One of Wall Street’s most closely watched voices has a clear verdict on who is responsible for the current state of digital assets. Famed investor Ross Gerber says the Trump coin and meme tokens are the primary culprits behind the ongoing crypto winter — and his argument is hard to ignore. As Bitcoin trades nearly 44% below its October 2025 peak and the broader market bleeds value with no clear bottom in sight, Gerber’s analysis cuts through the noise with a straightforward diagnosis: the explosion of celebrity-backed speculative tokens has poisoned the well of investor confidence, and the damage may take years to undo. For anyone trying to understand why the crypto market is suffering so deeply right now, the story of the Trump coin, meme tokens, and the crypto winter is the story worth reading.
What Is the Crypto Winter of 2025 and Why Does It Matter?
The term “crypto winter” refers to a prolonged period of declining prices, fading investor enthusiasm, and widespread market stagnation in the digital asset space. The crypto world has seen these cycles before — most notably in 2018 and again in 2022 — but the 2025 edition carries a unique sting. This downturn arrived against a backdrop of enormous optimism. When Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, the crypto community celebrated. Here was a self-described “crypto president,” a man who promised to ease regulatory burdens and position the United States as a global hub for digital assets. Bitcoin surged to an all-time high of approximately $124,000 in October 2025. The mood was euphoric.
And then it all started to fall apart.
By early 2026, Bitcoin had shed nearly half its value from that peak, falling to around $69,000. Altcoins fared even worse. The crypto market downturn triggered over $2.7 billion in liquidations during a single February sell-off — the sharpest such event since 2022, according to algorithmic trading firm Wintermute. For retail investors who had poured money into the market at or near its peak, the losses were devastating.
The Numbers Behind the Market Collapse
The scale of the decline becomes even starker when you look at specific assets. TRUMP coin has fallen 88.3% since its launch, according to CoinGecko. MELANIA coin has dropped an astonishing 98.4% from its debut price. The Trump family-backed World Liberty Financial token shed more than 43% of its value in a single month. Even legacy meme coins like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu tumbled into freefall, compounding the sense that something had fundamentally broken in the market’s psychology.
Trump Coin and Meme Tokens Crypto Winter: Ross Gerber’s Full Argument
Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management, made his position clear in a widely discussed interview with Business Insider published in February 2026. His argument is both simple and damning: the launch of the Trump coin and meme tokens around the time of the January 2025 presidential inauguration created a speculative frenzy that ultimately drove everyday investors out of the crypto ecosystem — and once those investors leave, they rarely come back.
Gerber describes the celebrity meme coin phenomenon as a cycle of exploitation. A well-known figure — in this case, the President of the United States himself — attaches their name and personal brand to a crypto token. Retail investors, excited by the association and seduced by the promise of quick gains, rush in. Prices spike. The insiders and affiliates who control the majority of the token supply profit handsomely. Then the price collapses, leaving ordinary buyers with losses they cannot recover.
“People dive in and buy this stuff because they buy into the fraud, basically, and then they get burned, and that money doesn’t come back,” Gerber said. That final phrase — “the money doesn’t come back” — is the crux of his analysis. It is not simply that people lose money on a bad investment. It is that those losses destroy their trust in crypto entirely, pushing them out of the market and taking their future buying power with them.
How Celebrity Meme Coins Erode Market Trust
Gerber is not speaking in abstractions. He points to a clear pattern that repeated itself multiple times in 2025. The Official TRUMP meme coin launched on January 17, 2025, just three days before the inauguration. Its price surged more than 300% overnight, briefly reaching $75.26 per token. Within days, MELANIA coin followed. The hype was enormous — but so was the structural risk. Approximately 80% of TRUMP’s maximum token supply was controlled by Trump-affiliated entities, giving insiders enormous leverage to profit while retail buyers bore the downside.
This dynamic — insiders profiting while retail investors lose — is precisely what Gerber identifies as the most corrosive element of the meme coin boom. He cited additional examples beyond the Trump family tokens: a cryptocurrency launched by former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and the $HAWK coin associated with internet personality Haliey Welch. In nearly every case, the pattern was the same: a brief burst of celebrity-fueled enthusiasm followed by a rapid collapse, with retail investors left holding worthless or near-worthless tokens.
A forensic analysis commissioned by The New York Times found that 813,294 wallets lost a combined $2 billion trading the TRUMP coin, while the president’s affiliated companies earned roughly $100 million in trading fees. According to Fortune, for every dollar collected in fees by the coin’s creators, investors lost $20. These are not minor statistics — they represent a transfer of wealth from ordinary people to those already holding power and capital.
Why Meme Token Losses Are Particularly Damaging to Bitcoin
One might argue that unsophisticated investors making bad bets on speculative assets is simply part of the free market at work. But Gerber’s concern goes deeper than individual losses. He argues that meme token investor losses create a structural problem for Bitcoin and the broader crypto market by cutting off the flow of new participants that has historically driven price appreciation.
Bitcoin’s growth cycles have always depended on waves of new adopters entering the market. When retail investors get burned on meme coins, they do not simply avoid meme coins in the future — they abandon crypto altogether. They tell their friends and family about their losses. They become active skeptics of the entire asset class. This chilling effect is, in Gerber’s view, one of the primary reasons Bitcoin struggles to rally in the current environment.
“It’s extremely difficult for Bitcoin to rally when investors are being scared away from crypto,” he argued. “Demand rises only when new participants enter the market.”
This is a particularly painful irony given the political moment. The Trump administration was widely expected to usher in a new era of crypto adoption, with friendlier regulations encouraging more Americans to invest. Instead, Gerber believes the administration’s lax regulatory approach has actually made the market less appealing to everyday investors. A market that appears lawless — where a sitting president can launch a personal token that collapses 88% in value — is not a market that inspires confidence.
The Role of Regulation (or the Lack of It)
Gerber’s critique of the regulatory environment is a significant part of his overall argument. He does not simply blame the meme coin market collapse on bad actors and greedy celebrities. He also faults the absence of meaningful guardrails that would protect retail investors from these schemes. When the person in the highest office in the land can launch a speculative token and profit from it while his supporters lose billions, it sends a clear message about the rules of engagement in the crypto space.
Mohamed El-Erian, Chief Economic Advisor at Allianz and one of the world’s most respected economists, has voiced a complementary concern: that Bitcoin will struggle to recover until institutional investors increase their participation in the market. Institutions, unlike retail investors, tend to move slowly and require regulatory clarity before committing capital. The current environment — characterized by political entanglement, regulatory ambiguity, and a string of high-profile celebrity meme coin failures — is not the environment that attracts serious institutional money.
Other Voices Joining the Chorus
Gerber is not alone in his assessment. Anthony Scaramucci, a former White House Communications Director and current crypto investor, described the TRUMP coin launch as what he called “Idi Amin level corruption,” arguing that it was damaging to the entire cryptocurrency industry. He noted that the structure of the coin effectively allowed anyone in the world to deposit money into the bank account of the sitting president with a few clicks — a conflict of interest with no clear parallel in American political history.
Representative Sam Liccardo of California went so far as to introduce legislation in direct response to the meme coin controversy. The Modern Emoluments and Malfeasance Enforcement Act — appropriately abbreviated as the MEME Act — would prohibit the president, senior White House officials, members of Congress, and their families from issuing or endorsing financial assets. The bill represents a direct legislative response to exactly the kind of presidential meme coin controversy that Gerber has been warning about.
A November 2025 report from Democrats on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee concluded that Trump’s cryptocurrency policies had benefited Trump personally, with the president adding billions of dollars to his net worth through crypto schemes that involved foreign governments, corporate allies, and other actors.
What Does All This Mean for the Future of Crypto?
The picture Gerber and others are painting is not a comfortable one, but it is an important one. The crypto bear market of 2025 did not arise simply from macro headwinds like rising interest rates or a rotation into AI stocks, though those factors played a role as well. It arose, in significant part, from a crisis of trust — a growing sense among retail investors that the crypto space is rigged against them, that the people with the most power to shape the market are also the people most willing to exploit it.
Capital has rotated heavily into AI-focused equities, Wintermute noted, leaving crypto underperforming in both market rallies and sell-offs — a pattern characteristic of bear markets rather than healthy corrections. Whether the market can reverse this trend depends not just on Bitcoin’s price action, but on whether the broader crypto ecosystem can rebuild the retail confidence that celebrity meme token schemes have so effectively destroyed.
Mark Yusko, CEO of Morgan Creek Capital Management, has predicted that Bitcoin could bottom somewhere between $58,000 and $63,000 before staging a meaningful recovery. Standard Chartered has slashed its near-term Bitcoin price targets. The consensus among serious analysts is that recovery is possible — but it will require a genuine shift in the conditions that created the current crisis.
Conclusion
The story of the Trump coin and meme tokens and the crypto winter is ultimately a story about trust — how quickly it can be built, and how easily it can be destroyed. Ross Gerber’s analysis deserves serious attention because it identifies not just symptoms but causes. The celebrity meme coin ecosystem did not simply disappoint investors. It actively harvested their money, their enthusiasm, and their willingness to participate in a market that still holds enormous long-term promise.
If you are an investor trying to navigate the current crypto landscape, the most important thing you can do right now is educate yourself about the structural dynamics that Gerber and others are describing. Understand the difference between speculative meme tokens with no utility and established digital assets with real use cases. Follow credible voices who prioritize investor protection over hype. And if you have been burned by meme coin losses, know that your experience is shared by millions — and that the conversation Gerber is starting is the conversation the crypto industry desperately needs to have.
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