Assembly Bill 2409 does not mention President Trump by name, but the Senate Judiciary Committee’s own analysis of the bill uses his $TRUMP coin as the backstory that justifies it. The coin launched days before his second inauguration, and the analysis says its price climbed from roughly $7 to $75. Trump then hosted a dinner for the coin’s 220 largest holders, whose combined spending has been estimated at $148 million to $394 million.
Assemblymember Avelino Valencia, who introduced the bill in February, has said it closes a gap in California’s economic disclosure laws that predate cryptocurrency and were never written to cover officials profiting from digital assets tied to their own office. The $TRUMP episode is the example the committee record keeps coming back to.
What the Numbers Actually Show
Trump and his family have reportedly earned more than $280 million from the coin and its trading fees, according to the same committee analysis. That figure sits inside a much larger one: Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure showed more than $1.4 billion in crypto-related income altogether, with roughly $635 million of it from memecoin sales alone.
The coin’s price has not stayed near its highs. Team-controlled wallets have pulled well over $150 million in TRUMP tokens and USDC out of its liquidity pools since mid-2025, and the token now trades far below where it started. Eric Trump had to publicly deny a new coin launch this August after a rumor briefly moved the market, with most of the coin’s buyers still underwater on their investment. Melania Trump’s own $MELANIA coin is separately facing what the committee analysis describes as a pump-and-dump fraud lawsuit.
Why the Ban Cannot Actually Touch Trump’s Coin
Here is the part the bill’s backstory does not fully deliver on: AB 2409 defines a “public officer” as a California state or local elected or appointed official. Trump is a federal official, so the bill’s core prohibition on issuing meme coins does not apply to him at all. Only a separate federal effort, Rep. Sam Liccardo’s MEME Act, introduced in February 2025, would actually cover a sitting president. It has more than 20 cosponsors and has not reached a floor vote. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has pushed for the same kind of federal ban separately, and neither effort has become law.
Trump himself has since moved on a version of this at the federal level. He agreed to an ethics provision inside the Senate’s CLARITY Act that would restrict how presidents and senior federal officials can profit from crypto while in office, though the exact legislative text has not been made public yet.
Public opinion has moved faster than either legislature. Separate surveys show most voters disapprove of his crypto profits, with one poll finding roughly two-thirds want officials barred from profiting off crypto altogether.
AB 2409 does reach a little further through its second provision, which bars digital asset exchanges from listing meme coins bearing the likeness of any federal, state or local official for sale to California residents. Because that provision names federal officials, it is the one part of California’s law that could realistically touch how a coin like $TRUMP trades among the state’s own residents, though the bill’s language treats coins already issued before January 1, 2027 differently from newly issued ones, and that distinction is not fully spelled out in the public record.
The Law Sacramento Actually Passed
California’s Senate passed the underlying bill 40 to 0 on August 26, and the Assembly concurred in the Senate’s changes 78 to 0 the same day, according to the bill’s official legislative record. California Common Cause is the only group listed as supporting it in the committee’s record, and no organization registered opposition.
The bill is now enrolled and awaiting Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature or veto. If he signs it, California will become the first state to actually write a meme coin ban into law, built directly on the paper trail one president’s coin left behind.
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