We usually measure political power in years.
A US president has a term of office. They appoint officials, influence legislation, allocate political attention, shape foreign policy, and use the enormous symbolic power of the presidency. Eventually, the term ends and another administration takes over.
This institutional structure creates an important constraint: political power is supposed to be temporary.
But what happens if a political leader can use their time in office to create economic and technological systems that continue to generate influence long after they leave office?
Recent developments in American politics suggest that this may no longer be a purely theoretical question.
Donald Trump's crypto ventures, politically associated digital assets, World Liberty Financial, and now Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP project point toward something potentially more important than the success or failure of any individual token.
They suggest the emergence of a new category of political infrastructure:
politically connected digital economic networks.
My hypothesis is that these networks could eventually allow political influence to become more persistent, more global, and more self-reinforcing than the traditional four-year electoral cycle allows.
If this happens, we may need to rethink what it means for a president to "leave power."
Political leaders have always attempted to create legacies that outlive their administrations.
A president can pass legislation.
They can create institutions.
They can establish government programs.
They can appoint judges.
They can build alliances.
They can create a political movement.
These mechanisms can survive an administration, sometimes for decades.
But they generally remain dependent on existing institutions: governments, budgets, parties, bureaucracies, courts and traditional financial systems.
Digital technologies introduce another possibility.
A political leader can now potentially create a community whose members are connected not only by political identity, but also by financial incentives.
The simplified mechanism looks like this:
political attention → digital community → financial asset → economic incentives → community growth → more political attention
If the feedback loop is strong enough, political capital can begin to behave somewhat like financial capital.
It can compound.
This is the part I find most interesting.
Donald Trump's crypto activities provide perhaps the clearest current example.
The $TRUMP token demonstrated that a political brand could be converted directly into a globally traded digital asset. Whatever one thinks about its economic value, the mechanism itself is novel: political attention can become a financial market.
But $TRUMP may actually be the less interesting part of the story.
A more consequential development is World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture associated with Trump and his family.
World Liberty has developed governance tokens and the USD1 stablecoin. In August 2026, the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted preliminary approval for a national trust bank charter to World Liberty Financial's banking entity, allowing it to expand stablecoin operations and custody activities under federal oversight. USD1 was reported at roughly $4 billion in market capitalization at the time.
The scale of the economic activity is also significant.
Trump's 2025 financial disclosure reported more than $1.4 billion in income connected to his family's crypto ventures, according to Reuters. The disclosure included hundreds of millions of dollars associated with World Liberty Financial and Trump's other digital-asset businesses.
This matters for my argument not because Trump is uniquely important.
It matters because it demonstrates a mechanism:
A political identity can now be connected directly to a financial ecosystem capable of generating capital, attracting participants, and persisting independently of an election campaign.
The important unit of analysis may therefore no longer be the political campaign.
It may be the political-economic ecosystem.
The recent launch of Hunter Biden's $LAPTOP project is particularly revealing.
Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, announced a new digital token called $LAPTOP, scheduled to launch on September 9, 2026. The project explicitly references the laptop controversy that became a major political story during the 2020 US presidential election. Reports describe a total supply of one billion tokens, with allocations for founders, users and other purposes, alongside mechanisms in which some tokens may be burned or donated depending on political and market outcomes.
I do not think $LAPTOP itself is necessarily important.
It may fail.
Its market value may collapse.
It may have little lasting economic utility.
It may ultimately be remembered as another speculative crypto experiment.
But its existence is informative.
The phenomenon is no longer exclusively associated with one political movement.
A political brand can become a tradable digital object.
That suggests a broader transition:
Political identity itself is becoming potentially financializable.
This is a much bigger phenomenon than "politicians launching meme coins."
The latter is merely the visible and often ridiculous early form of something potentially more consequential.
The word memecoin can make this phenomenon appear trivial.
It encourages us to think about speculation, internet culture and short-lived hype.
But the underlying technology is broader.
The more useful concepts might be:
The distinction matters because the long-term question is not whether a particular token retains its price.
The question is whether digital assets can become infrastructure for maintaining political coordination and influence.
A token can be replaced.
A platform can evolve.
A community can migrate to another blockchain.
A stablecoin can replace a governance token.
A media platform can be acquired.
What matters is the persistence of the network.
Consider two different ways of thinking about a presidential term.
The conventional model is:
What can I accomplish during my four years in office?
A more technologically sophisticated model could be:
What can I create during my four years that will continue producing influence for the next forty?
This difference is enormous.
Imagine that a future president spends their term building:
At the end of the presidential term, the individual leaves the White House.
But the ecosystem remains.
It may even become stronger.
The former president may no longer control the state.
But they may still have access to:
capital + attention + data + infrastructure + millions of participants + a global network.
The formal presidency has ended.
The political ecosystem has not.
There is a useful metaphor here.
A president can plant trees during their administration.
Some trees are laws.
Some are institutions.
Some are political movements.
Some are economic networks.
Some are technological platforms.
The first three are familiar.
The last two are different because they can potentially grow without continuous government funding.
A president who builds a durable digital ecosystem during their term may therefore be doing something analogous to creating an endowment.
The political leader supplies the initial political capital.
The network then generates economic and social activity.
That activity generates resources.
Those resources sustain the network.
The network generates more influence.
And the cycle continues.
In simplified form:
initial political capital → network → economic activity → resources → network expansion → political influence
This is a form of compounding political capital.
This is not entirely unprecedented.
The Obama administration's Affordable Care Act provides an example of a political legacy that became institutionally durable. The important point is not Medicare — which predates Obama by decades — but the creation and expansion of a major institutional framework through the ACA.
Once such a system exists, subsequent administrations can modify it, restrict it, expand it or attempt to repeal it.
But they cannot simply pretend that it never existed.
This is how political institutions normally create long-term effects.
Digital networks potentially introduce a different mechanism.
An institution such as the ACA requires legislation, government agencies and public funding.
A digital network can potentially continue through private capital, users, incentives and market activity.
That difference could make some forms of political legacy much more persistent.
There is a deeper technological distinction here.
A law requires enforcement by institutions.
A government program requires a budget.
A bureaucracy requires personnel.
A political party requires organizational structures.
But a sufficiently decentralized digital network can potentially continue operating with relatively little centralized coordination.
This creates a fascinating possibility.
Imagine a future political movement with:
Now imagine that its founder loses an election.
The political movement does not necessarily disappear.
The network may continue to exist.
The financial infrastructure may continue to generate revenue.
The community may continue to recruit members.
The media ecosystem may continue to shape public opinion.
And the founder may remain the symbolic center of the system.
This would be something quite different from a conventional political party.
It would be closer to a political-economic network state — even if it remained legally private and formally separate from government.
This is where I think the topic becomes particularly relevant to Effective Altruism and longtermism.
The interesting question is not:
"Are cryptocurrencies good or bad?"
Nor is it:
"Is Donald Trump good or bad?"
Those questions may matter politically, but they are not the core issue.
The deeper question is:
What happens to the distribution of power if political leaders gain the ability to create global, persistent and partially self-sustaining systems of economic coordination?
This is fundamentally an institutional question.
And institutional design matters for the long-term future.
We spend substantial effort thinking about risks from:
But another category deserves more attention:
If technology increases the persistence of political influence, then the probability distribution of future political outcomes could change significantly.
A leader who would historically have had four years of influence might instead create infrastructure capable of influencing political behavior for decades.
That does not require authoritarianism.
It does not require abolishing elections.
It does not even require illegal behavior.
It can emerge through perfectly legal markets and voluntary participation.
That is precisely why it may be worth studying.
Suppose two presidents each serve four years.
President A leaves office and loses most of their political influence.
President B leaves office with:
Formally, both presidents served the same amount of time.
But their effective political half-life is radically different.
This suggests a potentially useful concept:
Instead of asking only:
How long did this person hold office?
we could ask:
How long does a political leader retain significant capacity to coordinate people, capital and political behavior after leaving office?
Historically, political half-life was constrained by institutions.
Digital networks may lengthen it.
And if financial incentives are added, the network may become self-reinforcing.
The twentieth-century image of political power was hierarchical.
A simplified model looked like:
President → government → bureaucracy → citizens
The emerging model may look more like:
political leader ↔ digital community ↔ capital ↔ technology ↔ users ↔ markets
The leader is no longer necessarily at the top of the hierarchy.
They may instead be at the center of a network.
This makes political power harder to measure.
A person can lose formal authority while retaining enormous network influence.
And because networks can cross borders, the resulting influence may not even be primarily domestic.
A US political movement could have millions of economically engaged participants elsewhere in the world.
The presidency is national.
The network is global.
That asymmetry could become increasingly important.
Financial capital has an important property:
capital can generate more capital.
A $1 billion endowment can produce investment returns.
Political capital traditionally behaves differently.
Popularity fades.
Movements lose momentum.
Organizations fragment.
But if political capital can be converted into financial and technological infrastructure, it may begin to compound.
Consider:
attention → users → revenue → infrastructure → more users → more revenue → more political influence
If that feedback loop becomes strong enough, political power no longer behaves like a temporary resource.
It behaves more like an asset.
This would represent a profound change in the economics of political power.
I want to be careful here.
The argument is not that politically connected digital networks are inherently harmful.
They could potentially have enormous benefits.
A political movement could use a digital financial network to:
A long-lived political network could even be socially beneficial if its incentives were aligned with broad human welfare.
The problem is therefore not simply persistence.
The problem is persistent power without sufficiently strong accountability mechanisms.
The same technological architecture could produce either:
long-term public-good coordination
or
long-term personal power.
That distinction deserves much more research.
Traditional democratic systems contain an important safety mechanism:
leaders leave office.
But imagine a world where leaders leave office while their economic and social networks remain.
The democratic institution says:
"Your term is over."
The network says:
"The network continues."
This creates a potential mismatch between formal power and effective power.
And that mismatch could become increasingly important.
We may eventually need institutions capable of measuring not only who holds office, but also:
In other words, we may need something resembling political balance sheets.
It is tempting to ask:
"Will cryptocurrencies become important in politics?"
I think this question is already becoming obsolete.
The more interesting question is:
What happens when political leaders can create economic networks whose lifespan is much longer than their constitutional tenure?
And then:
What governance mechanisms should exist before these networks become large enough to matter?
We may be looking at the earliest, somewhat chaotic version of such a transition.
$TRUMP.
World Liberty Financial.
USD1.
And now $LAPTOP.
Some may fail.
Some may become irrelevant.
Some may turn out to be little more than speculative bubbles.
But technological transitions often look ridiculous in their early stages.
The first social networks were not obviously transformative.
The first cryptocurrencies were not obviously financial infrastructure.
The first smartphones were not obviously replacements for computers.
The important question is therefore not whether today's political tokens are sophisticated.
It is whether they reveal a new capability.
And I think they do.
Perhaps the most important change is conceptual.
The president of the future may not think only:
"What can I accomplish during my four years?"
They may increasingly think:
"What systems can I build during these four years that will still matter forty years from now?"
That is a fundamentally different conception of political power.
The president becomes not only a policymaker.
They become an architect of persistent networks.
The presidency becomes the initial funding and attention mechanism.
Technology provides the infrastructure.
Markets provide the economic engine.
Communities provide the human network.
And after the president leaves office, the system can continue.
The constitutional term ends.
The political ecosystem does not.
I suspect we are approaching a period in which the most important political resource will no longer be the office itself.
It will be the ability to create systems that survive the office.
The political leaders of the future may compete not only to win elections, but to build institutions, technologies and economic networks capable of surviving electoral defeat.
That could be extraordinarily beneficial if those networks are oriented toward public goods.
It could also create a new class of long-term political risks if they allow individuals to accumulate influence that is effectively insulated from democratic turnover.
For Effective Altruism, this suggests a relatively unexplored research agenda:
How should we think about the long-term effects of technology on the persistence and compounding of political power?
Possible research questions include:
I do not think we yet know the answers.
But perhaps this is exactly the right moment to start asking the questions.
The strange political tokens appearing today may not be important because of their prices.
They may be important because they demonstrate something deeper:
Political identity can now be converted into digital economic infrastructure.
And if that infrastructure can outlive the politician who created it, then we may need to rethink one of our most basic assumptions about democracy:
that when the president leaves office, the presidency — and therefore a significant part of their political power — leaves with them.
