One of JD Vance’s key financial advisers in the Senate, Aaron Kofsky, is behind a Reddit account with the name PsychoticMammal that posted about using a variety of drugs, including cocaine, kratom, “gas station heroin,” and many others. The account also calls Vance a “Trump boot licker” and provides instructions on how to get drugs through TSA while traveling.
In one of the posts, Kofsky shared a video of Vance at a Senate hearing and provided a number of other pieces of identifying information. That information, paired with a Poshmark account using the same username and an image of Kofsky as its avatar, were two of the big bread crumbs that helped me confirm Kofsky was behind the account.
Kofsky’s drug use puts him in stark contrast to Vance’s policy priorities. During his Republican National Committee speech this summer, Vance spoke at length about his mother’s battle with drug addiction and how it has informed his anti-drug stances. Since joining the Senate, Vance has become one of the leading voices against fentanyl trafficking and has joined in on former president Donald Trump’s suggestions that drug dealers should be punished with the death penalty.
It’s not your average politics newsletter. Makena Kelly and the WIRED Politics team help you make sense of how the internet is shaping our political reality.
Kofsky isn’t just a random staffer; he is Vance’s financial policy adviser. It’s difficult to tell just how much influence Kofsky had on Vance’s crypto policy, but it was enough to warrant a short Politico profile praising him for it. From what I could tell from his X account (before he locked it yesterday), Kofsky held many of the same deregulatory positions as Vance and the crypto industry at large. In fact, Stand With Crypto, one of the largest pro-cryptocurrency super PACs, has given Vance and Trump both a “thumbs up” rating on the issue. (President Joe Biden got a “thumbs down,” while vice president Kamala Harris isn’t rated.)
Both the Trump and Harris campaigns have made efforts to win over the crypto community in recent months. Just this week, Trump’s crypto co-venture with his sons Eric and Don Jr. launched, but only a small number of the firm’s crypto tokens were purchased, primarily due to the website crashing in the middle of the launch. According to WIRED reporting, only 8,500 people participated in the coin’s presale and collectively purchased 750 million of them.
Beyond the Trump family’s personal crypto ventures, the campaign has been raking in millions of dollars in donations from coin holders. Tuesday was the last Federal Election Commission deadline before the election, and listed in the Trump 47 joint fundraising committee filing was more than $7.5 million in donations made in cryptocurrency, CNBC reported. The joint committee includes the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, and state party committees. While the crypto donations are only a fraction of the $145 million total raised, the donations still show the growing influence of what was once a nascent industry.
That the crypto industry clearly favors the Trump-Vance campaign has seemingly spooked the Harris campaign to some degree. Whether they’re afraid of turning off wealthy tech donors or ostracizing crypto voters (if those exist in any meaningful metric), Harris formally announced her support for the technology this week as part of a new initiative to protect Black men who have invested in these assets.
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