Scaramucci Blames Trump Memecoin for CLARITY Act's 49-50 Senate Defeat

Scaramucci Puts CLARITY Act Defeat on the Memecoin

SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci says President Donald Trump's own crypto business doomed the CLARITY Act, telling attendees at the SALT conference in London that the memecoin launched shortly before Trump's January 2025 inauguration cost the bill its Democratic support. Asked whether the token launch was the sole reason the legislation stalled, Scaramucci called it the “singular reason,” arguing that Democrats who had grown more receptive to crypto regulation after the 2024 election pulled their backing once the token went live. In his account, the launch landed at the exact moment bipartisan goodwill toward crypto rulemaking was at its peak, and it converted that goodwill into suspicion on the Democratic side of the aisle.

The arithmetic behind that claim sits on the Senate record. On September 15, a procedural motion to advance the CLARITY Act received 49 votes in favor and 50 against, well short of the 60 votes required to move the bill into substantive review. The legislation was designed to give digital assets a federal regulatory framework, but negotiations broke down over ethics provisions restricting how much crypto government officials may hold. Scaramucci spread the blame further still. Lawmakers, he said, were trying to write an ethics provision with real teeth, while the White House refused to sign off on it. “I think it's the business interests, the memecoins,” he said, adding that “there's culpability on both sides for that deal not going forward.” His account splits the failure in two: the missing votes explain why the bill could not clear the Senate, and the ethics standoff explains why no compromise was available once the count came up short.

Public Citizen Puts Losses at $4.7 Billion

The claims rest on a documented trail. In July, five Democratic senators called for hearings into Trump's crypto holdings and potential conflicts of interest, arguing that his financial ties could shape crypto policy. House Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill also acknowledged publicly that the president's crypto businesses had complicated the path for legislation.

In August, the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen published an estimate of the damage to investors: at least $4.7 billion in losses across Trump-linked crypto ventures, most of them unrealized, with $3.2 billion tied to the Official Trump memecoin itself. Drawing on Trump's financial disclosure, the group put his 2025 income from memecoin licensing fees at $635 million. The White House tells a different story. Its crypto advisor, Witt, has attributed the deadlock to banking-industry lobbying and rejected the conflict-of-interest framing outright. The two accounts are less opposed than they look: lobbying explains why the Senate could not find its 60th vote, while the memecoin and the ethics clause explain why Democrats withheld theirs. Senator Ruben Gallego had warned earlier that a rushed September push would backfire, and Senator Thom Tillis has called for a fresh vote, yet industry expectation has shifted toward administrative rulemaking at the SEC and the CFTC. Scaramucci still rates that route highly: under SEC Chair Paul Atkins, he argued, tokenization could reach escape velocity, a level of adoption so deep that no future chair could slow or reverse it. He stopped short of predicting that milestone before the next administration takes office, and Democrats' strong showing in this week's midterm elections narrows the legislative window further.

A Narrower Window After the Midterms

What follows from Scaramucci's account is narrower than the headline. The CLARITY Act text never became law; what the market actually holds is a 49-50 roll call and a stalled negotiation. The practical consequence is that the binding framework for digital assets in the United States will, for now, be written by regulators rather than Congress. If tokenization scales through SEC exemptions and CFTC interpretations before the next Congress revisits market structure, the political urgency for a unified federal statute falls with it, and so does the leverage of whichever side wants the ethics clause written most aggressively.