Trump Made $1.4 Billion on Crypto Last Year. Republicans Just Sent Democrats a 'Final Offer' That Makes Him Give Up Control of It.

The president reported roughly $1.4 billion in crypto income for 2025. On Sunday night, his own party released a bill that says he has to divest it or hand it to a blind trust, and that state attorneys general can come after him if he doesn’t.

That’s the pitch Senate Republicans are making to Democrats with about 36 hours to go.

Late Sunday, Senators Cynthia Lummis, Tim Scott and John Boozman dropped a 635-page revised text of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. A Republican aide told reporters it was “a final offer on the bill.” Other GOP staff went further and called it “last, best and final.” The cloture vote on the motion to proceed is locked for Tuesday, September 15 at 2:15 p.m. ET.

Lummis, in the statement accompanying the release:

“After a year of intense daily bipartisan negotiations, this bill is ready.”

And on the part everyone actually cares about:

“President Trump voluntarily agreed to unprecedented ethics restrictions, holding every federally elected official, judge, and their spouses to some of the toughest ethics restrictions in US history.”

What’s actually in the ethics section

This is the paragraph that has stalled the bill since July. Here is what the Sunday text does, per the summaries circulated with the release:

• Covered individuals are federally elected officials, federal judges and their spouses. That includes the president and vice president.
• They are barred from issuing, sponsoring or promoting digital assets.
• Significant crypto-linked financial interests must be divested or placed in a qualified blind trust.
• State attorneys general can enforce the ban. This is the concession the White House had refused for two months. Democrats wanted it because the alternative was leaving enforcement to a Justice Department run by Trump’s own appointees.
• Civil penalties run to $500,000 or 20% of the transaction, whichever is greater.
• It takes effect 360 days after enactment, or earlier if the regulations are finalized sooner.

A GOP aide described it as accepting roughly 80% of the Tillis-Gallego framework, the bipartisan ethics proposal that Senators Thom Tillis and Ruben Gallego floated in late July and that the White House had, until this weekend, met with what one trade publication called “radio silence.”

The other 20% is where Tuesday will be decided.

The gap Democrats have been pointing at

Democrats’ objections to the earlier White House-approved ethics language, laid out publicly over the summer, came down to a short list:

1. Children aren’t covered. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump run the family’s crypto operations, including World Liberty Financial. A rule that binds the president and his spouse but not his sons is, in Democrats’ telling, a rule with a hole exactly the shape of the Trump family business.
2. Nothing touches prior activity. The $TRUMP memecoin, the World Liberty token sales and the stablecoin business all happened already. The bill is forward-looking.
3. Enforcement. Solved, apparently, by the state AG provision.

Senator Cory Booker’s verdict on an earlier draft was blunt: “This is the partisan draft. It’s very obviously not going anywhere.” Elizabeth Warren: “If it doesn’t stop the president from profiting off of crypto… then it’s not really any expedition.”

White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt, posting on X over the weekend, framed the remaining opposition as one of two positions. Either an ethics provision without state AG enforcement is meaningless, which he argues would make all existing federal ethics law meaningless too. Or an ethics provision that doesn’t penalize Trump for past crypto activity is unacceptable. The first objection is now moot. The second is the one that’s left.

Witt’s Saturday post, after Trump met with advisers on Friday to work through the language, was three words: “Bad day to be a Clarity Act doomer.”

The math

Cloture needs 60. Republicans hold 53. Senators Jerry Moran and Josh Hawley have both threatened to vote no over what the bill does to community banks, so the working assumption is at least two Republican defections.

That means Republicans need nine Democrats.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer convened his caucus Sunday to settle the party’s position. No outcome has been made public. The names that have circulated as the persuadable bloc are Angela Alsobrooks, Cory Booker, Catherine Cortez Masto, Ruben Gallego, John Hickenlooper, Mark Warner and Raphael Warnock. Gallego and Alsobrooks were the two Democrats who voted the bill out of Banking Committee in May. About a dozen Democrats have been in the room negotiating for months.

Lummis’ closing argument to them, from a post on Saturday:

“Democrats helped write the Clarity Act, securing more than 115 wins in the text. They demanded the felony bar on fraudsters, $150M for the CFTC, the crackdown on platforms like Binance, and they got almost everything they asked for.”

Her Sunday statement puts the count of Democratic-requested changes at 126. And the threat: “no CLARITY now means 2030.” If Tuesday fails, there is no realistic floor window before the midterms, and the industry stays under agency rulemaking through at least the next Congress.

Prediction markets have moved with the weekend. Polymarket’s odds of the bill becoming law in 2026 were at 16% on September 8, ticked to the low 20s after Friday’s White House meeting, and were reported around 30% after Sunday’s release. In February the same market sat at 82%.

The rest of the 635 pages

The ethics fight has eaten the headlines, but the Sunday text also moved on the other live disputes:

• Stablecoin yield. A “circuit breaker” lets Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent restrict stablecoin rewards if he determines community banks are losing deposits substantially. This is the compromise aimed at the bank lobby, and it’s what Moran and Hawley are weighing. It also puts a regulatory kill switch over the reward programs that Coinbase and others run on USDC balances.
• Developer liability. The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act language shielding non-custodial software developers from money-transmitter treatment is still in, extended to miners and validators, but reportedly narrowed to Bank Secrecy Act civil enforcement rather than a blanket shield.
• Exchange rules. Tighter provisions on vertical integration, affiliate trading and conflicts of interest for digital commodity exchanges, and state consumer-protection laws are preserved.
• DeFi. The Agriculture Committee’s DeFi provisions are now folded into the combined text, which was one of the mechanical blockers a week ago.

Why This Matters for Crypto Jobs

Tuesday is the single biggest hiring signal of the year, and it cuts both ways.

If cloture passes, the US gets a credible path to a statutory market structure before 2027. That triggers the hiring pattern we saw after the GENIUS Act: every exchange, custodian, market maker and stablecoin issuer starts building the compliance, legal, registration and reporting functions the bill requires. Regulatory counsel, licensing leads, CFTC-facing compliance officers, and policy analysts who can read 635 pages and turn it into a control matrix become the most contested hires in the industry. DeFi teams that have been incorporating abroad get a reason to keep engineers in the US.

If it fails, “no CLARITY means 2030” is a hiring forecast, not just a slogan. Four more years of rulemaking-by-agency and enforcement-by-litigation means the jobs stay where they’ve been: outside counsel, enforcement defense, and the offshore entities that the industry has spent three years building in Dubai, Singapore and Zug. This week’s Bitcoin Suisse news, moving half its Swiss headcount to Bratislava and Vietnam, is the same story from the other direction. Capital and headcount go where the rules are legible.

Either way, ethics compliance just became a product category. If a divest-or-blind-trust rule with state AG enforcement lands on every federal official and judge, someone has to build the disclosure tooling, the trust structures, and the on-chain screening that proves an official isn’t touching a covered asset. That’s a new niche for compliance engineers and forensic analysts, and it’s one that exists whether or not the people it targets are in office next year.

The uncomfortable subtext for builders: the bill’s fate is now almost entirely about one family’s holdings, not about your protocol. That’s the political reality you’re hiring into.

The Bottom Line

Republicans have put a number on it: 80% of what Democrats asked for on ethics, 126 changes across the bill, and a president who says he’ll accept a divestment rule written with him in mind. Democrats have to decide by Tuesday afternoon whether the missing 20%, the sons and the prior profits, is worth killing the first crypto market-structure law the Senate has ever gotten to a floor vote.

Nine votes. One paragraph. About 36 hours.

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Want to be on the right side of whichever way Tuesday goes? Regulatory, compliance and policy roles are hiring on every outcome, and the builders who understand the rules are the ones who stay employed through the cycle. Find them at Cryptogrind — the job board for crypto and Web3 builders.