Trump Says Government May Buy More Bitcoin as His Own Crypto Bets Lose Money

President Trump told industry leaders at a White House event Wednesday, August 19, that his administration is reviewing large-scale government purchases of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, according to Watcher.Guru and Bloomingbit. No dollar figure, timeline, or purchase mechanism has been confirmed by major reporting.

The U.S. already holds roughly 328,000 BTC, making it the largest sovereign Bitcoin holder in the world, according to Crypto Briefing. That stockpile traces back to Trump's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, seeded mostly with coins the government seized through criminal and civil forfeiture. Buying more BTC on the open market would be different. It would mean using taxpayer-linked authority to actively expand a position in a volatile asset, not just warehousing what law enforcement already grabbed.

Trump paired that announcement with a renewed push for the Clarity Act, a bill meant to give crypto firms a clear regulatory rulebook. "We need Congress to take the next step by passing the Clarity Act, a fair version of the Clarity Act," Trump said, according to Dow Jones' MarketWatch. He argued it would "keep us ahead of China, keep us ahead of everyone else."

Why the bill is stuck

The Clarity Act isn't stalled over some obscure technical dispute. Senate Democrats are objecting specifically because the bill's ethics provisions don't address Trump's own crypto income, according to MarketWatch. Trump's 2025 financial disclosure showed $1.4 billion in crypto-related earnings. Democrats want language that would limit or account for a sitting president profiting from the same industry he's regulating. Past presidents used blind trusts or divested outright specifically to avoid this scenario.

Banking lobbyists are fighting the bill too, but for a different reason. They oppose language letting crypto firms offer interest-like payments, warning it could pull deposits out of traditional banks, according to MarketWatch.

The math in the Senate is not favorable. Republicans hold only 53 of 100 seats, and a procedural vote isn't expected until September 15. Prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket put the odds of passage this year at just 22% and 24% respectively, per MarketWatch. A separate report from openpr cited Polymarket pricing the bill's 2026 passage even lower, at 19%, down from 82% back in February. This sharp swing reflects how much confidence in the bill has collapsed since the Senate left for its August recess without acting.

The conflict-of-interest picture is broader than one bill

Mother Jones raised a specific concern. Trump and his family hold direct financial stakes in the same crypto and prediction-market industries the White House is now shaping regulation for. World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm Trump co-owns, took a $500 million investment from a senior UAE government official months before the administration approved sending the UAE advanced AI chips, according to Mother Jones. World Liberty also recently received a bank charter from a Trump-appointed regulator, despite not taking deposits or making loans in any traditional sense.

Trump's $TRUMP meme coin has generated about $635 million for him personally while investors collectively lost roughly $3.8 billion as its value collapsed, per Mother Jones' figures. Presidents have historically been exempt from federal conflict-of-interest statutes that bar other officials from having a financial stake in matters they oversee. But every prior president used that exemption sparingly. Trump has not.

The White House has denied any conflict exists.

Trump Media's own Bitcoin bet is going backward

While the president talks up more government Bitcoin buying, his own media company is retreating from crypto. Trump Media built a position of 12,062 BTC, now worth close to $755 million, after announcing last summer it would become a Bitcoin treasury company, according to Cryptonomist. The company posted a $190 million paper loss tied to Bitcoin's price decline over the past ten months and is now pivoting back toward its original advertising and media business, per Cryptonomist and Breitbart's coverage of Monday's investor call.

CEO Kevin McGurn told investors the company is instead launching a paid data-access service for high-speed trading firms, charging $60,000 to $100,000 a month, according to Breitbart. Ten firms signed up in the first week, translating to $7 million to $12 million in annualized revenue. Breitbart notes this would be two to three times what Trump Media earned across its entire business last year. The company lost more than $1 billion since the start of last year and reported another $238 million loss for the quarter ended June 30.

Strategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin holder, is faring worse. It's sitting on a roughly $10 billion paper loss after buying 840,447 BTC at an average price of $75,482, with Bitcoin trading closer to $63,000-68,000 in recent weeks, according to Cryptonomist and openpr.

The next concrete marker is September 15, when the Senate is expected to hold a procedural vote on the Clarity Act. Whether Trump's push moves any Republican or Democratic votes, and whether the White House offers any ethics concession to unstick it, remains an open question.