Trump Crypto Probes After the Midterms: What It Means for XRP

Donald Trump has got a problem, guys. In the midterms on the 3rd of November, 2026, his party lost the House and the Senate. And the first thing that happened wasn't a speech or a protest. It was a two-word message from the man about to take over Congress's main investigations committee.

Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia has a strong worded message after the midterms, and that's lawyer up. Garcia is expected to be the new House Oversight Committee chairman after the Democrat's huge victory last night.

Two words and then look at what the markets did. On the 4th of November, the Trump Mingcoin crashed to a record low about a$122, more than 98% below its peak. World Liberty Financials token, the family's own crypto project, hit a record low the same day. and shares in the Trump media, the company behind True Social, fell nearly a quarter in a single session to the lowest close it has ever had. Here's how Forbes covered it. President Donald Trump's net worth fell by $73 million Wednesday morning after a Democratic midterm election sweep caused shares of Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, to plummet.

Trump lost tens of millions from his estimated $6.5 billion fortune shortly after markets opened Wednesday morning after Democrats scored majorities in both houses of Congress in a sharp rebuke of the Trump administration. Trump Media shares plummeted to an all-time intraday low of $523 just after markets opened, a more than 11% decline over its previous close price.

So, what's actually coming? because Congress now has the power to do something nobody with real power has done yet, which is open the books on the Trump's family crypto empire. Since he went back into the White House, his accounts have made more than $21,000 trades in a single year, according to an analyst of his disclosures reported by Crypto.NET. He declared more than a billion dollars of crypto-related income for 2025 alone. And there's one deal in particular signed 4 days before he was sworn in that I think is going to be the center of this whole thing. So, is this the end of the Trump crypto machine?

Or is this the start of something bigger? And this twist at the end is the bit that matters for most of it if you hold XRP because the president's own crypto might be the very thing that's been holding back the rules this whole industry has been waiting for.

[music]

Hey bull runners, welcome back. So first, what does losing Congress actually cost a president? Think of it as three powers. The first is laws. Anything new has to get through both the House and the Senate.

The second is money. Every dollar the government spends has to be signed off by Congress. And the third is the one people forget about, which is oversight. That's the power to investigate. When America's founders wrote the rules, they were terrified of a president turning into a king, the British kind, they just fought a war to get rid of.

So they gave Congress the right to dig into how the government's being run. In practice, that means the committees in the House can subpoena documents, which is a legal order to hand them over, and they can make people testify under oath. And if someone refuses, Garcia told Punch Bowl News, "The committee can go to the courts and push for contempt, which is how Congress makes a subpoena actually bite." Now, when Trump's own party ran the House, that power barely got used. They weren't going to go after their own president, were they? But from the 3rd of January 2027, the Democrats chair the committees, and they decide what gets looked at.

And according to CryptoNews, the investigations could start as early as February 2027. So, where do they start? Well, with the money and the trading first of all. According to his own financial disclosure for 2025, Trump made more than 21,000 trades in a year worth somewhere between 600 million and $1.86 billion. Then, according to CBS News, there are about 3,600 more in just the first 3 months of 2026.

The White House says it's all handled by outside money managers. And Trump himself has said he purposely never speaks to the people who runs his money and that he's profiting because the stock market's going up. And that's the key point. Up until now, nobody with real power has been able to test that. A Democratic House can.

Then there's the family. House oversight. Democrats say businesses connected to Trump's sons, Donald Jr. and Eric have picked up more than $725 million in government loans, grants, and rewards since he went back into office. Robert Garcia, who's in line to chair that committee, said Jared Kushner's business dealings are on the list, too. And the committee has asked the Pentagon's own watchdog to check whether companies tied to the Suns got favorable defense contracts.

But the biggest one of all is crypto. And this is where it gets really interesting. World Liberty Financial launched in October 2024. It lists Trump and three of his sons as co-founders. It has its own token and it has its own dollar stable coin called USD1.

And in February 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported something nobody had known. Just days before Trump's second inauguration, the journal reports 49% nearly half of the Trump family crypto company World Liberty Financial was purchased for $500 million by Shik Tanun bin Zed al- Nayan who heads the United Arab Emirates state investment fund and serves as national security adviser sometimes referred to as the spy shake. So here's what's documented. According to the journal, the buyer was an Abu Dhabi company called Aryan, backed by Shik Tanum. The deal was signed four days before an inauguration with Eric Trump among those who signed it.

Half was paid up front and about $187 million of that went up to entities controlled by the Trump family. Then months later, the administration agreed to let the UAE buy hundreds of thousands advanced American AI chips every year, including for G42, a company tied to the chic. Now, here's the other side, because you deserve both. World Liberty told ABC News that any claim the deal had anything to do with the chips decision is completely false and that neither the president nor his Middle East envoy, Steve Wickoff, had any involvement. The White House has denied any conflict of interest.

Nobody has been charged with anything. So that's a documented part. That's the denial and you decide. Back in June 2026, Elizabeth Warren and four other Democratic senators demanded hearings into that stake. But as the minority party, they had no power to force anyone to turn up.

From January, that changes. And there's another thread to this because a different firm led by the same chic called MGX used World Liberty's USD1 stable coin to make a 2 billion investment into Binance. Then in October 2025, Trump pardoned Binance's founder Shangp Xiao, known as CZed, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to breaking America's anti-moneyaundering laws. About 10 days later, 60 Minutes asked him why.

Why did you pardon him?

Okay, are you ready? I don't know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that and I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.

According to Crypto.NET, that pardon is now one of the things Democrats want to look into. CZ himself has denied any business ties to the Trump family and says he never discussed any kind of deal for a pardon, and there's no evidence the two things are connected. Then you've got the Trump memecoin. It launched on the 17th of January 2025, 3 days before the inauguration, and it shot up to more than $73. By the 4th of November 2026, it was around $1.25.

According to a disclosure analysis reported by Cryptonews, about $635 million of Trump's income in 2025 came from royalties tied to that coin. And the people who bought near the top, well, they took a hammering. And the coin's biggest holders have been invited to a gala dinner with the president on the 22nd of November 2026, which is exactly the kind of thing a Democratic committee will want to ask about. And I'll be honest with you, I've been there. I rode Dogecoin all the way up and never took a penny a profit on the run.

And I think a lot of us have done exactly the same thing with a memecoin. You tell yourself one more week and then the music stops. And it doesn't stop at the coins. Trump Media isn't just a social media company anymore. It's sitting on a big pile of Bitcoin, more than 9,000 coins held directly at the end of June 2026, and it bought more in July.

Trump's own trust owns about 41% of the company. And on paper, that stake dropped from around $683 million to about 515 million in one day. Then there's American Bitcoin, the mining company Eric Trump helped set up. On the 5th of November, its shares fell 17% according to the block. even though it had just reported a quarterly profit of $126 million. That tells you the market isn't only pricing the business, guys, it's pricing the name.

So that's the empire, the trades, the family deals, world liberty, the chic, the pardon, and the coin. Now, the big question is, what can Congress actually do about any of it? And the honest answer is less than you'd think. The federal law that stops officials making decisions they personally profit from doesn't cover the president. and legal experts point out that any criminal case would have to come from a justice department that Trump runs and that he holds the power to pardon. Nobody in the family has been charged with anything.

So, the real weapon isn't a court case. It's daylight, months of hearings, documents dragged out in public, people forced to answer questions under oath. For a family selling crypto, that only works if people trust it. That's a big deal. The White House, according to Crypto.NET, News calls it a continuation of a decadel long witch hunt.

And critics like the activist Riley Gaines who already saying to get ready for 2 years of political theatrics. But oversight is only one of Congress's three powers. The second one, money could hurt even more. Remember, every year Congress has to pass a bills that pay for almost everything the government does. If they don't, the government starts to shut down.

And we've just lived through the worst one ever. From October to November 2025, the government was shut for 43 days, the longest in American history. And the Congressional Budget Office reckoned it cost the economy about 11 billion it'll never get back. And here's a bit of that story crypto people sometimes forget. Washington was stuck for 6 weeks, and when it finally reopened, the first American Spot XRP ETF started trading on the 13th of November 2025. and Bloomberg's Eric Balunas said it did more day one trading than any other ETF launched that year.

So when Washington grinds to a halt, crypto approvals tend to get stuck right along with it. The government's current funding runs out on the 11th of December 2026. And then there's a bigger one, the debt ceiling. That's a legal limit on how much Americans can borrow. In 2025, Congress raised it by $5 trillion to 41.1 trillion.

But by early November 2026, America had already borrowed about 40.5 trillion of that. Goldman Sachs reckons a deal to raise it has to be done by October 2027 at the latest, which lands right in the middle of the new Democratic Congress. And we've seen exactly how that fight goes. In 2011, a brand new Republican House refused to raise the limit unless Barack Obama agreed to big spending cuts. They went back and forth for months.

The deal was signed on the very day the money was due to run out and 3 days later S&P took away America's top credit rating for the first time ever. The Dow dropped 635 points on the next trading day. Back then, the debt limit was around $14 trillion. Now it's nearly three times that. So imagine that fight with the president who's already told everyone he'll be Mr.

Veto. Every shutdown threat and every debt limit stands off rattles market. And crypto has a habit of feeling it first. Which brings me to the twist I promised you, and it's the bit that winds me up the most. For years, the one thing crypto in America has been crying out for is proper rules.

And it got close because the Clarity Act, the bill that would finally set out how coins like XRP get treated, passed the House in July 2025 with 78 Democrats voting for it. Then on the 15th of September 2026, it hit a wall in the Senate. 49 votes to 50 when it needed 60. And it wasn't the boring technical stuff that sank it. And listen to why.

Ultimately, clarity stalled over ethics and [music] the proximity to the vote to the midterms themselves. And it was just not politically palatable for certain policy makers to vote in favor of the bill with anything less than 100% win on ethics. Democratic lawmakers argue the bill fails to effectively prevent highranking public officials like the president from profiting off crypto.

So think about that for a second, guys, because the president's own crypto businesses became one of the biggest arguments against the very crypto rules the industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get. And Ruben Ggo, one of the Democratic senators who worked on the bill, told Bloomberg Law the industry and the Republicans had screwed up and that this bill was the best they were going to get. Republicans, for their part, say they'd already made more than a 100 changes to the bill at the Democrats's request. Now, the Democrats are in a position to push for an even tighter ethics rules aimed at the president's crypto. And according to Roll Call, Maxine Waters, who's been one of crypto's toughest critics in Congress for years, is favored to chair the House Financial Services Committee, the one that writes these bills, although Shan Casten is challenging her for the job.

And here's how I see it, and you can tell me if I'm wrong. If the hearings drag every one of these deals into the light, it may actually clear the road because crypto in America was never just a Trump thing. The stable coin law, the Genius Act, passed with support from both parties and has to take effect by the 18th of January 2027 at the latest. The regulators are still writing rules. And on the 26th of October 2026, Ripple got final approval from America's banking regulator for its own National Trust Bank.

While World Liberty's application for a trust bank to handle USD1 was still waiting on final sign off. What the industry really needs is rules at work whoever's in the White House. And if clearing up the ethics question is the price of getting them, a lot of people in crypto would probably take that deal. So could the Democrats actually remove him? Probably not.

The House could impeach him with a simple majority. It did that twice in his first term in December 2019 and again in January 2021 and both times the Senate cleared him. But removing him takes twothirds of the Senate. That's 67 senators. And the Democrats will be well short.

What's far more likely is a slow squeeze. No new laws without the other side say so. No money without a deal. Executive orders that the next president can scrap on day one. And because he can't run again, every Republican eyeing up 2028 starts to build a brand of their own and some might find it easier to do that away from the Trump name.

So, what do you reckon, guys? Will these hearings end up hurting crypto? Or are they exactly what clears the road for proper rules? Tell me in the comments because I like to read them. Because one thing's for sure, the people who bought the Trump coin near the top and trusted a name instead of a plan, and a lot of them have lost almost everything they put in.

So, here's a real question. Who's looking out for your crypto when the headlines go mad? That's what our research team helps with. They're the best in the game. They dig through this every day, so members hear it first, and they'll help you get your crypto onto your own keys and know when to move, working off a plan instead of a famous name.

Grab a free 15-minute chat with the team. It's the first link under this video. It's built for people holding $50,000 or more in crypto. And if that's not you yet, no stress at all. Keep watching.

These go up every day. None of this is financial advice, guys. It's just me, a coffee, and a lot of research. Crypto carries risk, and what's happened before is no guarantee of what happens next. Your keys stay with you, and the team never needs them.

Thanks for watching, guys. Keep your head stack with purpose, and I'll keep you posted. [music]

[music]