Trump’s Birthday Parade: I Didn’t Think I Could Hate the Assholes at Coinbase Any More, But I Was Wrong
- john raymond
- Jun 15
- 2 min read
I already hated Amazon. I hated them for what they did to the American economy—turning workers into widgets, crushing small businesses, waging war against unions, flooding the world with cheap plastic and cheaper dignity. I hated them for treating art like an algorithm, for mutilating The Wheel of Time into a billion-dollar embarrassment to taste and literacy. That hate was earned.
But Coinbase?
Coinbase was already everything wrong with crypto. They were the lie behind the revolution. The glossy middleman pretending to decentralize, the rent-extracting toll booth in a system that was supposed to need no gatekeepers. They were KYC compliance dressed up as radical transparency. They were the casino that called itself a bank, the extraction engine that wrapped itself in slick UX and libertarian vapor.
And now they’ve made it worse.
Because now Coinbase has thrown in not just with capital, not just with exploitation, but with outright authoritarian spectacle. They sponsored Trump’s birthday parade—a grotesque display of state militarism packaged as patriotism, wrapped around the personal vanity of a man whose only loyalty is to himself and his handler in the Kremlin. It was not a celebration of the Army. It was not even a true civic display. It was a personality cult staging ceremony, with tanks and jets and soldiers reduced to set dressing. And Coinbase paid for the lights.
Let’s be very clear: this wasn’t a one-off marketing slip. It was an act of ideological clarity. Coinbase didn’t just choose to ignore politics. They chose to underwrite the most dangerous politics in the country. The company that once told its employees to avoid activism is now actively bankrolling the optics of fascism.
You don’t get to play neutral anymore. You don’t get to sell crypto’s promise of decentralization and liberty while backing a wannabe king. You don’t get to wrap yourself in freedom while propping up a man who talks tough to immigrants and bows low to Moscow. Coinbase revealed what we always suspected: it was never about freedom. It was always about proximity to power.
They were already everything wrong with crypto. The centralization. The grift. The regulatory theater. The insider dumps. The empty slogans of democratization masking old-school finance in new fonts. But now they’ve gone further. Now they’re collaborators. Now they’re patrons of authoritarian pageantry.
And that makes them worse than hypocrites. That makes them enemies of the republic.
And I didn’t think I could hate Coinbase any more than I already did.
But I was wrong.
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