Democratic lawmakers have spent the past year criticizing the Trump family’s growing influence in the cryptocurrency industry. Now, just months before the midterm elections, they are making a push to crack down on one of the First Family’s most lucrative businesses.<\/p>\n
Republicans may have limited time to use their control of the government to fulfill a Trump campaign promise to pass a comprehensive crypto bill that would help the industry. But they need the support of Senate Democrats, who want to use leverage to force the White House to agree to a provision limiting how executive branch officials use digital assets.<\/p>\n
“There is no final bill \u2013 there is no final movement \u2013 \u200b\u200buntil there is bipartisan agreement when it comes to the ethics provision,” the senator said. ruben gallego<\/a>An Arizona Democrat generally supportive of the legislation has been involved in conversations on the issue.<\/p>\n The debate over the bill is giving Democrats a powerful point of leverage on one of the president’s key fiscal policy priorities. The Trump family’s crypto businesses, which contribute more than $1 billion to their wealth, have been a common point of outrage among lawmakers on the left, who say Republican-led efforts to impose a light-touch regulatory regime on the digital asset industry will enrich the family first.<\/p>\n The White House has consistently maintained that the president has no conflicts of interest, and Senate Republicans have mostly protected the president from attacks on his family’s businesses. But they’re still trying to compromise with Democrats on the ethics provision. Both parties know that if Republicans lose either house of Congress, the push to pass legislation dividing oversight of crypto trading among Wall Street regulators, a long-standing industry goal, will face long obstacles.<\/p>\n Now, Democrats have at least one reinforcement from across the aisle: senators. Thom Tillis<\/a>The retired North Carolina Republican and senior Senate Banking Committee member said in an interview that the ethics language in the bill is necessary.<\/p>\n “There has to be ethics language in the bill before it leaves the Senate, or I’ll go from being one of the people who negotiated it to voting against it,” said Tillis, who has stymied other White House efforts on the Hill, including confirmation of the new Federal Reserve chair.<\/p>\n The lawmakers who worked for the bipartisan ethics compromise have fought for months to make progress. But now he says that talks are progressing.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are making progress,\u201d the senator said. adam schiff<\/a> (D-Calif.). “We’ve been talking for a long time without any progress, and now that other parts of the bill are starting to come together, we’re narrowing our differences.”<\/p>\n It is not clear what shape the language of morality might take.<\/p>\n Schiff, who is leading negotiations for Democrats on the issue with Gallego, said earlier this year that he wanted a “ban on sponsoring, endorsing or issuing digital assets that applies to all federal employees,” including the president. Negotiations are ongoing over how the sanctions will be implemented, and it is unclear whether Democrats will be able to get Senate Republicans and the White House to sign an agreement that would meaningfully crack down on the Trump family’s crypto businesses.<\/p>\n White House crypto policy adviser Patrick Witt is leading negotiations for the administration, along with GOP Sens. Cynthia Loomis<\/a> and Wyoming Bernie Moreno<\/a> Of Ohio. Moreno said in a recent interview that lawmakers are talking about “common sense” reforms.<\/p>\n Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee are hoping to advance the crypto bill in the coming weeks \u2014 which has been stalled for months due to other policy disputes. The ethics fight is one of the last outstanding issues that needs to be resolved for the legislation to gain bipartisan support. Since this issue is outside the jurisdiction of the Banking Committee, ethics language is not expected to be included in any bill the Committee approves. But Gallego said in an interview this month that by the time the markup comes around, \u201cthere needs to be a clear explanation of how this is going to happen and how it will be incorporated before it reaches the floor.\u201d<\/p>\n White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement that \u201cPresident Trump promised to make America the crypto capital of the world, and he has delivered on it over the past historic 15 months.\u201d<\/p>\n Once fierce crypto skeptics, President Donald Trump and his family jumped into the crypto business during the 2024 presidential campaign \u2013 just as the then-former president promised to make the US the \u201ccrypto capital of the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n The growing Trump crypto empire now includes several ventures: World Liberty Financial, a crypto project that Trump and his sons helped co-found; Trump-themed memecoin; and Truth Social parent company Trump Media & Technology Group, which has sought to expand into crypto markets. As in his first term, Trump has agreed to step away from the daily operations of his family business while serving as president and place his assets in a trust managed by his children.<\/p>\n Major crypto players have emerged as the Washington landscape has become increasingly favorable to the sector, largely thanks to Trump’s approval of regulators and industry allies on Capitol Hill. The latest bill could particularly help accelerate the expansion of crypto into mainstream finance, opening it up to more investors and Wall Street veterans who until now were reluctant to jump into the market due to outstanding questions about its regulation.<\/p>\n Not that Trump’s projects show any signs of slowing down with his namesake coming into office.<\/p>\n World Liberty Financial has launched a stablecoin, USD1, and applied for a federal banking license. And an entity affiliated with Memecoin, known as $TRUMP, hosted a crypto conference at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday for about 300 of the token’s top investors. Speakers at the event included former boxer Mike Tyson; Tony Robbins, self-help guru; and Trump, who spoke at the event before flying back to Washington for the White House correspondents’ dinner. <\/p>\n \u201cThis is a very clear example of the president selling access,\u201d said Donald Sherman, who leads the ethics watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, at the Memecoin conference. Trump is “effectively auctioning off access to the highest bidder without any transparency,” Sherman said.<\/p>\n The Mar-a-Lago conference followed a massive selloff in the token, whose value reached $75 early last year. As of Sunday morning, the $TRUMP token was trading at around $2.65. \u201cToday, we celebrate our tremendous success in putting America at the forefront of the crypto revolution,\u201d Trump, dressed in a navy suit and light blue tie, said in his remarks, according to a recording of his remarks. He also spoke on the war in Iran and artificial intelligence, among other topics. <\/p>\n A White House official said the President attended the event in his personal capacity. The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt has previously denied that Trump or his family “have ever been, or ever will be, involved in a conflict of interest.”<\/p>\n Investors and traders have recently shown signs of turning sour on Trump projects. Justin Sun, a crypto billionaire who calls himself an ardent Trump supporter, sued World Liberty Financial on Tuesday over what he calls an “illegal scheme” to expropriate his stake in the company’s WLFI tokens.<\/p>\n World Liberty Financial CEO Zach Witkoff, son of Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, retaliated<\/a> In Sun’s lawsuit against X, it was called “a desperate attempt to divert attention from Sun’s own misconduct.” And Eric Trump, the president’s son and co-founder of World Liberty Financial, was immediately pile up<\/a>.<\/p>\n