{"id":283595,"date":"2026-07-01T14:26:21","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T14:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/283595\/"},"modified":"2026-07-01T14:26:21","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T14:26:21","slug":"trumps-moneymaking-run-unrivaled-in-presidential-history-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/283595\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Moneymaking Run: Unrivaled in Presidential History"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Lyndon B. Johnson\u2019s wife owned<\/a> a profitable radio station. George W. Bush was on the board of an oil company<\/a> while his father was in the White House. And Hunter Biden was paid by a Ukrainian<\/a> natural gas company while his father was vice president.<\/p>\n

But never before in American history has there been anything like Donald J. Trump, a president who in his first year back in office has collected about $1.4 billion in new revenues from cryptocurrency businesses that directly benefited from his actions as president, a financial disclosure report made public on Tuesday shows.<\/p>\n

Overall, Mr. Trump\u2019s revenue in 2025 jumped to at least $2.2 billion<\/a>, compared with a minimum of $622 million in 2024 before he returned to office.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is completely unprecedented,\u201d said Megan Gorman, a tax attorney and the author of a recent book, \u201cAll the Presidents\u2019 Money,<\/a>\u201d that studied the history of presidential wealth dating back 250 years.<\/p>\n

Generally, throughout history, Ms. Gorman and other historians said, American presidents have taken actions to try to separate themselves from corporate entanglements that might create conflicts.<\/p>\n

\u201cPublic office, if anything, was a source of debt, not a source of revenue,\u201d said Lindsay M. Chervinsky, a historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump and his family have done the opposite, creating new business ventures that are profiting from actions Mr. Trump has taken since he returned to the White House.<\/p>\n

Those include the pardon<\/a> Mr. Trump issued in October to Changpeng Zhao, the richest man in crypto, who founded the company Binance, which has been a critical business partner to the Trump family\u2019s own crypto venture. They also include legislation that Mr. Trump signed<\/a> last July to promote a form of cryptocurrency called stablecoins, four months after his family-backed firm introduced its own stablecoin.<\/a><\/p>\n

In many ways, Ms. Gorman said, his acts are \u201ca betrayal of the American social contract: that those who lead the country prioritize country over self \u2014 a premise that goes back to George Washington.\u201d<\/p>\n

The White House and Trump family have repeatedly dismissed any questions about the president\u2019s moneymaking while in office, arguing that Mr. Trump\u2019s two oldest sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., run the family business operations and that, as a result, there are no conflicts of interest.<\/p>\n

\u201cPresident Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public,\u201d Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in late May when asked<\/a> about profit-making stock purchases made on behalf of Mr. Trump in companies like Dell Technologies since he returned to office. \u201cWhich is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bulk of the new revenue for Mr. Trump comes from the cryptocurrency industry, which the family aggressively moved into starting in late 2024, just as Mr. Trump was about to be re-elected to a second term.<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump served as a co-founder of his family\u2019s crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. That business has now generated $799 million for the president, the financial disclosure made public on Tuesday shows, a significant share of which came from a payment from the government of the United Arab Emirates, which bought a stake in the company.<\/p>\n

Three days before Mr. Trump was inaugurated, he separately helped launch a memecoin, $TRUMP, a kind of collectible version of a crypto token. That business has generated another $636 million for Mr. Trump, the disclosure shows, equal to slightly more than the entire amount of money Mr. Trump made from all his other<\/a> business operations worldwide in 2024.<\/p>\n

His memecoin business directly benefited from a February 2025 statement<\/a> from the Securities and Exchange Commission notifying the industry that such tokens would no longer be subject to the agency\u2019s oversight, reversing the position taken by the agency\u2019s<\/a> chairman during the Biden administration.<\/p>\n

Real estate deals with a Saudi Arabia-based developer, including one that involves the Saudi government, have also brought tens of millions of dollars in new revenues to Mr. Trump and his sons, as have real estate deals in other parts of the world, including Vietnam<\/a> and Romania<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This does not include business endeavors by Mr. Trump\u2019s sons like recent investments in military contractors<\/a>, or predictions market<\/a> companies or companies pursuing billions<\/a> of dollars of federal assistance to build mines that supply critical minerals \u2014 all of which stand to generate new profits for the Trump family, but not Mr. Trump directly.<\/p>\n

When Mr. Trump arrived for his first term in Washington in 2017, he and his family agreed not to do any new international business deals, aware that it might leave them vulnerable to allegations that they were benefiting from Mr. Trump\u2019s presence in the White House. Even with that, there were questions about conflicts, as a result of foreign government visits and lobbyists spending at Trump hotels and his family\u2019s other venues.<\/p>\n

Upon his re-election, the Trump family has been unapologetic about its aggressive pursuit of profits.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first term we did everything imaginable to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and frankly, we got crushed anyway,\u201d Eric Trump said in late 2024<\/a>, shortly before the election, contending that the presidency had cost his father \u201can absolute fortune.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eric Trump added: \u201cWe can\u2019t just sit out in perpetuity, and I won\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Trump\u2019s sons do run the business operations, and legally they control trusts that were set up<\/a> after Mr. Trump\u2019s first election that collect the revenues from the business operations. But the president is the beneficiary<\/a> of these trusts, so he still profits from the business deals.<\/p>\n

By contrast, most former presidents in modern times have sold off businesses that they owned or even held stakes in, as well as individual stock holdings. George W. Bush, for example, sold his stake<\/a> in the Texas Rangers baseball team before his election, while Jimmy Carter turned over operation<\/a> of his peanut farm to an independent trustee.<\/a><\/p>\n

Presidential historians said they could identify no other president in American history who entered into new business enterprises just before moving into the White House, and then continued to personally profit from them during his term.<\/p>\n

Instead, they cited examples of efforts to avoid potential conflicts.<\/p>\n

President Warren G. Harding continued to own an Ohio newspaper while he was in office, but it had been in his family for nearly four decades and after questions were raised about the investment, he agreed to sell the paper,<\/a> shortly before his death in 1923.<\/p>\n

After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson moved to the White House, his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, transferred her radio and television stations<\/a> into a trust controlled by an outside lawyer and station executive, said Mark K. Updegrove, chief executive of the LBJ Foundation and a presidential historian.<\/p>\n

\u201cPresidents have worked assiduously to show they are not connected to anything that could in any way compromise their decision making or leverage their public virtue,\u201d said Jeffrey A. Engel, the director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. \u201cThe Trump White House seems to go in the opposite direction: that if we do so much of it, people will not think anything about it is weird.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even when children or siblings of presidents have pursued business deals \u2014 relatively minor in scale compared with the endeavors that have directly brought Mr. Trump money in the last year \u2014 these episodes have generated intense media attention and public backlash.<\/p>\n

Examples include Billy Beer,<\/a> the brand endorsed by Carter\u2019s brother, and James Roosevelt,<\/a> the son of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was a part-owner of an insurance company that sold policies for American corporations and government agencies, even as he worked as an adviser to his father.<\/p>\n

After The Saturday Evening Post and The New York Times wrote prominen<\/a>t pieces about James Roosevelt<\/a>\u2019s insurance business, it became known as the \u201cJimmy\u2019s Got It\u201d scandal,<\/a> forcing the president\u2019s son to leave his government post.<\/p>\n

Historians said that what is happening with Mr. Trump and his family actions appear to be disconnected from this legacy of sensitivity to such appearances.<\/p>\n

Case in point: Jared Kushner serves as a Middle East foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump, his father-in-law, while his private equity firm has collected billions of dollars from Middle Eastern sovereign<\/a> wealth funds.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is the openness, the flagrant nature of what they are doing, almost with pride \u2014 cashing in on the office itself,\u201d Mr. Updegrove said. \u201cThat\u2019s what makes it dramatically different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andrea Fuller and Ben Protess contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Lyndon B. Johnson\u2019s wife owned a profitable radio station. George W. Bush was on the board of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283244,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[108595,24433,1452,82791,104977,80739,31824,66379,9,24,63,11770,9234,122,124,123,1069,1554,1876,33437,108555],"class_list":["post-283595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-binance","tag-conflicts-of-interest","tag-donald-j","tag-donald-j-jr","tag-eric-f-1984","tag-jared","tag-kushner","tag-nepotism","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-presidential-election-of-2024","tag-presidents-and-presidency-us","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-trump","tag-united-states-international-relations","tag-united-states-politics-and-government","tag-virtual-currency","tag-world-liberty-financial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}