As noted before, Bitcoin doesn’t fit neatly into a box and has evolved over the past thirteen years.
Yes, it’s a commodity. It’s also a digital property. And it’s a currency. And it’s a base settlement layer for a payment rail system.
I recommend reading Satoshi Nakamoto’s original introduction of BTC in his white paper as a start.
And how Satoshi solved the Byzantine Generals' problem for a more detailed response than I can provide here.
As for political manipulations, yes, politicians know no bounds when it comes to manipulating currencies and markets.
But they can’t manipulate BTC, the core digital asset.
The BTC proof of work network assures that there is no necessity for a trusted third party, (like a state, government or bank, anyone), to maintain the absolute scarcity of the 21 million coins, and the accounting of those coins.
A quote from the white paper…
“Proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it. If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the fastest and outpace any competing chains.”