“Crypto shifts focus to Trump regulators after coming up short in Senate”, 17 September 2026 (Photo via The Hill — the original report)
As it ran on the front
CLARITY ACT, a bill, died Tuesday on the floor of the United States Senate, felled by a procedural cloture vote after fifteen months of negotiation failed to produce the votes required to keep it breathing. It was not old, as bills go, and it was not unloved; it was merely inconvenient, and the malarkey of a Senate that cannot agree on how to guard a wallet finished the job that consensus could not. It leaves behind the very question it was born to answer — who regulates crypto — unanswered, and hands the answering to Trump's own regulators, who inherit, along with the paperwork, an industry the president personally profits from.
Nineteen days before the funeral, on Aug. 27, the watchdog group Public Citizen filed a report the White House left unanswered: Trump's assorted crypto products have left investors on the hook for at least $4.7 billion, the bulk of it in a meme coin the president launched three days before his second term began. That figure did not come from the government the bill was supposed to arm; it came from outside it, from a group with no rulemaking power and no dog in the fight except arithmetic. The Senate had that number for weeks before the vote. It voted anyway, and the bill still failed.…
…(cont) The same week the bill lay dying, in the family, Donald Trump Jr.'s wife took to Instagram to defend a wedding gift from a Russian oligarch, reaching for the word "clarity" to describe her own explanation — a small, unpaid tribute to the bill whose name she borrowed and whose job she did not do.
CLARITY ACT is survived by the industry now filing, per The Hill's reporting, straight into the offices of the regulators the bill was meant to check, and by those regulators themselves, who answer to the man whose losses they have not yet priced, let alone recovered. It is preceded in death by nothing; it never lived long enough to become anyone's shield before it became everyone's forgotten paperwork.
There is a difference between a bill that fails and a bill that was never going to be allowed to succeed, and the Senate did not bother telling us which one this was. The industry did not wait to find out. It simply changed which door it walks through, and the new door leads to men who work for the person the old door was built to watch.
In lieu of flowers, ask your senator which vote failed on Tuesday, and ask the regulators, before they write the first new rule, whose $4.7 billion they intend to find first.
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“They killed the one bill that could've watched Trump's crypto, so now the regulators writing the rules are the same ones who already let $4.7 billion in losses walk out the door and never chased a dime of it. That's not oversight, pal, that's the house owning the ticket booth — and the guy running the table is the one cashing the chips.”
“Look, the CLARITY Act failed on procedure, not on the merits — the industry needs rules, any rules, and regulators are simply filling the gap Congress left sitting there. Sure, the president has crypto products in the market they'll be regulating, but that's a coincidence of timing, not a conflict — did I just call $4.7 billion in losses a coincidence? That doesn't sound like something I should keep explaining.”
The DOJ disbanded its crypto enforcement team in April 2025 and ordered inconsistent investigations closed - while the president's family runs a crypto business CNBC, 8 April 2025 (Blanche memo)
A cryptocurrency regulation bill appears to have little momentum left in the Senate after it came up short in a floor vote Tuesday, with the industry now turning its attention to Trump administration regulators to set the rules of the road. The Clarity Act failed to secure enough support to clear a procedural hurdle Tuesday...
The DOJ disbanded its crypto enforcement team in April 2025 and ordered inconsistent investigations closed - while the president's family runs a crypto business CNBC, 8 April 2025 (Blanche memo)
Welcome to The Hill's Business & Economy newsletter {beacon} Business & Economy Business & Economy The Big Story Clarity Act faces Senate test A cryptocurrency regulation bill is poised to face a key test on the Senate floor this week, as lawmakers weigh whether to advance the measure after nearly a year of negotiations....
The DOJ disbanded its crypto enforcement team in April 2025 and ordered inconsistent investigations closed - while the president's family runs a crypto business CNBC, 8 April 2025 (Blanche memo)
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