WASHINGTON – Imagine if President Bill Clinton created a Strategic Beanie Baby Reserve, hoping the ugly dolls could someday pay down the national debt.

Or if President Joe Biden had created a Hunter Biden Paintings Asset Stockpile, encouraging investment in a commodity that just so happened to enrich his son.

Here on real world earth, we’re lucky enough to get the worst of both worlds, the inane and the corrupt, with President Donald Trump creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve as well as a Digital Asset Stockpile ― to hoard cryptocurrencies that are even more volatile and sketchy than Bitcoin.

Trump’s plan has sparked outrage across the political spectrum from those who actually do know how the economy and money work.

“There is no argument for why the government should be buying it and holding it,” said Jason Furman, a top economist in the Barack Obama White House.

“We’re never going to need any of these tokens because they don’t do anything,” said Peter Schiff, who runs Euro Pacific Capital Management. “They’re just used to gamble.”

Even Avik Roy ― once a top policy adviser to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney who believes that stockpiling specifically Bitcoin, because of its finite supply and wide acceptance, might be a good way to hedge against what he sees as a looming budgetary and monetary crisis ― sees no reason to “line the pockets” of some “random billionaires” by elevating non-Bitcoin crypto.

As late as the summer of 2021, Trump had no problems describing crypto for what it is: “Bitcoin, it seems like a scam” — specifically, a “greater fool” scam, which relies on you finding someone gullible enough to spend even more than you did for something with little or no intrinsic value.

Then proponents of the stuff began coming to him with schemes that let him cash in on some of that easy fake money. First came the Trump “digital” trading cards, featuring cartoonish images of Trump as a race car driver, Trump as an astronaut, and so on, letting him profit off the NFT craze that peaked in 2022.

That was followed by far more lucrative opportunities. Last September, he and his sons launched “World Liberty Financial,” a brokerage that lets the family make money buying and selling crypto.

That came not long after crypto backers began wooing him with pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago and six-, seven-, even eight-figure donations to the super PACs backing his effort to regain the White House. In all, the crypto industry spent $119 million, extracting a promise in September to make the United States the “crypto capital” of the world.

Then, three days before his inauguration, Trump took the corruption to whole new levels. Instead of divesting from businesses or placing them in a blind trust, as previous presidents have done, Trump created a quick, easy, impossible-to-track method for anyone to bribe him by purchasing some or lots of his very own crypto “coin.”

And last weekend, Trump caused a brief stampede and then rapid selloff of three lesser known crypto “coins” by boosting them on social media while he played a round of golf. (The White House did not respond to queries about why those particular coins.)

At Friday’s “crypto summit” Trump convened at the White House, he made clear his total reversal on the topic was complete: “Last year I promised to make America the Bitcoin superpower of the world, and the crypto capital of the planet, and we’re taking historic action to deliver on that promise.”

The actual order Trump signed Thursday was not as bad as critics had feared. It transfers the Bitcoin and other crypto “assets” that have been seized by the federal government in criminal or civil proceedings into “reserves” and says taxpayer money cannot be used to buy more.

Still, Trump’s executive order, regardless of whatever else may come, provides enormous benefits to the industry, the biggest of which is legitimacy.

Crypto proponents have always relied on the “baffle them with BS” sales theory. When asked what, exactly, crypto does that is useful for consumers or society as a whole, they typically start tossing out jargon. Web3! Defi! Blockchain! Tokenization!

Like the adult citizenry in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” non-converts are made to feel stupid, to shame them into going along with the genius of the concept and buy some crypto themselves.

The federal government’s imprimatur is an enormous gift to those trying to persuade Americans that crypto is not just an updated, more sophisticated Nigerian Prince email scam. What’s more, if the U.S. government is holding particular cryptocurrencies with the intention never to sell them, that helps set a floor price — which, of course, enriches those who already own them.

The normalization of crypto as an investment “asset” — even though it pays no interest like bonds, generates no dividends like stocks and you can’t live in it like a house — is precisely what the giant financial industry that has evolved to take advantage of people’s desire to buy imaginary money wants. There are brokerages to help you buy and sell crypto products. There are even mutual funds from erstwhile respectable investment firms, layered on top of the actual crypto content creators, such as they are. All get a slice any time you buy or sell from them.

Finally, the federal government’s official entrance into the crypto holders’ club could be the ultimate camel’s nose. This week’s executive order mentions the possibility of further Bitcoin acquisitions if they are “budget neutral” — two weasel words that right now are being used to characterize the nearly $5 trillion extension of Trump’s tax cuts.

The crypto battle will now move up Pennsylvania Avenue to Congress, where the industry has already greased the skids for legislation that could well put taxpayer money into the pockets of crypto billionaires. With Trump’s election, they already got an end to prosecutions against money launderers and scammers and a Wild West, anything-goes lack of regulation. Now they will want more.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, it took a little boy to state the obvious, that the emperor had no clothes and was, in fact, naked. On our real world earth, to even stand a chance, that little boy had better come armed with hundreds of millions of real campaign dollars to fight those the industry is already spending.