President Trump’s White House and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong are locked in a public clash over who ultimately sets the agenda for U.S. crypto legislation, with a series of leaks, denials and on?the?record statements now making that power struggle impossible to ignore.
Brian Armstrong has spent the week, including in high?profile Davos interviews, disputing that the White House was upset with Coinbase’s decision to pull support from the CLARITY Act the day before a key Senate markup. He has argued that reporters covered the fallout like “three blind men” each feeling a different part of an elephant, suggesting that every outlet offered only a partial, distorted account of his relationship with the administration.
Yet the volume of coverage and Armstrong’s own media blitz have had an unintended effect: the “elephant” has started to trumpet back. As stories piled up about internal anger and legislative threats, the White House moved from background grumbling to explicit public signaling about who controls the President’s legislative agenda.
Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, emerged on X as the clearest internal voice pushing back on Armstrong’s “no bill is better than a bad bill” line. In a widely shared post, Witt argued that being able to say “no bill is better than a bad bill” is a privilege that exists only because Donald Trump won in 2024 and installed a pro?crypto team at the SEC, CFTC and inside the White House.
Witt’s warning was blunt: there will be a crypto market structure bill; the only question is whether it is written under Trump or by a future Democratic Congress in the wake of a crisis, “à la Dodd?Frank,” with far more punitive terms. He acknowledged that industry may not “love every part of the CLARITY Act,” but argued that a Trump?era compromise is preferable to a future “Dem version,” urging the sector not to “let perfect be the enemy of the good” as backers work to assemble the 60 votes required to clear the Senate.
While the House passed CLARITY on a simple majority, the Senate’s 60?vote threshold means some Democrats must join Republicans for any bill to become law, just as a bipartisan coalition was needed to pass the GENIUS Act stablecoin framework last year. In practical terms, Witt’s message to Coinbase is that if it wants a federal framework at all, it will have to accept imperfections—including compromises designed to win over moderate Democrats.
The first sign that relations had seriously frayed came from Crypto in America reporter Eleanor Terret, who reported that the White House was considering pulling its support for CLARITY entirely if Coinbase did not return to the table with a stablecoin?yield compromise acceptable to major banks. Terret, citing a source close to the administration, wrote that officials were “furious” with Coinbase’s “unilateral” decision to walk away from the Senate draft and described the move as a “rug pull” against both the White House and the broader crypto industry.
That source underscored the core power dynamic now echoed in Witt’s public comments: “This is President Trump’s bill at the end of the day, not Brian Armstrong’s,” and the White House “does not believe that one company speaks for the entire industry.” Terret’s scoop quickly migrated beyond specialist audiences, including into posts on r/unusual_whales and other social platforms, where the “rug pull” language and the suggestion that White House backing could be withdrawn entirely drew wider attention.
Armstrong responded on X by calling Terret’s report inaccurate, insisting that relations between Coinbase and the White House remained “super constructive” and that officials had simply asked Coinbase to negotiate a stablecoin?yield agreement with banks. He also emphasized a willingness to help community banks—even as critics noted that some past Coinbase advertising has portrayed smaller banks negatively—which he framed as evidence the company was not trying to undermine the banking system.
However, the emerging narrative in Washington is less about the substance of yield economics and more about process and control. The question as to whether Coinbase is risking its position with the administration not only by pulling support from the bill in the week of a critical markup, but also by trying to steer the public story as though it, rather than the White House, could ultimately determine what happens to the key issues in the market structure legislation that Coinbase was concerned with.
In the days after Terret’s article, several outlets confirmed that senior officials felt blindsided and were actively weighing whether to walk away from the current effort if Coinbase refused to re?engage. Yahoo Finance summarized the mood as “outraged,” quoting an administration source who again labeled Coinbase’s move a “rug pull” and stressed that the White House “does not recognize any single company as a representative of the entire sector.”
DLNews and other publications likewise reported on “deep divisions” following Armstrong’s withdrawal, citing Terret’s description of the decision as “unilateral” and “not notified” in advance, and repeating the internal line that CLARITY is Trump’s bill, not Armstrong’s. Further coverage highlighted that the threat to pull support was not merely rhetorical: officials were exploring scenarios in which the administration would rather let this version of CLARITY die than see it stall publicly amid disputes dominated by one exchange’s demands on stablecoin yield.
Armstrong’s statement that Coinbase would prefer “no bill” to a “bad bill,” and his argument that the status quo is “way better” than the current Senate text—which he says over?empowers the SEC, constrains tokenized securities and favors banks on stablecoin rewards—has become a political flash point. Those comments have been widely read in Washington as crossing a red line by appearing to de?prioritize a president’s stated legislative priority in favor of one company’s product mix.
The administration, for its part, has signaled that it does not quickly forget perceived slights. Even as Armstrong continues to describe the relationship from Davos as “super constructive” and cast his move as an attempt to improve the bill, the decision to elevate Witt and other aides as public surrogates reflects a broader constitutional point: crypto legislation is now part of presidential agenda?setting, not a negotiation chaired by any one CEO.
Witt’s latest post effectively invites the rest of the industry—and wavering senators—to choose between a Trump?backed compromise that can realistically pass, or a future in which a similar bill is rewritten by Democrats who are both more skeptical of digital assets and aware of the perception that a single exchange tried to dictate terms to the Oval Office. For Coinbase, the bet on “no bill is better than a bad bill” highlights the central risk of making a dramatic stand just before a major markup: regardless of whether its substantive concerns prove prescient, the timing and tone of its move have brought into sharper focus the limits of any one company’s influence over the President’s legislative calendar.