicion. Without it, citizens cannot board domestic flights, enter federal buildings, or access certain public facilities. Critics warn that REAL ID creates another layer of exclusion and control, particularly for those who already face bureaucratic and systemic barriers.

An expanded picture of what is happening around the world makes this moment appear even more calculated than coincidental. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s digital ID programhas been exposed as a security disaster that relied on unsecured workstations in foreign countries, leaving millions of British citizens vulnerable to data theft and foreign manipulation. In the United States, whistleblower Charles Borges revealed that the DOGE team copied and uploaded the Social Security Administration’s database containing hundreds of millions of Americans’ personal records to unmonitored cloud servers. He resigned after filing complaints, claiming he was harassed and isolated by the administration. Meanwhile, cybersecurity analysts detected data activity linked to Russia at the same time DOGE engineers were transferring files. When taken together, these events suggest a global pattern of governments and private actors concentrating power by controlling not only digital money but also personal identity and access to daily life. Globally, other nations have already begun shifting toward cashless societies. Sweden and Norway have reduced physical currency use to historic lows, and while the move is framed as progress, even their governments are now warning about the vulnerability of fully digital economies to war, cyberattacks, and authoritarian abuse. The convergence of Trump’s crypto policies, REAL ID enforcement, the global cashless push, and Musk’s suspected data exfiltration raises the specter of a coordinated effort to centralize control over citizens’ finances and personal freedoms. It suggests that the line between economic policy, surveillance, and political domination is disappearing.

As the physical dollar fades, major institutions warn of who will be left behind. Brookings predicted years ago that cash will soon be obsolete, with digital currencies becoming the new norm. While central banks promote benefits like efficiency and transparency, they also introduce total traceability, enabling governments or corporations to freeze, restrict, or program how citizens spend money. J.P. Morgan and Loughborough University both note that a cashless system risks excluding the poor, the elderly, and the unbanked, groups disproportionately represented by Black and minority Americans. Digital payments must be designed with inclusion and convenience at their core, said Loughborough economist Markos Zachariadis, warning that without oversight, we risk leaving vulnerable groups excluded. In the United States, those same groups are already being priced out of basic participation in the economy as Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and anti-worker policies strip away safety nets like Medicaid and food assistance.

For Black America, the stakes are especially high. The march toward a cashless economy threatens to replicate the structural inequalities of the old banking system under the guise of innovation. Access to digital money will depend on data verification, credit history, and digital ID compliance, areas where Black Americans have historically faced discrimination and surveillance. With tech billionaires like Musk controlling the digital rails, privacy and autonomy may soon become luxuries reserved for the elite. As Global Finance observed, nations like Sweden are reassessing their nearly cashless economies after realizing that wars, natural disasters, and crises reveal vulnerabilities in fully digital systems. In America, those vulnerabilities may soon look like total control, where the same administration that tanked the economy gains the power to decide how and where citizens can spend what little they have left. In the end, Trump’s version of economic freedom is not about liberty. It is about ownership of currency, of data, and of people. If this cashless, crypto-fueled dystopia becomes reality, Black America and the poor will once again be first in line to pay the price.