What’s Fueling America’s Gold Bar Conspiracy
The US is right where it needs to be for Trump and Musk to tap into a decades-old fear about the country’s precious bullion stored in Fort Knox.
Gold on the mind.
Photographer: Stefan Wermuth/BloombergFort Knox, home to much of the nation’s gold reserves, doesn’t get many visitors. That may soon change: President Donald Trump and his sidekick, Elon Musk, claim there’s a chance someone has stolen the shiny stuff. They want to visit and see it with their own eyes.
It’s tempting to dismiss this demand as paranoid raving, but history suggests there are more interesting forces at play here. The last time this happened — a full-throated cry to audit the nation’s gold reserves — came at another critical moment in American monetary history, when anxiety about the future reached crisis levels.