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- Democrats Blast Crypto Dealings of Trump's Family
Democrats Blast Crypto Dealings of Trump's Family
Call for tougher bill
Matt Davis
May 06, 2025
In partnership with
Morning! It’s been five days since the New York Times drew our attention to the ways Donald Trump is making millions off the crypto industry while shaping policy around crypto, globally. That’s enough time for the Democratic Party to realize a story is somewhat serious, apparently, because today’s lead story is about just that.
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That’s right. Today’s story appears to show that the Democratic Party is reading the newspaper, just like we are, so that you don’t have to!
Senate Democrats are demanding changes to cryptocurrency legislation pending in Congress, responding partly to growing evidence that the Trump family is using its connections and President Trump’s power to profit from crypto trading.
The pushback intensified late last week after a closed-door meeting among Senate Democrats in which Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, told colleagues they should not commit to voting for the so-called GENIUS Act, a bill backed by the crypto industry.
The bill was "sailing toward passage,” apparently, until Democrats read the paper and started talking about the story in the meeting with Schumer.
Among the concerns the senators raised, according to lawmakers, is that the Trump-affiliated crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, recently secured a deal to take $2 billion in deposits from an Emirati venture fund backed by the government of Abu Dhabi, as The Times reported last week.
I don’t know what’s worse. That Trump did it or that we need to rely on the country’s largest newspaper to hold him accountable rather than the democratically elected opposition. But I’ll take a partnership between the two.
“It’s a selling of influence, a conflict of interest, just a massive form of corruption we haven’t witnessed,” Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview, echoing comments he said he made at the meeting. “And it needs to be ended.”
I interviewed Jeff Merkley a few times when I was a news reporter in Oregon, and before he was the state’s junior Senator. Let’s just say he liked to show up to interviews wearing flannel shirts. Not because he thought it was good for his image but I think because he really just liked wearing them. It’s nice to see him saying something that he should have said days earlier.
Elizabeth Warren has also said something scathing. Now there’s “broader unease” about the bill among Democrats. That’s good news for the New York Times because yesterday they lost out to the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal in all the major Pulitzer categories. Sure, photography and international reporting matter. But you can’t lose the breaking news category to a newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos, people. Better luck next year, I guess?
World Liberty Financial declined requests for comment and Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said Mr. Trump had no conflict, because his assets were in a trust managed by his children. (Mr. Trump still benefits financially from the investments.)
That’s a major parenthetical.
As a reminder…
Crypto executives have lobbied for months to pass the GENIUS Act, a bill that would make it easier for U.S. companies to deal in stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency that maintains a price of $1.
But a boost to the industry would also be a boost to World Liberty, expanding the market for a stablecoin that it recently began issuing. The Trump family and its partners are already positioned to take in tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue, if not more, on those stablecoins issued by World Liberty.
On Saturday (after the Times’s reporting surfaced) a group of senior Democrats appear to have grown a backbone.
On Saturday, a group of nine Democrats, including four who voted to advance the legislation out of the Senate Banking Committee, announced that they would not support it without major changes. They argued that the bill lacked strong provisions to stop money laundering and police foreign crypto firms but did not mention Mr. Trump’s crypto business.
Senate Republicans need at least seven Democrats to vote with them to move the legislation past procedural hurdles, so the opposition that has emerged could kill the legislation, potentially a major blow to the crypto industry’s policy objectives in Washington. The crypto industry has spent millions lobbying since the election in the hopes of passing bills like this one.
Meanwhile Mr. Merkley and Ms. Warren separately moved on Monday to ask the Office of Government Ethics to investigate the Trump family’s growing cryptocurrency business deals, calling them “a startling degree of foreign influence and the potential for a quid pro quo that could endanger national security.”
Members of the house are equally concerned about an equivalent bill there, and here’s a rare thing…a brave Republican.
Even some Senate Republicans and longtime crypto advocates have expressed concerns about the efforts by Mr. Trump and his family to profit from crypto. “This is my president that we’re talking about, but I am willing to say that this gives me pause,” Senator Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, told NBC News last week.
Here she is:
I hate to say it but she looks a bit more trustworthy than many Republicans I’ve been writing about over the last few months. Still, looks can be deceiving. But well done to her for stating the blindingly obvious in public, something most of her colleagues have become unable to do lately.
The Times, apparently aware of the importance of its reporting in all this, repeatedly emphasizes that in a way that’s starting to feel almost like they feel they got stiffed in the Pulitzers yesterday, as I mentioned.
Recent reporting from The Times about the Abu Dhabi transaction and other conflicts of interest trailing World Liberty circulated widely in the Capitol last week. Senate Democrats distributed research memos citing those investigations and attacking the legislation as a vehicle for the Trump family to “corruptly profit from his cryptocurrency schemes,” according to copies obtained by The Times. Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, read aloud one of The Times’s articles in its entirety during a committee hearing last week.
That’s really quite something, though, isn’t it?
Meanwhile Mr. Trump has shown no signs that he is deterred.
On Monday, he posted an illustration of himself with his fist in the air on his social media platform, Truth Social, urging his supporters to buy a cryptocurrency called $Trump, another new business that has generated more than $100 million in fees for his family and its partners.
He also threw a $1.5 million-a-head fundraiser for crypto executives last night. The Times even got a copy of the invitation which is rather amusing. Thanks for letting me read the newspaper so that you and the Democratic Party of the United States don’t have to!
Say, is there a story that might cheer me up a bit?
Oh, sure. Look at all the pictures from the Met Gala 👇🏻
The popular consensus is that Rihanna “won.” I like the idea of celebrating “Black Dandy” in an era when DEI efforts and by extension, Black people are once again under horrific attack. That Anna Wintour sure is a smart cookie, even if she did basically sack her Black editor Andre Leon Talley because he got too fat. And yes, I did read his autobiography and yes, that’s basically what it says. People are complicated in America, eh?
Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.
Standard disclaimer: I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. I’m also doing a five-minute video version of this, each weekday morning at around 9 a.m. (depending on how long it takes me to read the newspaper). If you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn (you can always watch the recording later). If you subscribe to my Youtube channel it’ll also send you a notification when I’m “going live.”