You walk into a casino. Early on, you experience a stroke of luck and double your money. Emboldened by your success, you keep gambling, only to lose every dollar you previously won. Chastened by your losses, you leave the casino with your original money in hand and count yourself lucky to break even.

How much did you earn in taxable income that day?

For years, the answer to that question has been intuitively obvious. Section 165 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 currently allows bettors to write off any gambling losses from their gambling wins. Consequently, when a bettor walks out of a casino with the same amount of money they walked in with, it doesn’t matter how much they won that day — they lost just as much as they won, so no taxable income was earned.

Section 70114 of the budget reconciliation bill President Donald Trump pushed through Congress, however, brought an unpleasant surprise for gamblers and recreational bettors: Starting Jan. 1, 2026, bettors will now only be able to write off 90 percent off all of their gambling losses. 

To help put this into perspective, imagine if someone wins the Megabucks jackpot (currently over $10 million) next year. Under the new law, at least $1 million of those winnings will be taxable unless the winner somehow loses over $11 million — considerably more than they won in the jackpot — in bad bets before the end of the year.

You read that right — starting next year, you can lose $1 million more than you win in Nevada’s casinos and still owe taxes on your “winnings.”

Since the entire business model behind casinos involves encouraging gamblers to revert to the mean and give their winnings back, gaming industry executives — as well as the legislators they support, especially in our gaming-dominated state — demanded that something be done. 

Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) quickly introduced the Fair Accounting for Income Realized from Betting Earnings Taxation (FAIR BET) Act to restore the full deduction. Within a week, every member of Nevada’s House delegation signed on as a cosponsor. This was then followed by a “field hearing” in Las Vegas, during which House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) pledged to restore the deduction before the change takes effect at the end of the year.

There is, however, one person everyone has forgotten to ask about this: President Donald Trump.

The budget bill, after all, was pitched as Trump’s signature legislative achievement for the year. Dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” by him and his supporters, it’s one of only 31 bills signed by the president since he was inaugurated in January (by comparison, Gov. Joe Lombardo signed 519 bills and vetoed 87 others in a shorter timespan). It took months of negotiations to pass the bill through the narrowest of House and Senate majorities — the final Senate vote was 51-50.

So what’s in it for him?

It’s not like Trump has any particular fondness or affinity for the gaming industry. Though he gained some notoriety by building and purchasing casinos in Atlantic City during the 1980s and 1990s and slapping his name on them, those projects eventually became unprofitable embarrassments. The only person who arguably made any money at all from them was the president himself — he infamously shifted personal debts to his properties, stiffed bondholders in bankruptcy court and refused to reliably pay contractors while collecting millions of dollars for himself in salary, bonuses and other payments.

Those days, however, are behind him.

Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc., the company under which the president organized his various gaming properties, filed for bankruptcy four times before it was eventually sold to Icahn Enterprises months before the 2016 election. Trump’s name — along with any arrangements his casinos were compelled to make in exchange for using his name while he ran them — was subsequently removed from his former gaming properties.

Instead, the future of Trump’s enlightened self-interest (less euphemistically, his venal self-dealing) lies in a direct competitor to the backbone of Nevada’s economy: cryptocurrency.

The basic appeal of cryptocurrency for someone like Trump is obvious. To put your name on a casino, as Trump did, you have to buy capital, deal with regulators and negotiate with shareholders. To put your name on a meme coin, however — such as $TRUMP and $MELANIA — you just need a press release (or, if your name isn’t worth much, some green dildos). You don’t even need to sell anything, though a short speech followed by a mediocre dinner certainly doesn’t hurt.

Digging further, however, the appeal doesn’t stop there.

When gaming executives, such as Miriam Adelson, donate $100 million to support Trump, there tend to be steep conditions attached — such as a requirement to remain a strong supporter of Israel regardless of Trump’s personal feelings toward the country and its current leadership. When cryptocurrency executives spend more than $245 million in an election cycle, however, the most they ask for is for someone in Congress to combine two industry-friendly bills into one — a request which administration officials are quite comfortable rejecting.

Gaming executives also rely on three resources that are ideologically uncomfortable for the Trump administration — namely, imported electronics, international tourists and unionized, largely immigrant labor. Though imported electronics and immigrant labor are certainly not unusual in the tech industry, there’s no requirement for cryptocurrencies to host themselves in domestic data centers, nor are they subjected to tariffs. 

As for the labor requirements involved in building a cryptocurrency-hosted meme coin, you can stand one up at home in minutes. You don’t even need to clean your room.

Finally, there’s the matter of Nevada’s mercurial support of the president. Trump won without Nevada’s six electoral votes in 2016 and would have won without them in 2024. Why should he care which way our votes go? For him, at least, we simply don’t matter.

All of which might help explain why the Trump administration is launching crypto.gov at the same time it’s doing everything within its power to hurt Nevada’s gaming industry — an industry which, owing to the growth of online gaming and the financialization of traditional betting products, was already employing a declining number of Nevadans each year. The administration’s recent decision to raise fees on international travelers — a policy that will siphon at least $750 million from the pockets of the millions who visit Nevada each year — is just another nail in the coffin that has already caused visitation to decline since Trump’s inauguration.

It also might help explain why the price of Bitcoin is higher today than it was on Inauguration Day.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected]. You can also message him on Signal at dcolborne.64.