Trump’s Crypto Corruption is Costing the American People

In the climactic days before their inauguration, most Presidents are focused on their vision for the nation’s future and their plans to lead the country. Donald Trump had a different priority: cashing in.

Right before he was inaugurated, Trump launched and promoted what he called the Official $TRUMP cryptocurrency, a meme coin. It had no inherent value. It was his face and identity. And it was effectively a pump-and-dump scheme.

Trump relentlessly hawked and hyped his meme coin on social media, aiming to inflate the price of the coin days before it was dumped. Strikingly, he used his meme coin to sell access to the Presidency, offering private meetings to top investors.

Trump personally made $636 million from his meme coin—while going to work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue every day as President of the United States.

Trump famously once called Bitcoin a scam, accurately foreseeing his own crypto schemes. He has exploited crypto to enrich not only himself, but also his family, his sons, his insider friends, his campaign donors. Some of them, like Steve Witkoff, are also in positions of prominent responsibility relating to national security.

Corruption has costs. Trump’s personal profits produced victims. Approximately one million investors lost $3.8 billion on $TRUMP coin as its value cratered. The consequences were decimated retirement accounts, sacrificed savings, houses in foreclosure—losses that changed their lives.

Trump’s meme coin was doomed to fail ordinary investors. As Ranking Member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, my team spoke to three investors who bought into the $TRUMP coin. They each said they believed in the coin because it had the President’s glowing endorsement—and each told us about the heartbreak of near total loss.

You can read my Subcommittee report on the collapse of $TRUMP coin here.

The deck was always stacked against average investors: it in effect locked most out of profits while protecting a few well-connected insiders.

Trump’s crypto scheme was purposefully constructed for his benefit. It was simply self-enrichment. In fact, it illustrates a common theme throughout Trump’s Presidency—that he cares first and foremost about his own personal interest, not the American people.

Trump is now fiercely committed to protecting the crypto industry. He is strongly opposing reforms that would eliminate the weaknesses and loopholes in the law that he exploits—and others are doing right now.

Many of Trump’s friends and family, high-level officials in his Administration, and others are profiting while the rest of America is struggling with rising costs. Their crypto deals have victims, just like Trump’s. The President is shaping his Administration’s policies in his own image.

I hosted a public forum on Trump’s crypto corruption last week—you can watch my opening statement here.

Taking a stand against President Trump’s self-enrichment scheme means rejecting the Clarity Act.

The Clarity Act would expose the financial future of millions of Americans to unacceptable volatility and risk. It would degrade enforcement by relying only on the Department of Justice, which has become Trump’s personal law firm, excluding State Attorneys General.

Banks and other companies in our regulated financial services industry are subject to safeguards and scrutiny. The crypto industry wants a free pass around such regulatory oversight—with Trump’s support.

The bottom line here is simple: the law must be reformed to stop crypto corruption, most prominently President Trump’s.

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