Eric Lipton
Washington: President Lyndon Johnson’s wife owned a profitable radio station. George W. Bush was on the board of an oil company while his father was in the White House. Hunter Biden was paid by a Ukrainian natural gas company while his father was vice president.
But never before in American history has there been anything like Donald Trump, a president who, in his first year back in office, has collected about $US1.4 billion ($2 billion) in new revenue from cryptocurrency businesses that directly benefited from his actions as president, a financial disclosure report made public on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST) shows.
Overall, Trump’s revenue in 2025 jumped to at least $US2.2 billion, compared with a minimum of $US622 million in 2024 before he returned to office.
“It is completely unprecedented,” said Megan Gorman, a tax attorney and the author of a recent book, All the Presidents’ Money, that studied the history of presidential wealth dating back 250 years.
Generally, throughout history, Gorman and other historians have said that American presidents have taken steps to separate themselves from corporate entanglements that might create conflicts.
“Public office, if anything, was a source of debt, not a source of revenue,” said Lindsay Chervinsky, a historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.
Trump and his family have done the opposite, creating new business ventures that are profiting from actions Trump has taken since he returned to the White House.
Those include the pardon 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’s own crypto venture.
They also include legislation that Trump signed last July to promote a form of cryptocurrency called stablecoins, four months after his family-backed firm introduced its own stablecoin.
In many ways, Gorman said, his acts are “a betrayal of the American social contract: that those who lead the country prioritise country over self – a premise that goes back to George Washington”.
No conflicts of interest
The White House and Trump family have repeatedly dismissed any questions about the president’s moneymaking while in office, arguing that Trump’s 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.
“President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in late May when asked about profit-making stock purchases made on behalf of Trump in companies including Dell Technologies since he returned to office.
“Which 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.”
The bulk of Trump’s new revenue comes from the cryptocurrency industry, which the family aggressively entered in late 2024, just as Trump was about to be re-elected to a second term.
Trump served as a co-founder of his family’s crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. That business has now generated $US799 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.
Three days before Trump was inaugurated, he separately helped launch a meme coin, $TRUMP, a kind of collectible version of a crypto token. That business has generated another $US636 million for Trump, the disclosure shows, equal to slightly more than the entire amount of money Trump made from all his other business operations worldwide in 2024.
His meme coin business directly benefited from a February 2025 statement from the Securities and Exchange Commission notifying the industry that such tokens would no longer be subject to the agency’s oversight, reversing the position taken by the agency’s chair during the Biden administration.
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 revenue to Trump and his sons, as have real estate deals in other parts of the world, including Vietnam and Romania.
This does not include business endeavours by Trump’s sons, including recent investments in military contractors, predictions market companies or companies pursuing billions of dollars of federal assistance to build mines that supply critical minerals – all of which stand to generate new profits for the Trump family, but not Trump directly.
When Trump arrived in Washington for his first term in 2017, he and his family agreed not to pursue any new international business deals, aware that it might leave them vulnerable to allegations that they were benefiting from Trump’s 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’s other venues.
Upon his re-election, the Trump family has been unapologetic about its aggressive pursuit of profits.
“The first term we did everything imaginable to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and frankly, we got crushed anyway,” Eric Trump said in late 2024, shortly before the election, contending that the presidency had cost his father “an absolute fortune.”
Eric Trump added: “We can’t just sit out in perpetuity, and I won’t.” Trump’s sons do run the business operations, and legally, they control trusts that were set up after Trump’s first election that collect the revenue from the business operations. But the president is the beneficiary of these trusts, so he still profits from the business deals.
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. Bush, for example, sold his stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team before his election, while Jimmy Carter turned over operation of his peanut farm to an independent trustee.
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.
Instead, they cited examples of efforts to avoid potential conflicts.
President Warren 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 shortly before his death in 1923.
After president John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson, his vice president, moved to the White House, his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, transferred her radio and television stations into a trust controlled by an outside lawyer and station executive, said Mark Updegrove, chief executive of the LBJ Foundation and a presidential historian.
“Presidents 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,” said Jeffrey Engel, the director of the Centre for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “The 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.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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