Garlinghouse says Trump helped crush Washington’s ‘anti‑crypto army’

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says the “anti‑crypto army” has been beaten back by courts, voters, and President Donald Trump, arguing the crackdown never made legal, policy or political sense.

Brad Garlinghouse did not mince words when he posted that the “Anti‑Crypto Army was defeated… by the courts… by the voters. And by Trump,” arguing that attacking digital assets “never made policy, legal or political sense.”

In his view, attempts to “combat financial innovation only helped protect those that wanted to keep an old, often broken, system in place,” a line that neatly captures how much of the industry now reads the last five years of American crypto policy.

The timing matters. After more than four years of litigation, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission agreed to drop its appeal in the XRP (XRP) case, with Ripple committing to pay a $50 million civil penalty instead of the $125 million originally on the table and the agency moving to lift an “obey the law” injunction that had hung over the company.

From courtroom to campaign trail

Garlinghouse has long framed the XRP lawsuit as a proxy battle over whether the U.S. would embrace or exile crypto innovation. IN a public note on Ripple’s site he called the SEC’s retreat a “historic victory—for Ripple, our employees and customers, and for the entire crypto industry,” while reiterating that Judge Analisa Torres’s 2023 ruling that XRP “in and of itself was not a security” undercut the regulator’s central theory.

That legal turnaround collided with a political shift in Washington. Following Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, crypto‑aligned super PACs and donors claimed credit for flipping key swing states, while industry advocates began touting an emerging “crypto voter” bloc that punished candidates who backed Senator Elizabeth Warren’s “anti‑crypto army” rhetoric.

Garlinghouse has leaned into that narrative, publicly thanking Trump as XRP rallied and describing the token as the top‑performing major cryptocurrency over a 90‑day stretch into early 2025. According to one crypto.news report, XRP’s upswing followed both the November election and Ripple’s SEC settlement, underscoring how tightly price action, politics and enforcement are now intertwined in this market.

Behind the victory lap is a legislative grind that will matter far more than a single White House photo‑op. Journalist Eleanor Terrett, whose post Garlinghouse quote‑tweeted, has tracked how Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno and other Republicans are pushing structural crypto bills, while the Trump administration presses Congress to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act—known as the CLARITY Act—on an accelerated timeline.

One widely circulated briefing suggested the White House set an informal March 1, 2026 deadline to line up the votes, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calling clear federal rules “exactly what we need” to stabilize volatile markets and give institutional capital permission to move. Closed‑door sessions with firms like Ripple and Coinbase have reportedly left Garlinghouse estimating a 90% chance that CLARITY will pass by April, which would lock in much of the court‑driven progress and codify how assets like XRP are treated in U.S. securities law.

For XRP holders who “waited for the most godly green candle known to man,” as one viral post on X put it, Garlinghouse’s declaration that the “anti‑crypto army” has been defeated is both vindication and provocation. In previous crypto.news coverage of the SEC fight and crypto.news analysis of the CLARITY push, the through line has been the same: U.S. crypto policy is no longer a technocratic sideshow but a front‑line political issue that can swing court cases, elections and hundreds of billions of dollars in token value.

Whether Trump’s team translates that into a coherent regulatory framework or just another slogan remains an open question, but Garlinghouse is already writing the first draft of the industry’s victory narrative.