President Donald Trump had been hearing the message loud and clear for weeks about the sweeping cryptocurrency bill being written in the Senate: to get it across the line, he would have to agree to ethics provisions that apply to him, too.
Trump agreed to a measure that would bar him and his wife from issuing the types of meme coins that they swiftly launched as he prepared to return to the White House for a second time. First, Mr. Trump consented to a tougher ethics proposal that several key senators had demanded. But Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Arizona, and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina, then presented an additional proposal to the White House that went further. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations.
And then another concession came late Sunday (September 13, 2026), when Republicans said Mr.
The president agreed — with surprisingly little pushback, according to two people with knowledge of the Oval Office discussion, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the private talks. It would require the President to put his crypto holdings in a blind trust and divest when those holdings reach a certain value, according to two other people with direct knowledge of the language.
Mr. Tillis and Mr. Gallego, pointing mainly to the state attorneys general provision. The White House has maintained that the President stays out of family business decisions administered by his sons. But Mr. Trump has since become a convert, persuaded by his sons’ interest in the business — and by its appeal to Black voters and younger voters, who could play a crucial role in close campaigns.
That proposal could, in theory, force Donald Trump to divest from ventures such as World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency venture that his sons launched in 2024.
Trump reported more than $500 million in revenue from World Liberty Financial sales of crypto products, including “governance tokens,” in his annual disclosure report filed with the Office of Government Ethics — a significant share of the more than $1.4 billion that the president reported from crypto businesses last year. In private, White House officials had raised concerns about giving State Attorneys General the power to enforce the law, arguing that Democratic state lawyers could use it as a political weapon against the President and other GOP officials — and that it could be used by Republican Attorneys General against elected Democrats, according to the two people familiar with the July Oval Office discussion. A senior GOP aide, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said the President had agreed to “about 80%” of the proposal from Mr. An updated version of the bill released Sunday (September 13) also includes a requirement to either divest or place in a blind trust any “significant” financial interest in an entity that issues cryptocurrencies. “It is true that conflict-of-interest provisions do not commonly apply to the president because of their whole-of-government responsibilities,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the government watchdog group Public Citizen. “That said, we have seen such unprecedented corruption and conflict of interest from this administration and Trump in particular, that we need a different rubric. In his first term, the President said that he was “not a fan” of cryptocurrency, saying it was “highly volatile and based on thin air.
