The Financial PageThe Year in Trump Cashing InSource photograph by Shawn Thew / Pool / GettySave this storySave this storySave this storySave this storyYou’re reading The Financial Page, John Cassidy’s weekly column on economics and politics.

As the anniversary of Donald Trump’s return to the White House approaches, keeping up with his family’s efforts to cash in is a mighty challenge. It seems like there is a fresh deal, or revelation, every week. Since many of the Trump or Trump-affiliated ventures are privately owned, we don’t have a complete account of their finances. But in tracking company announcements, official filings, and the assiduous reporting of a number of media outlets, a clear picture emerges: enrichment of the First Family on a scale that is unprecedented in American history. Other Presidential relations, including Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, and Hunter Biden, have engaged in questionable business deals. But in terms of the money involved, the geographic reach, and the explicit ties to Presidential actions—particularly Trump’s efforts to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the world”—there has never been anything like the second term of Trump, Inc.

The Setup

The time line begins in September, 2024, a couple of months before the Presidential election. It was then that Trump announced that his family was partnering with the family of a longtime friend of his, the real-estate developer Steve Witkoff, and two little-known online entrepreneurs, Zachary Folkman and Chase Herro, to create a new crypto company, World Liberty Financial, which his three sons, Eric, Donald, Jr., and Barron, would all be involved with. In a message on social media, Trump said, “Crypto is one of those things we have to do. Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.” By the following month, he had apparently quashed any doubts he may have harbored about marketing digital assets of dubious value to his supporters. In a post advertising a sale of crypto tokens that World Liberty was organizing, he declared, “This is YOUR chance to help shape the future of finance.”

According to Reuters, the Trumps are entitled to receiving seventy cents for every dollar raised from World Liberty’s token sales. Reports in the crypto media said that the initial demand for them was weak. But they did attract one significant buyer: Justin Sun, a Chinese-born billionaire who founded the Tron crypto platform, invested thirty million dollars. At the time, the Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.) was suing Sun and his companies for fraud and other violations, which he denied. In a tweet announcing his purchase, Sun wrote, “TRON is committed to making America great again and leading innovation. Let’s go!”

After Trump won the election, he repeated the pattern of his first term, refusing to divest his businesses and instead placing them in a revocable trust. Although this trust is managed by his eldest sons—Eric and Donald, Jr.—Trump remains the owner of the Trump Organization. The potential conflict of interest was obvious: if the reëlected President adopted policies or took any other actions that his businesses benefitted from, he and his family stood to gain financially.

In another post-election development, Donald, Jr., expanded his business ambitions by joining 1789, a venture-capital fund founded by Omeed Malik and Charles Buskirk, two conservative financiers, and Rebekah Mercer, a conservative hedge-fund heiress. According to the New York Post, 1789 has raised large sums of money from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. Some of the firm’s early investments were in conservative-media ventures, including Tucker Carlson’s company, but by the time Donald, Jr., joined it was also branching out into other industries, including consumer goods, defense, and technology.

On January 17, 2025, three days before Trump’s second Inauguration, he took another leap into the crypto world, releasing a new meme coin: $TRUMP. The day before the ceremony, his wife, Melania, launched her own coin, $MELANIA. Unlike the World Liberty tokens, which gave their holders certain governance rights associated with the company, these assets were simply memes. The $TRUMP one featured a picture of the President with his fist raised and the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” emblazoned over him. The Melania meme showed a closeup of her face with her hands clasped in front, as if in ebullient prayer. After the Trumps advertised the coins on their social-media accounts, their value jumped up. “$TRUMP is currently the hottest digital meme on earth,” Eric Trump said in a statement to the Times. “This is just the beginning.”

The Rake-In

With Trump back in the Oval Office, and players all over the world keen to get in his good books, developments came thick and fast, many of them involving crypto, foreign money, or both. One of his first acts as President was ordering agencies to identify regulations affecting the digital-asset sector and recommend which should be “rescinded or modified.” In February, the S.E.C.—now under new leadership—asked a court to pause its lawsuit against Sun, who by then had raised his World Liberty stake to seventy-five million dollars.

In March, Trump hosted a crypto summit at the White House, which was organized by his “crypto czar,” David Sacks, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and announced plans for a U.S. “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.” Later that month, Eric and Donald, Jr., merged a company that they had formed only the previous month with a Canadian-based bitcoin-mining outfit, Hut 8, to take an ownership stake in a new company, American Bitcoin, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, had ambitions to become the world’s biggest bitcoin miner, and to establish its own bitcoin reserve.

The spring also saw the Trump brothers expanding in other areas, particularly the Persian Gulf. In April, Dar Global, a Saudi-owned real-estate developer that was already partnering with the Trumps on other Trump-branded projects in the Middle East, declared plans to launch a Trump hotel in Dubai and a Trump golf resort in neighboring Qatar. Eric Trump was in the Gulf for these announcements.

On the home front, his brother Donald, Jr., attended the launch party for another of his business ventures: the Executive Branch, an exclusive Washington club supposedly charging members an entry fee of half a million dollars. News reports identified Donald, Jr., as one of the club’s owners, and two others as Malik and Buskirk, his partners at 1789, and Zach and Alex Witkoff, two of Steve Witkoff’s sons, who are both co-founders of World Liberty Financial. CNBC said that the attendees at the Executive Branch party included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Paul Atkins, the head of the S.E.C., and Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission.

Crypto—and the cultivation of foreign investors—remained central to the Trumps’ enrichment strategy. According to a lengthy report on their “global crypto cash machine” that Reuters published in October, Eric Trump, while attending a cryptocurrency conference in Dubai in May, pitched World Liberty to potential investors, including a Chinese businessman named Guren (Bobby) Zhou, who had been arrested for suspected money laundering in Britain. (Zhou denied any wrongdoing, and he has not been convicted of any crimes.) Subsequently, the Reuters report said, a U.A.E.-based company associated with Zhou purchased a hundred million dollars’ worth of the World Liberty Financial crypto tokens, WLFI. Evidently, there have been many other foreign purchases. An analysis published by Reuters indicated that more than two-thirds of the purchases of World Liberty’s tokens were carried out via digital wallets that were likely linked to overseas buyers.

Trump also gained from official largesse. The Constitution explicitly prohibits federal officials, including the President, from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional consent. But, in February, Trump, who had been complaining about how long it was taking to build a new Air Force One, went to Palm Beach International Airport and toured a luxurious Boeing 747 owned by the government of Qatar. In May, days before leaving on a trip that took him to Qatar, the U.A.E., and Saudi Arabia, Trump announced on social media that the Pentagon would accept the 747 from the Qatari royal family to replace Air Force One as a “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE.” The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement, “Any gift given by a foreign government is always accepted in full compliance with all applicable laws. President Trump’s administration is committed to full transparency.”

Another transaction that involved a Gulf state and benefitted the Trumps received less publicity. MGX, an investment fund controlled by the U.A.E. government, put two billion dollars into Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, using a stablecoin issued by World Liberty to make the payment. Stablecoins are supposedly a safer form of cryptocurrency backed by reserves of other assets, such as dollars; essentially, they provide a way to make deals in the crypto universe without having to worry about wild price fluctuations.

To put it mildly, the circumstances of the MGX-Binance transaction were curious. Last year, the founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born Canadian crypto billionaire who is commonly known as C.Z., served four months in a U.S. federal prison after pleading guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program at his crypto exchange. In March of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Zhao was pushing for a Presidential pardon. That same month, World Liberty announced that it was creating its own stablecoin, USD1, and the use of the new coin in the MGX-Binance transaction was transformative. “The deal caused the amount of the cryptocurrency in circulation to erupt 15-fold and overnight become one of the world’s largest,” the Journal noted. It also put two billion dollars on World Liberty’s books, which it could invest in Treasuries, or similar assets, to generate returns that Bloomberg estimated at eighty million dollars annually—money flowing directly to the Trump family business.

Why would Binance and MGX decide to use the largely untested USD1? MGX told Forbes the parties settled on the new stablecoin because it was backed by safe assets “all held and managed by an independent, U.S.-based custodian in externally audited custodial accounts.” The cynical explanation is that C.Z. was angling for a pardon and the U.A.E. wanted to curry favor with an Administration that could deliver valuable concessions. In a detailed reconstruction of the deal, the Times pointed out that two weeks after the transaction was completed the White House let the U.A.E. import hundreds of thousands of advanced computer chips that previously had been subject to U.S. export restrictions.

Summer is sometimes a slow season for business, but not for the Trumps this year. In July, with urging from the Administration, Congress passed the GENIUS Act, which created a regulatory framework for stablecoins but failed to assuage fears, in some quarters, that integrating crypto into the mainstream financial system could be dangerous. That same month, Trump Media & Technology said that it had bought about two billion dollars in bitcoins and other related securities, pivoting from social media to become a “bitcoin Treasury” company, following the example of Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy. The announcement produced a spike in Trump Media’s stock price, which had fallen sharply since the start of the year. In August, the Trumps applied some financial engineering to World Liberty. They invested in a small publicly traded company, which then issued seven hundred and fifty million dollars in stock to buy WLFI tokens. “This sort of circular transaction—with the same party as buyer and seller, dealing in products they themselves created—is more common in the crypto world than in traditional finance,” an article in the Journal noted. At the start of September, some of the WLFI tokens started trading on crypto exchanges. Two days later, American Bitcoin—the bitcoin-mining company in which Eric and Donald, Jr., have ownership stakes—started trading on the Nasdaq and immediately jumped in value. These moves enabled the Trump family “to rack up about $1.3 billion,” Bloomberg reported.

Through the fall, the deals and controversies continued. In October, Trump pardoned C.Z., which caused an uproar, but he claimed that he didn’t know the crypto entrepreneur and added that he had handed down the pardon “at the request of a lot of very good people.” The following month, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee published a staff report that said Trump had “leveraged his office to make himself a crypto billionaire,” extending “broad protection to fraudsters, scam artists, and other online criminals—who, in turn, repay the President and his family with millions of dollars in tribute.” Responding to the report, Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement, “Neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest. Through executive actions, supporting legislation like the GENIUS Act, and other common-sense policies, the administration is fulfilling the President’s promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world by driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans.”

The Over-All Tally

There are various tallies of how much money the Trumps are making over all. During the first six months of this year, Reuters estimated, the family garnered about eight hundred million dollars through crypto sales. Looking at the twelve months leading up to October, 2025, the Financial Times put the haul at more than a billion. Adding in the proceeds of non-crypto ventures—licensing arrangements, gifts, sweetheart media deals, and legal settlements—the Center for American Progress, a think tank with close ties to the Democratic Party, puts the total “Trump Take” at $1.8 billion since he was reëlected. Taking a longer-term view, my colleague David Kirkpatrick estimated that, going back to 2016, Trump has generated $3.4 billion from the Presidency.

It should be noted that these figures refer to cash income. They don’t include the gains in paper wealth that Trump and his family have enjoyed, especially through their ownership stakes in World Liberty Financial and other crypto businesses. In September, after WLFI tokens started trading on crypto exchanges, some accounts put the value of the family’s crypto wealth at five billion dollars or more.

During the past few months, however, the market value of virtually all crypto assets, including the Trump ones, has fallen sharply. The $TRUMP meme coin has dropped in value by about eighty per cent, and the Melania meme coin has plummeted by 98.5 per cent. Stock in Trump Media & Technology, which, in financial terms, is now largely an acquisition vehicle for Bitcoin, is down by close to seventy per cent, year to date, and by close to forty per cent since it started accumulating the cryptocurrency in bulk. World Liberty is a private company, so it doesn’t have a publicly traded stock. But the value of its WLFI tokens has decreased by more than a third since the start of September. Stock in American Bitcoin, the company associated with Eric Trump, has fallen by more than seventy-five per cent over the same period.

For the Trumps and their business partners, this market plunge was the sting in the tail from their strategy of going all in on crypto. Going forward, their prospects are heavily dependent on the future path of Bitcoin and other crypto assets. Yet, even after their recent slump, the Trumps’ digital holdings still have a paper value of billions of dollars. And, even if the crypto markets went to zero tomorrow, the family would still have the hard cash it has already pocketed since its patriarch returned to Washington—and the possibility of making further scores going forward.

Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, which the Biden Administration created in 2022 to help finance the development of new technologies with national-security applications, has awarded a loan of six hundred and twenty million dollars to a rare-earths startup with links to Donald, Jr. The firm, Vulcan Earth, recently received backing from 1789, the venture-capital fund where he is a partner. A spokesman for Donald, Jr., told the Financial Times that he wasn’t involved in the company’s dealings with the government; officials at the Pentagon and Commerce Department said the same thing, as did Vulcan’s chief executive.

Still, the loan raises questions. “At least four of 1789’s portfolio companies have won contracts from the Trump administration this year, amounting to $735 million,” the Financial Times report noted. From one perspective, this might suggest that 1789 is following a clever business strategy: aligning its investments with the emerging priorities of Trump’s Pentagon. From another perspective, it looks like more Trump enrichment. When the public and the private are as intertwined as they are in this Administration, it’s hard to tell the difference. ♦