Where Are the People?

On October 23, 2025, Donald Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao — better known as CZ — the billionaire founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. The move barely registered as a blip in most mainstream coverage. After all, Zhao had already served his four-month federal sentence in 2024 for violating U.S. anti–money laundering laws. The crime had been acknowledged. The punishment, while minimal, had been carried out. Case closed.

Except it wasn’t.

Because this was no random act of mercy. It was a strategic cleansing of a criminal record for a man whose company had reportedly helped facilitate one of the Trump family’s most lucrative ventures: World Liberty Financial, the crypto project that launched Trump 2.0 into the digital finance stratosphere.

The pardon wasn’t just leniency. It was erasure, a clearing of the books for someone whose proximity to Trump’s personal wealth couldn’t be ignored.

This wasn’t justice. It was consolidation. And it was just one chapter in a larger story of how American democracy is being quietly rewritten — not by legislation or voters, but by tech magnates and their political patrons.

The president’s crypto empire

By mid-2025, Trump’s family-linked crypto venture had reportedly generated over $800 million in revenue, primarily from token sales and international transactions. World Liberty Financial didn’t just launch a coin. It launched an infrastructure —wallets, stablecoins, partnerships, and exchange relationships — that made it a central player in the new digital financial order the Trump administration is actively championing.

Binance, the company CZ founded, played a key role in powering parts of that infrastructure, including early liquidity and backend support.

So when Trump wiped Zhao’s record clean, more than a year after his sentence had ended, it didn’t look like forgiveness. It looked like gratitude, or worse, repayment.

And if that’s the case, then this wasn’t just a pardon. It was a payoff.

Where are the people?

This democracy was designed — at least in theory — to be governed by the people, for the people. But in this new era of tech-driven, personality-fueled policymaking, one has to ask: where are the people now?

They’re not present when billionaires are pardoned by the very politicians whose platforms they help enrich. They’re not consulted when experimental economic systems are fused with national policy. They’re certainly not included when those same systems are promoted by unelected private actors whose incentives are profit, not public service.

Crypto is being positioned as an essential pillar of the U.S. economy. AI is being integrated into federal workflows, hiring, benefits administration, and even defense. Both are actively being deregulated. But who asked for this? Who consented?

There was no referendum, no public debate, and no national reckoning.

There was only the quiet shifting of power and the vanishing of the public from the equation.

Musk, DOGE, and the decimation of federal purpose

Nowhere is this dynamic more glaring than in the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE.

Elon Musk — billionaire, technocrat, and self-appointed government reformer — was tapped as the unofficial head of DOGE in late 2024. For months, he served as the architect behind an AI-powered blitz to “eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse” across the federal government.

What that really meant was dismantling institutions without transparency, oversight, or accountability.

Among DOGE’s earliest and most extreme targets were USAID and the U.S. Institute of Peace. USAID, America’s leading development agency and a pillar of soft power abroad, was gutted. Missions were closed, partners abandoned, and budgets slashed by an algorithm. The Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan institution founded by Congress to promote conflict resolution, was rendered defunct, deemed too inefficient by a system that couldn’t measure diplomacy in dollars.

These decisions weren’t made through congressional hearings or public votes. They were executed by AI tools and rubber-stamped by Musk and his inner circle.

The people had no say. Their institutions were burned down in the name of optimization.

The cost: human and environmental

Neither AI nor crypto is a neutral tool. They carry profound consequences, especially for civil rights and the planet.

AI systems, embedded without accountability, have already been used to deny benefits, misidentify suspects, and profile marginalized communities. Crypto, sold as a financial equalizer, has become a speculative marketplace where those with the least are often the first to lose, and the last to be protected.

Meanwhile, both technologies devour energy. The servers that train AI models and mine tokens pull electricity from fossil-fueled grids, emit vast amounts of carbon, and accelerate climate collapse, all while the administration shrugs off environmental science as “opinion.”

The systems are new. The harms are familiar.

A government of men, not of laws

It’s not that Musk or CZ are inherently evil, or even necessarily untrustworthy. They are, by many measures, brilliant. However, brilliance is not governance. Innovation is not democracy.

And no matter how intelligent or visionary an individual may be, you cannot run a democratic superpower through a cult of personality.

A republic is not meant to orbit around billionaires. It’s meant to be rooted in law, accountability, and shared power.

When decisions about war, peace, finance, and surveillance are shaped more by a handful of men than by 330 million people, that’s not a tech revolution. That’s oligarchy. More specifically, it is techno-oligarchy, or what happens when Silicon Valley replaces Capitol Hill as the true seat of power, without ever being elected.

We’ve seen this story before

When America cracked the atom, it didn’t give Oppenheimer the nuclear launch codes. It didn’t turn Einstein into the Secretary of Energy.

We paused. We debated. We built institutions, flawed though they were, to contain the power we had unleashed. We erred, but we tried.

We didn’t rebuild the nation around the inventors of the bomb. We kept our civic foundation intact, or tried to.

Now? We are building economic infrastructure around crypto tokens backed by Trump. We are handing federal workflows to AI systems curated by Musk.

It’s like rebuilding the entire economy around airports days after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, except now, Wilbur is automating public life with black-box algorithms, and Orville is selling invisible money.

Guardrails, not gods

This is not a call to reject progress. We need innovation. We need disruption.

However, we also need rules. We need oversight. We need to remember that bold bets aren’t always wise ones, and that collapse, in this context, won’t be abstract. Both cryptocurrency and AI are showing early signs of a possible bubble. Both are relatively new, poorly understood, and show extreme stability concerns due to human input.

If either bubble bursts or even falters, the impact will not be minor glitches. It will be benefits not delivered, climate targets missed, jobs eliminated, and trust in government eroded.

At that point, there may be no public left to turn to. When democracy disappears behind the dashboard, it doesn’t go out with a bang. It dissolves line by line.

Because by then, the people — the very foundation of this democracy — will have been written out of the code entirely.

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Sources:

1. Trump pardons convicted Binance founder ‘CZ’ Zhao – Reuters (Oct 23, 2025)
2. Binance seeks to curb US oversight during deal talks with Trump’s crypto company – Reuters (Apr 12, 2025)
3. Trump family held deal talks with Binance’s US arm, WSJ reports – Reuters (Mar 13, 2025)
4. Binance and CEO Plead Guilty to Federal Charges in $4B Resolution – U.S. Department of Justice (Nov 21, 2023)
5. Binance founder sentenced to four months in prison for money laundering – The Guardian (Apr 30, 2024)
6. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao sentenced to 4 months in prison for allowing money laundering – PBS NewsHour (Apr 30, 2024)
7. “Crime Pays!” Is the Message Sent by DOJ’s Actions (…) – BetterMarkets (May 2024)
8. Binance Founder CZ Confirms He Has Applied for Trump Pardon After Prison Term – CoinDesk (May 8, 2025)
9. Dig into: United States v. Changpeng Zhao – U.S. Department of Justice
10. Letter to DOJ/Treasury re Binance Pardon – U.S. Senate Banking Committee
11. Inside the Trump family’s global crypto cash machine — Reuters (Oct 28, 2025)
12. From coins to miners: Trump family’s crypto playbook — Reuters (Sep 3, 2025)
13. Trump reports more than $600 million in income from crypto, golf … — Reuters (Jun 14, 2025)
14. Trump‑backed World Liberty proposes $1.5 billion crypto holder … — Reuters (Aug 9, 2025)
15. How the Trump family took over a crypto firm as it raised hundreds of millions — Reuters (Mar 31, 2025)
16. Trump’s World Liberty tokens to become tradable — Reuters (Jul 16, 2025)
17. UAE fund buys $100 million of Trump’s World Liberty tokens — Reuters (Jun 27, 2025)