Cryptocurrency News: Trump Tokens Crash After Midterms

The latest cryptocurrency news from Washington carries a blunt message for the millions of Americans who bought into the president's digital ventures: the tokens tied to Donald Trump's name have fallen to the lowest prices of their short lives, and the political ground beneath them has shifted at the same time. In the days after the midterm elections, the three best-known products in the Trump family's crypto portfolio all sank to record lows, turning a political defeat for the Republican Party into a financial one for the holders who had bet on the president's brand. The declines arrived just as Democrats, who won control of both chambers of Congress on November 3, began preparing the investigations they have promised into the family's crypto businesses, and just as one of the Senate's most persistent critics of those businesses demanded that the records be preserved.

The scale of the fall is difficult to overstate. The $TRUMP meme coin, which traded above $70 in the first weeks of 2025 and was reported at one point to carry a market value of around $72 billion, sank to $1.11 in public trading, an all-time low. The governance token of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto firm, known by its ticker $WLFI, also touched an all-time low. The $MELANIA coin, the first lady's own meme coin, had already fallen from $8 in January 2025 to less than $1 by March 2025, and its value was nearly halved again in the days after the midterms, leaving it down roughly 99.6 percent from its peak.

The Tokens at the Centre of the Sell-Off

The three products at the heart of the story are different in design but identical in branding, and they have moved together for most of their existence. The $TRUMP coin is the official meme coin of the president, launched around his return to the White House. The $MELANIA coin is the equivalent product for the first lady. And $WLFI is the governance token of World Liberty Financial, the crypto company the president co-owns with his sons, which sits at the centre of the family's wider digital asset business.

The numbers tell the story of a long decline that accelerated sharply after the election. The $TRUMP coin was trading at roughly $1.70 immediately before voting began, and at around $2 as recently as a month earlier. The slide to $1.11 amounted to a decline of about 34 percent from its pre-vote price alone, and roughly 44 percent from where it stood a month ago. Its market value, once reported at $72 billion, now stands at about $340 million. Over the past twelve months the coin has fallen about 79 percent, and it is down about 98 percent from its all-time high. Measured against its early-2025 highs above $70 to $75, the drawdown is in the region of 97 to 99 percent. The $WLFI token has followed a similar path, down about 55 percent over the past year and about 85 percent from its all-time high, trading at around $0.049 after the election. The $MELANIA coin is down about 24 percent over the past year but remains more than 99 percent below its peak, trading at around $0.072.

Election Night: The Moment the Market Turned

The timing of the sell-off leaves little doubt about what set it off. As election results began to point to a Republican defeat late on November 3, $WLFI dropped 10 percent to reach its all-time low. The $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins plunged 8 percent and 11 percent respectively in the same window, while DJTB lost 8 percent. The selling did not stop there. Over the following day the $TRUMP coin fell about 17 percent in 24 hours to roughly $1.33, and in a later trading window it dropped more than 20 percent over two days to a fresh all-time low.

What makes the timing so striking is that the wider crypto market did not fall with it. On the day the Trump-linked tokens led the losses, Bitcoin was up more than 4 percent and Ether was up about 6 percent. The contrast was repeated across the week: while Bitcoin rebounded above $80,000 and most large cryptocurrencies moved higher, the $TRUMP coin fell another 15 percent over 24 hours. The message from the market was unmistakable. This was not a general crypto sell-off. It was a verdict on the political fortunes of the man whose name is on the coins.

The political explanation is straightforward. Crypto products tied to the president have traded, from the start, as a proxy for his political power. When that power looked secure, buyers piled in. When the midterm results showed Republicans losing both branches of Congress, the same buyers rushed for the exit. The Democrats' victory also changed the regulatory outlook for the family's crypto businesses, because the party has pledged to investigate the ventures and bring more scrutiny to the family's crypto operations. Traders who had bought the tokens as a bet on the president's influence were suddenly holding damaged assets.

A Broader Market That Moved the Other Way

The wider market backdrop makes the Trump-token crash look even more specific. In the days after the election, the broader crypto market went through its own turbulence, but for different reasons. A sharp sell-off in American technology and artificial intelligence stocks triggered roughly $1.1 billion in crypto liquidations over 24 hours, with Bitcoin falling about 6 percent and Ether falling more than 7 percent in that window. The low-liquidity, speculative character of the Trump coins meant they reacted far more violently than Bitcoin or Ether when leverage was flushed out of the system, and the $TRUMP coin fell more than 20 percent over two days in that second wave. Trump Media and Technology Group, the public company behind Truth Social, was hit in the same downdraft: its shares fell almost 25 percent in a single day to about $4.46, a record low, leaving the stock down more than 69 percent from its annual highs and reducing the president's paper net worth by roughly $168 million in that session alone. None of this, on its own, would explain the scale of the Trump-token collapse. The broader market recovered. Bitcoin climbed back above $80,000. The Trump products did not.

The Investigation Democrats Are Preparing

The political side of the story is only beginning. Democrats, who are about to gain subpoena power in the House and Senate, have pledged to investigate the president's crypto ventures, and the first moves are already visible. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut demanded that World Liberty Financial preserve its records, and the $WLFI token hit its all-time low in public trading in the aftermath of that demand. Blumenthal is expected to lead the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, a panel with the power to compel documents and testimony, and its inquiries are likely to reach deep into the family's crypto dealings.

According to Corey Frayer, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America and a former aide to Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, the subcommittee is likely to delve into who the president's firms have been doing business with internationally, and who has benefited from policy decisions. That framing points to the two questions that have dogged the Trump crypto ventures from the start: who is on the other side of the trades, and whether the family's business interests have shaped the administration's approach to crypto regulation. The answers, if the investigations proceed as Democrats have promised, will come out in public hearings, with subpoenaed documents behind them. The new Congress, which convenes on January 3, 2027, will bring Democratic majorities to the committees that oversee financial regulation, banking, and government ethics, giving the party the tools to pursue the crypto inquiries alongside its wider oversight of the administration. Tron founder Justin Sun is also engaged in a legal battle against World Liberty Financial.

What Ordinary Investors Have Lost

Behind the percentages and the price charts are the people who bought the coins. Almost a million people invested in the $TRUMP token alone, and the losses they have absorbed are now measured in billions of dollars. Zach Everson, the research director at the watchdog group Public Citizen, previously calculated that retail buyers had lost $4.7 billion in Trump-linked crypto products. A separate study published in July found that of about 1.48 million wallets that bought the $TRUMP coin, roughly two-thirds were in loss, with an estimated $3.81 billion in realised and unrealised losses as of mid-2026. Those figures predate the post-midterm crash, and the losses have grown since.

The distribution of those losses has also drawn attention. One analysis found that 21 well-timed large holders, known in crypto markets as whales, pulled out early in the coin's launch, getting out with some $214 million between them and sending the value plummeting for everyone who stayed in. The pattern is a familiar one in meme-coin markets, where early insiders and large holders can exit at the top while ordinary buyers are left holding an asset that has lost almost all of its value. The scale of the losses is part of what makes the coming investigations so politically charged. The people who lost money are, in many cases, the president's own supporters, drawn in by a product that carried his name and his brand.

The Fortune Behind the Tokens

That contrast is the most striking feature of the whole affair. While the tokens have collapsed, the president's personal fortune has grown. Forbes has estimated that the president is now worth $3 billion more than he was before his second term, although that amount fell by roughly $200 million after the midterm elections. The president reported earning $57 million from World Liberty Financial, the crypto company he co-owns with his sons, and another $635 million from the $TRUMP meme coin. One report put his disclosed crypto-related earnings for 2025 at no less than $1.4 billion. The BBC reported in July that the president had taken in more than $1 billion from all of his crypto dealings combined since returning to the Oval Office in 2025.

The gap between the family's earnings and the buyers' losses is explained by how the products were structured. The family and its partners earned fees, royalties, and proceeds from the launches themselves, while the tokens traded in the open market bore the full risk of the price collapse. The result is that the people who created and promoted the products have been paid, in very large sums, while the people who bought them have lost, in very large sums. That asymmetry is likely to be at the centre of the Democratic investigations.

What Happens Next

The immediate question is whether the tokens have found a floor. The $TRUMP coin has now set successive all-time lows, and with a market value of around $340 million, down from $72 billion, there is little left in the way of a cushion. The $WLFI token and the $MELANIA coin are in the same position, each trading a fraction of a percent of its former value. The market's verdict, for now, is that the political premium that once supported these products has gone, and that nothing in the underlying assets has replaced it.

The political calendar will decide what comes next. The new Congress takes its seats on January 3, 2027, and the Democratic majorities will then have the subpoena power they have promised to use on the crypto ventures. The records demand from Senator Blumenthal is the first step, and the hearings that follow will test whether the family's international business partners and the beneficiaries of its policy decisions can be brought into public view. For the millions of holders still carrying the tokens, the advice from market watchers has been blunt: the coins are unlikely to regain their former value, and the political conditions that once supported them have reversed. The crash that followed the midterms was the moment the market stopped believing that the president's name, on its own, was enough to hold a price up.

Source: NOTUS