11-10-2026 
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TL;DR: Donald Trump’s crypto ventures face growing scrutiny as Democrats prepare to investigate potential ethics violations, foreign government investments, and financial dealings involving his crypto companies. Meanwhile, $TRUMP and WLFI tokens have suffered steep declines following the midterm elections, as Trump Media & Technology Group struggles with falling stock prices, Bitcoin exposure, and looming debt obligations despite reporting higher quarterly revenue.
Key Takeaways:
- Trump says George Washington would have launched crypto projects of his own if they existed during his presidency.
- Trump tokens take it on the chin post-election, with $TRUMP and WLFI suffering steep price declines.
- Sen. Blumenthal reminds World Liberty Financial he’s getting a promotion in January, when Democrats regain control of Congress and he takes the lead on investigations.
- TMTG buys more BTC, prays price goes up before its mounting financial obligations come due.
Donald Trump keeps insisting there’s nothing illicit about enjoying a billion-dollar crypto windfall while serving as United States president, but with Democrats about to take control of Congress, his stance appears set for a serious stress test.
On Sunday, CBS News program 60 Minutes aired Trump’s first sit-down interview since his Republican party received a drubbing for the ages in last week’s midterm elections. Come January, Democrats will regain control over both legislative chambers, along with the associated ability to issue subpoenas to support probes of suspected corruption among the Trump administration.
Chief among these are the billion-dollar-plus crypto profits that Trump reported earning in 2025 alone, largely stemming from his $TRUMP memecoin, the World Liberty Financial (WLF) token-issuing project, the AI Financial Corp (formerly ALT 5 Sigma) digital asset treasury firm that stockpiles WLF’s ‘governance’ token WLFI, along with some less impactful projects.
60 Minutes reporter Ross Douthat challenged Trump regarding reports that the president’s “net worth went up by $3 billion” since he returned to office in January 2025. Trump responded by saying “I devote almost no time to my net worth. I don’t care … I have a lotta money, and far more than I ever thought I’d have. And I guess it’s gone up. I don’t even know. I have a son who’s a very straight, good guy. He watches over money. I don’t even talk to him about it.”
Both Don Jr. and Eric Trump serve as exec VPs of the Trump Organization, so it’s unclear which specific son the president was referring to. But when Douthat began a question about how “your son manages or helps manage a cryptocurrency company called World Liberty Financial,” Trump interjected with “which son are you talking about?”
Douthat didn’t address that question, instead noting that Trump is a WLF “co-owner” (a Trump-linked entity controls “approximately 40%” of WLF after steadily reducing its stake from the original 75%), and WLF is also “partially owned by investors connected to the government of the United Arab Emirates.” Douthat suggested that if such an arrangement had existed with Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, Trump “would say ‘that sounds corrupt,’ right?” Trump simply repeated that he knows “nothing” about such dealings.
It emerged this year that a UAE sheikh took a 49% stake in WLF just days before Trump took his second oath of office. More recently, the same UAE entity took a 49% stake in WLF’s new U.S. national trust bank, which has received conditional approval from the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
Douthat quizzed Trump as to whether he thinks “the people who are investing in the company that you co-own with your sons, who are coming from foreign countries who want things from your government, don’t you think they think that they are buying influence?”
Trump replied, “I don’t know,” then tried to claim that every president “going back to George Washington” owned “something, whatever crypto was at the time.” Trump listed oil as an example of assets allegedly owned by previous presidents that were analogous to his crypto ventures, before abruptly ‘weaving’ into an entirely unrelated argument regarding the loyalty of his staff. (Watch the complete exchange here.)
Market also not voting for Trump tokens
The $TRUMP memecoin began election day (November 3) at $1.61 but soon fell to $1.12 as the scale of the electoral defeat became clear. The token remains stuck near that figure, which represents a greater than three-quarters decline since the year began and a 98.5% decline from its all-time peak of $73.43 around the time of its January 2025 launch.
The WLFI token was worth nearly $0.052 on the morning of the vote, but sank as low as $0.044—not far off its all-time low—within 48 hours. While the token has since rebounded on talk of a WLFI buyback, the token remains two-thirds below where it started the year and a fraction of its all-time high of $0.33 shortly after the token’s debut in August 2025.
The buyback was announced around the time WLFI was hitting its new low. The company said the intention was “to strengthen the WLFI ecosystem and governance” and “encourage active participation in WLFI governance and consolidate voting power among our most committed long-term holders.”
How the buyback will be funded remains somewhat murky, with WLF saying the plan is to use “an initial allocation that may include fees earned from [WLF-issued stablecoin] USD1 reserves and other sources.” WLF said it will “evaluate the program over time.”
(For the record, the dollar-pegged USD1’s market cap has also taken a post-midterms tumble, falling around half a billion dollars to its current cap of $3.33 billion. That’s $1 billion below its cap in early October and $2 billion off its all-time peak set in February.)
This isn’t WLF’s first WLFI buyback, having disclosed in April that it had spent $65.6 million to repurchase over 435 million WLFI at an average price of $0.15, more than 3x the token’s current value. It remains to be seen whether the current buyback will prove equally incapable of arresting this token’s terminal velocity.
Trump probes a-comin’
Congressional Democrats are already promising “an end to the rampant and out-of-control corruption overflowing the Trump swamp,” and this includes a look into Trump’s crypto ventures.
On Monday, the Financial Times quoted Ron Hammond, head of policy at crypto market maker Wintermute, advising crypto firms that “if you’ve been on the receiving end of a letter from congressional Democrats and didn’t respond to their liking, get ready to answer them directly.”
Case in point: last week, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), the current ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (and set to wield the Subcommittee gavel come January), sent follow-up letters to several major crypto entities that failed to respond to earlier requests for data regarding their operations.
Among the entities receiving ‘no, we haven’t forgotten this’ notices are Tether, issuer of the largest stablecoin USDT, and Binance, the world’s largest digital asset exchange. Blumenthal is also seeking info from all the companies that donated funds to help build Trump’s ‘ballroom’ project, including crypto firms Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Ripple Labs, and the Trump-loving Winklevoss twins behind the Gemini (NASDAQ: GEMI) exchange/prediction market.
But Blumenthal also wants leaders of both WLF and Fight Fight Fight LLC (the company behind $TRUMP) to comply with his requests for info regarding potential ethics violations, investments by foreign governments and transactions involving individuals facing federal charges.
Blumenthal’s requests were initially made in May 2025 but were swiftly rejected by WLF attorneys, who claimed Blumenthal was trying to force them into “the false choice between innovation and oversight.”
All of the companies have been given until January 4, 2027 to produce the requested information. Failure to comply “will leave the Subcommittee with no choice but to consider alternative measures to obtain compliance.”
The chief legal officer at market maker GSR told the FT that “the pressure on the industry will be real and the expectations of this Congress will be different to the last one.” Hearings appear to be a foregone conclusion, regardless of whether the companies cooperate with the Subcommittee’s demands.
On November 6, Blumenthal tweeted that the targets of his letters “should be on high alert.” Blumenthal reminded his targets that he will soon chair the investigations panel, and said he was “sending a warning to all who’ve failed to cooperate.”
TMTG buys more BTC, prays it doesn’t fall again
Shares of Truth Social parent company Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) (NASDAQ: DJT) were trading just under $6 on election day, but have shed roughly one-third of that value. After opening Monday’s trading at $3.93, TMTG closed at $4.06 (+1.75%). For the year-to-date, TMTG’s stock is down 70%.
Reuters reported last week that Trump’s 114.75 million personal shares in TMTG—for which he stumped up no cash—are still worth around $460 million, despite the share price’s sharply downward trajectory. Other TMTG investors, including many Trump supporters who bought based on their faith in the MAGA potentate, have collectively lost over $2.2 billion.
TMTG released its Q3 earnings results on Monday, detailing an impressive 205% rise in its revenue from the same period last year. It’s a lot less impressive when you realize Q326’s revenue was a mere $1 million, meaning this most recent quarter’s revenue was just $3 million. And $1.8 million of this ‘surge’ came via subscriptions to Truth API, TMTG’s ‘you see Trump’s Truth Social posts before everyone else’ product.
Still, TMTG posted a profit of nearly $410 million in Q3, although $378 million of that came courtesy of TMTG’s BTC treasury, as the token’s fiat price increased by ~42% since June 30.
At any rate, TMTG held 15,649 BTC as of September 30, up significantly from 9,477 BTC at the end of Q2. The company said it acquired 4,359 tokens during the quarter, financed from a partial sale of TMTG’s holdings in the iShares Bitcoin Trust exchange-traded fund (NASDAQ: IBIT) issued by BlackRock (NASDAQ: BLK). TMTG’s remaining IBIT shares added $60 million in investment gains during Q3.
Around 11,385 of TMTG’s BTC have been pledged to the company’s Bitcoin Yield Management Program. On the earnings call, TMTG interim CEO Kevin McGurn said “we want to preserve as much of our Bitcoin as possible to continue our yielding strategy and allow that asset [BTC] to recover.”
There’s a lot of ground to recover. Most of TMTG’s original stock of BTC was purchased in 2025 at an average price of $118,522, so a quarter-on-quarter gain doesn’t necessarily mean these tokens are back in black. And while BTC’s price may have risen 42% during Q3, that price has fallen by ~12% since September 30.
There’s also the fact that last week saw TMTG move 4,259 BTC worth ~$342 million to the Crypto.com exchange. Arkham data shows the digital wallets that transferred the tokens were labeled ‘2028 Convertible Notes Collateral.’ That’s a reference to the $1 billion potential bill that could come due on November 30 to pay holders of TMTG’s debt, which it raised to buy much of that original BTC stash.
Stripping aside all its passive income, TMTG would have booked an adjusted earnings loss of $12.3 million for the quarter. But never fear: while TMTG’s previous efforts at generating revenue from actual operations have failed to ignite, TMTG’s plan to merge with ‘premier fusion company’ TAE Technologies is still on. First announced in December 2025, TMTG said the deal is on track to close by year’s end. Who knows? Perhaps the president will tell the ‘truth’ about it.
FAQs:
Why are Democrats planning to investigate Trump’s crypto ventures?
Democrats want to examine potential ethics violations, foreign government investments, and financial transactions involving Trump-linked cryptocurrency businesses.
Which Trump-affiliated crypto companies are facing scrutiny?
World Liberty Financial (WLF) and Fight Fight Fight LLC, the company behind the $TRUMP memecoin, are among the primary targets.
What role does the UAE play in World Liberty Financial?
A UAE-linked entity acquired a 49% stake in WLF and another 49% stake in its new U.S. national trust bank.
How have $TRUMP and WLFI tokens performed since the midterm elections?
Both tokens declined sharply. $TRUMP fell to around $1.12, while WLFI dropped near its all-time low before partially recovering.
Why is Trump Media & Technology Group facing financial pressure?
TMTG faces declining stock prices, Bitcoin price volatility, and a potential $1 billion debt obligation due November 30, 2026, despite reporting higher quarterly revenue.
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