Trump is about to sign laws regulating an industry he profits from. Here’s how the grift works.
I keep thinking we have rules in this country.
Not moral rules. Not vibes. Boring rules, the kind you learn in middle school civics and then forget until someone starts selling access to the president like it is a raffle prize at a casino charity night.
Right now, Congress is moving a bill called the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, better known as the CLARITY Act. It passed the House on July 17, 2025, and the Senate received it on September 18, 2025. White House crypto adviser David Sacks said Senate Banking and Agriculture leaders plan to mark it up in January 2026. That is not a rumor, it is being discussed openly.
That part is boring policy.
The part that is not boring is that the president and his family have real, documented financial exposure to the very industry this legislation would stabilize and legitimize.
World Liberty Financial is the center of gravity here. Reuters reported that the Trump family took control of the venture, and through governance and ownership terms, Trump family entities are entitled to 75 percent of certain revenues from token sales. In March 2025, World Liberty announced a dollar pegged stablecoin called USD1. In May 2025, Reuters reported that MGX, an Abu Dhabi state controlled investment company, used USD1 in connection with a $2 billion investment in Binance.
If you want to understand why people are screaming about conflicts of interest, start there. Crypto market structure bills are not theoretical. When you make the rules clearer, you make it easier for large pools of money to enter. When you make it easier for large pools of money to enter, you raise the value of whatever already exists in the ecosystem. That is not ideology. That is how markets work.
There is also the meme coin piece, which turns the ethical problem into performance art.
Reuters reported that buyers of the $TRUMP meme coin competed for a private dinner with President Trump at his country club on May 22, 2025. The top 220 holders were invited based on time weighted holdings over a set period. Reuters also reported that investors spent an estimated $148 million buying $TRUMP to secure seats at that dinner, based on analysis from Inca Digital. Reuters reported the coin hit about $75 at its peak and fell sharply after, and that the venture had raised hundreds of millions of dollars in fees.
I am not here to clutch pearls about adults gambling on meme coins. People can light their money on fire in whatever shape they want. The problem is that the fire is being sold as a political donation substitute, with fewer disclosure rules and more plausible deniability. It is the same access economy as a PAC fundraiser, except it comes wrapped in a token that can be bought by anyone, anywhere, through layers of wallets designed to make tracing difficult.
If you are a foreign billionaire who wants something from the administration, this looks less like investing and more like leaving a cash filled envelope on the table. Digitally. With a fan community.
That is why lawmakers started saying the quiet part out loud.
On May 6, 2025, Senator Jeff Merkley said, “Currently, people who wish to cultivate influence with the president can enrich him personally by buying cryptocurrency he owns or controls,” and called it “a profoundly corrupt scheme.” In July 2025, Representative Maxine Waters warned that if Congress does not ban elected officials, including the president or vice president, from crypto ventures in the CLARITY Act context, “each of us will be complicit.” Senator Chris Murphy has called the $TRUMP meme coin venture “the single most corrupt act ever committed by a president.”
You can disagree with their politics and still understand their basic point. If lawmakers pass rules that increase the legitimacy and value of an industry, and the president is financially entangled with that industry, the public is forced to wonder which hat he is wearing. It does not matter whether you believe he is personally making calls day to day. The incentives exist either way, and incentives are the whole story in corruption.
Then there is enforcement, which is where the bodily autonomy angle shows up in the real world. The people who get hurt by crypto fraud are not the venture guys.
In the FBI IC3 2024 report, Americans reported $9.3 billion in cryptocurrency related fraud losses in 2024, up 66 percent from the prior year. Investment scams were the largest bucket, with $5.8 billion in losses. The report says the largest age group reporting crypto fraud was people 60 and older.
That means grandparents. That means retirees. That means people who do not have time to rebuild from a wipeout. It is not abstract. It is food, rent, medication, and the ability to leave a bad situation. Financial autonomy is bodily autonomy with paperwork.
Now put that next to what DOJ did in April 2025.
On April 7, 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a memo titled “Ending Regulation By Prosecution.” It ordered the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, created in 2021, to be disbanded “effective immediately,” and directed the Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit to cease cryptocurrency enforcement and focus on other priorities. The Associated Press reported on the move at the time.
ProPublica later reported that Blanche still held significant crypto investments when he made the decision, including Bitcoin and other assets, and that he had pledged to divest within a set period after confirmation. You do not have to believe in cartoon villain corruption to see why that looks bad. The thing that protects consumers gets dismantled, and the person doing the dismantling reportedly still has skin in the same market.
Then, in October 2025, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. Reuters and AP both reported the pardon. DOJ’s own clemency list shows Zhao received a pardon on October 21, 2025. Zhao had pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti money laundering program, and Binance had paid billions in penalties in the earlier settlement.
When you line those events up, you get a pattern that is hard to ignore, even if you want to. A stablecoin tied to the Trump venture is used in a major Binance related deal. A DOJ unit focused on crypto is disbanded. The Binance founder is pardoned.
Individually, any of these could have an explanation. Together, they look like a government drifting toward a pay to play vibe that is easier to monetize because it is built on code and chaos.
The defenders of all of this will tell you the CLARITY Act is needed. They are not wrong that the U.S. has had a messy, contradictory approach to digital assets for years. The bill aims to clarify whether a digital asset is regulated as a security by the SEC or a commodity by the CFTC, and to create registration and compliance pathways. That clarity could reduce the regulatory whiplash that has defined this space.
But clarity for the market is not clarity for ethics.
I do not need to know whether the final bill is good policy to know that we should not be normalizing a situation where a president can benefit from a regulatory outcome, while simultaneously offering exclusive access to token holders. One system is called governance. The other is called bribery. Crypto just makes it harder to tell which is which.
The United States has not figured out how to regulate crypto without looking like it is either strangling innovation or endorsing scams. Now we are adding a third problem, which is that the person who signs the rules appears financially entangled with the winners.
If you are wondering what this means for ordinary people, it is simple. The people who understand this game extract money from the people who do not. The government is supposed to be the referee. Right now, the referee is also selling team merchandise in the parking lot.
SOURCES
∙ House Judiciary Committee Democrats Report, “Trump, Crypto, and a New Age of Corruption” (November 25, 2025) https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/new-report-exposes-the-trump-family-s-multi-billion-dollar-crypto-empire-fueled-by-self-dealing-and-corrupt-foreign-interests
∙ PBS News, “Trump family’s cryptocurrency ties raise concerns as administration loosens regulations” (November 21, 2025) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/trump-familys-cryptocurrency-ties-raise-concerns-as-administration-loosens-regulations
∙ PBS News, “How a Trump business deal with a crypto firm exposes potential conflicts of interest” (December 2025) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-a-trump-business-deal-with-a-crypto-firm-exposes-potential-conflicts-of-interest
∙ ProPublica, “Top DOJ Official Shut Down Enforcement Against Crypto Companies While Holding More Than $150,000 in Crypto Investments” (December 2025) https://www.propublica.org/article/todd-blanche-crypto-doj-trump
∙ NPR, “Trump tech adviser David Sacks under fire over vast AI investments” (December 12, 2025) https://www.npr.org/2025/12/12/nx-s1-5631823/david-sacks-ai-advisor-investment-conflicts
∙ Senator Elizabeth Warren, Letter to Office of Government Ethics on David Sacks (May 2025) https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/ahead-of-trump-crypto-fundraiser-warren-questions-government-ethics-agency-on-crypto-czar-david-sacks-conflicts-of-interest
∙ CNBC, “DOJ ends crypto enforcement team, shifts focus to terrorism and fraud” (April 8, 2025) https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/08/doj-ends-crypto-enforcement-team-shifts-focus-to-terrorism-and-fraud.html
∙ CNBC, “Trump’s crypto agenda is being threatened by his pursuit of personal profits” (May 10, 2025) https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/10/trumps-crypto-agenda-threatened-by-his-pursuits-of-personal-profits.html
∙ FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2024 Annual Report (April 2025) https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/04/24/fbi-says-americans-lost-usd9-3b-to-crypto-scams-in-2024
∙ ABC News, “Scammers notched $333 million from bitcoin ATM scams in 2025, FBI says” (December 30, 2025) https://abcnews.go.com/US/scammers-notched-333-million-bitcoin-atm-scams-2025/story?id=128526877
∙ Congress.gov, H.R.3633 – Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3633/text