TL;DR
- Anthony Scaramucci says Trump’s memecoin launches cost the CLARITY Act Democratic support by turning crypto market-structure negotiations into a broader ethics dispute.
- The bill failed to advance in the Senate on September 15, receiving 49 votes in favor and 50 against, short of the required 60.
- Scaramucci also said both sides shared responsibility over unresolved ethics provisions, while remaining optimistic that SEC policy could still accelerate broader institutional tokenization adoption.
Anthony Scaramucci says President Donald Trump’s memecoin ventures cost the CLARITY Act Democratic support by turning crypto market-structure legislation into an ethics dispute. Scaramucci, SALT chairman and SkyBridge Capital founder, made the argument at SALT London, saying the token launches shortly before Trump’s January 2025 inauguration damaged bipartisan momentum. Scaramucci described the memecoin launches as the singular reason Democrats pulled back from supporting the bill, tying the setback to political concerns around memecoins rather than to the legislation’s technical market-structure provisions alone.
Scaramucci Links Trump Crypto Interests to CLARITY Setback
The CLARITY Act failed to advance in the Senate on September 15 after a procedural motion received 49 votes in favor and 50 against, short of the 60 needed to move toward debate. Scaramucci argued that lawmakers who had become more receptive to digital-asset regulation reversed course after Trump launched crypto ventures connected to his public profile. His claim is an attribution, not a demonstrated causal finding about every senator’s vote, but it echoes the broader ethics debate around Trump-linked crypto interests that had already complicated negotiations over the bill.
Scaramucci also said responsibility was not limited to one side. He pointed to disagreements over proposed ethics restrictions, arguing that some lawmakers wanted stronger safeguards while the White House resisted provisions with greater enforcement power. He said both sides shared responsibility for the deal failing to move forward. The comments frame Trump’s memecoins as the trigger for lost support while treating the unresolved ethics language as the mechanism that kept negotiations stuck, consistent with earlier CLARITY Act talks over political pressure and stablecoin provisions.
Despite the legislative setback, Scaramucci remained constructive on the broader direction of U.S. crypto regulation. He said the SEC’s approach under Chair Paul Atkins could help tokenization reach what he called “escape velocity,” meaning adoption could become difficult for a future administration to reverse or slow. He also acknowledged that it was too early to know whether that threshold would be reached before the next administration. Scaramucci’s argument separates his criticism of Trump’s political impact from his longer-term optimism about digital-asset adoption, as the industry continues assessing the consequences of the Senate’s failed CLARITY advance and what regulatory progress may still come through federal agencies even without immediate passage of the legislation itself.
