The official TRUMP coin lost 17% on Wednesday, November 4, sliding to $1.33 while nearly everything around it went green. Bitcoin gained more than 4% to roughly $80,500. Ether climbed 6% to $2,433. The total crypto market added 3.4% and reached $2.69 trillion. One token and a few of its relatives ran the other way.
The trigger was no mystery. Democrats took both the House and the Senate in Tuesday's midterms, including some unexpected wins in Texas. A TRUMP holder needs no political science degree to see the problem.
The numbers on the day
The figures below come from CoinMarketCap data around 5:32 pm UTC on Wednesday, as relayed in Cointelegraph's market report. TRUMP, the memecoin the president launched in January 2025, was the worst performer among the top 100 assets. World Liberty Financial's governance token, WLFI, was second-worst, down more than 7% to $0.047. World Liberty is the Trump family-backed DeFi project that dates to 2024.
The damage spread sideways. MELANIA, the token tied to the First Lady, lost nearly 13% and changed hands near $0.066. A token called VANCE fell nearly 12%. Nobody has confirmed any link between it and the vice president, so I'd read that one as a name and nothing more.
Across the whole political memecoin category, combined market capitalization dropped more than 16% to $477 million. Volume jumped 123% to $437 million. I put weight on that pairing: a falling price on rising volume suggests people were actively leaving, rather than just failing to show up.
BNB, meanwhile, rose 3%, XRP 2.6% and Solana 2.5%. The bid was broad, and the Trump-adjacent names sat outside it.
Why these tokens trade differently
Benjamin Sarquis Peillard, founder and CEO of the stablecoin-yield platform Cap, gave the cleanest explanation I've seen. Bitcoin and other established assets, he told Cointelegraph, respond to liquidity, institutional flows and macro conditions. Politically linked tokens are more sensitive to shifts in expectations about Washington. Even in a recovering market, he said, they can face selling pressure as investors reassess how much risk they carry.
That fits what happened, and it points at something structural. Bitcoin has a monetary-policy story, an ETF channel and a decade of institutional plumbing. TRUMP has a face on the logo. When the face's party loses the legislature, one of the few things anchoring demand takes a bruise.
Peillard also named the real question: whether anything supports demand for these tokens beyond "their association with a political figure." He called the selloff possibly a short-term reaction. I'd add that a short-term reaction can still tell you something. If a token is priced on proximity to power, and power's grip loosens by even a few seats, repricing is no surprise. It's arithmetic.
A caution before anyone reads too much into one session. A 17% daily drop in a memecoin is, by the standards of the genre, an ordinary Wednesday. The odd part is the direction relative to the tape, since memecoins usually fall with the market and not against a rally.
Democrats start with subpoena talk
The politics moved faster than the price chart. By Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers were already sketching what the January Congress might look like, and Cointelegraph's follow-up piece catalogued the early targets.
Senator Ed Markey, who sits on the Commerce Committee, joked that Big Tech executives should brace for a subpoena volume large enough to require replanting forests. Representative Robert Garcia, the expected chair of House Oversight, listed the Trump family's business dealings, corporate corruption, immigration enforcement abuses and the Epstein files as his agenda. His advice to those in the crosshairs ran two words: "Lawyer up."
Punchbowl News reported that tech figures close to Trump, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang, are expected to face scrutiny from House Oversight, House Energy and Commerce and Senate Commerce. OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei were named as possible witnesses on AI products.
Crypto is more than a side note here. Candidates such as Virginia Senator Mark Warner used Trump's memecoin earnings in campaign attacks. At a Wednesday press conference, Garcia said the president runs a crypto scheme earning him billions. That is his characterization, and it is politically contested. It does show where the committee gavels will point.
There's paper behind the rhetoric. House Judiciary Democrats published a staff report in November 2025 alleging that the president turned his office into a vehicle for family profit via crypto businesses with foreign ties, while enforcement and anti-corruption safeguards weakened. The same committee's Democrats have begun posting openings for counsel and professional staff, including investigative roles, for the next Congress. People don't hire investigators for a project they plan to abandon.
The CLARITY Act problem
Here the market story and the policy story meet, and here I think the long-term weight sits.
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, the CLARITY Act, was supposed to give the US a market-structure framework for digital assets. It stalled in the Senate earlier this year after failing to reach the 60 votes needed to advance. The reasons were mixed. Democrats pressed for stronger ethics provisions and conflict-of-interest safeguards aimed squarely at Trump's crypto businesses. Four Republicans also voted against moving it forward, so partisanship alone didn't kill the bill.
Cointelegraph's headline feed on Wednesday also carried a claim from Anthony Scaramucci that Trump's memecoin ventures derailed the bill. That is one critic's view and no established finding, though it matches the ethics fight above.
Now the scenarios. In the lame-duck period before the new Congress sits in January, Republicans still control both chambers. AMINA Bank's derivatives trading chief, Andreja Cobeljic, told Cointelegraph that this window is what's being watched most closely. She read the Democrats' message to lawyer up as a clear sign that corruption investigations are coming. Could Republican leaders try to push the bill through before the gavel changes hands? Possible. Would Democrats who just won big accept terms they rejected months ago? I doubt it, though nobody has said either way.
After January, the ethics provisions Democrats wanted stop being a request and become a price of admission, which strengthens their hand at the table. That could actually produce a bill. It could equally produce one the White House no longer likes, or no bill at all. Peillard described it as fresh regulatory uncertainty over how fast legislation moves and which way it points. He added that the larger question for the industry is whether Congress can build a lasting framework that survives changes in party control.
There's an irony in that. The tokens that profited most visibly from a friendly Washington may have helped make the friendliest legislation harder to pass.
What the tape can't tell us
Several things remain unknown. Nobody has explained how much of Wednesday's TRUMP selling came from large holders versus retail traders, and one day of volume can't settle it. It's also unclear whether the drop starts a re-rating or is the kind of event-day flush that fades by the weekend. The price quoted in the reports above has since moved, as prices do.
The divergence is firmer. On a day when the broad market rallied on the same news, the assets most tied to one political figure fell by double digits. Whatever Bitcoin buyers were pricing in, a threat to their asset class wasn't it. The threat they priced was to one family's brand.
That will get tested. If subpoenas land in January aimed at World Liberty Financial or the memecoin launches, the investigative paper trail could touch on-chain wallets, foreign buyers and fee flows. Crypto can be unusually transparent about those, which cuts both ways for investigators and for the people being investigated.
Three dates to circle. First, any lame-duck movement on CLARITY in the weeks ahead. Second, the swearing-in of the new Congress in January and which Democrats take the Oversight and Judiciary gavels. Third, the first document requests, which will show whether crypto sits near the top of the list or gets folded into a much larger fight over Big Tech and the Trump family's finances.