Since returning to office, President Trump has added approximately $3 billion to his net worth. Two-thirds of that increase came from the explosion of his cryptocurrency ventures, while hundreds of millions more came from the resurgence of Trump-branded international real estate deals.
The scale of these profits and the way Trump has monetized the White House to generate them are unique. Few if any of his financial entanglements are illegal on their face, because the president — like members of Congress and the Supreme Court — is exempt from ethics rules that bind most other federal officials. But by erasing the distinction between public office and private business and systematically weaving personal profit into official policy, Trump has enriched himself financially on a scale that dwarfs even the most infamous scandals in American history.
Nothing exemplifies the close connections between Trump’s presidency and his business ventures more than the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, which has netted the Trumps approximately $1 billion since its creation shortly before the president took office for the second time.
World Liberty’s dealings with foreign governments raise stark questions about who is influencing key U.S. foreign policy and national security decisions. For instance, shortly before Trump’s second inauguration, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Emirati royal family, bought a 49 percent stake in the company for half a billion dollars, netting the Trump family roughly $187 million, with another $31 million going to entities affiliated with Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. In May, a state-backed Emirati investment fund agreed to use USD1, World Liberty’s stablecoin, to finance a $2 billion investment in the cryptocurrency giant Binance, an arrangement that could net World Liberty up to $80 million per year in interest. Two weeks later, the White House announced a deal — brokered by Sheikh Tahnoon with Witkoff’s help — to give the UAE access to the United States’ most advanced and closely guarded computer chip technology, despite long-standing national security concerns about the country’s ties with China.
The UAE chip deal is one of many examples of World Liberty purchasers and other partners receiving favorable treatment from the U.S. government. In October, after Binance helped launch USD1 and bolster its credibility with investors, Trump pardonedthe company’s founder, Chinese billionaire Changpeng Zhao. Zhao and Binance pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating U.S. rules against money laundering, after the company allowed terrorists, cybercriminals, and sanctioned users in Iran and Russia, among others, to move billions of dollars through the exchange. And last February, the Securities and Exchange Commission paused its fraud investigation into Justin Sun, another Chinese crypto billionaire, who has purchased $90 million worth of Trump family cryptocurrencies.
This tangle of personal business and government policy is a pattern across the administration’s actions. Several foreign governments that have struck deals for new Trump-branded projects in multibillion-dollar real estate developments, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have also received access to advanced U.S. microchips, as well as weapons systems (and in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s case, diplomatic erasure of culpability for the brutal 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi). In other countries like Vietnam, officials bypassed normal rules and regulations to fast-track existing Trump properties even as they were negotiating with the U.S. government over tariffs.
No other administration in modern history has cashed in like this. Presidents generally have tried to avoid even the appearance of impropriety by selling off their assets or putting them in blind trusts before taking office. President Jimmy Carter famously did so with his family’s peanut farm. The revenue involved was less than 1 percent of the increase in Trump’s net worth since he took office last year: In 1975, Carter’s farm grossed $2.5 million, or about $14.3 million in today’s dollars….
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