The Unprecedented Profiteering Revealed by Donald Trump’s Financial Disclosure

Earlier this week, Trump released a nine-hundred-and-twenty-seven-page personal-financial-disclosure report, for 2src25, revealing the windfall he has reaped from his return to the White House. It recorded more than $2.2 billion in earnings, up from six hundred and twenty-two million dollars in 2src24, a jump in profits without precedent in Presidential history. More than $1.4 billion of those earnings came from crypto tokens or investments like the ones Trump sold Sun, including some eight hundred million dollars associated with World Liberty and more than six hundred million dollars that appears to come from the partnership that sold his $TRUMP memecoins.

His transactions with Sun were hardly the only instances in which Trump ignored conspicuous conflicts of interest and heedlessly cashed in on his public office. (The White House and World Liberty have both maintained that there was no connection between Sun’s payments to Trump and his Administration’s favorable actions, although it is hard to imagine that Sun would have ponied up for World Liberty tokens or $TRUMP if Trump had lost the election.) In one glaring example, Trump appears to have reported proceeds of about two hundred and sixty-three million dollars from the secret sale of a half interest in World Liberty Financial, on the eve of his Inauguration, to the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates, a country that has benefited in conspicuous ways from his Administration’s foreign and trade policies. (Neither Trump nor World Liberty disclosed the transaction at the time. The Wall Street Journal unearthed it earlier this year, and Trump’s disclosure report appears to acknowledge the payment, declaring sixty-six million dollars as an “equity sale” and a hundred and ninety-seven million dollars as “capital contribution,” without naming the actual source of the money.) World Liberty’s profits have also been driven, in part, by a partnership with the crypto giant Binance, whose founder and owner, Changpeng Zhao, Trump pardoned, last fall, for violations of anti-money-laundering laws. (Binance had allowed Iran to evade sanctions, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, it has continued to, even after the pardon. Binance denied those allegations, and announced that it has filed a lawsuit against the Journal for defamation.) Trump recorded making more than eighty million dollars last year by settling civil lawsuits he had filed against major media companies that his Administration regulates—claims that legal experts have described as absurd. According to calculations by the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Trump also disclosed earning more than a hundred and seventeen million dollars from business deals outside the U.S.—much of it coming from a blitz of new real-estate development in the monarchies of the Persian Gulf—up from about forty million dollars a year in foreign revenue during his first term. What’s more, this week’s report is already dated. It does not include the gift of a four-hundred-million-dollar Boeing 747 from the Emir of Qatar; Trump, coincidentally, unveiled it on Wednesday as his new Presidential airplane (he has had said that he would pass it to his foundation when he leaves office).

Sun’s lawsuit against World Liberty is a reminder that the unseemliness of Trump’s rampant Presidential profiteering goes beyond conflicts of interest. Announcing the début of World Liberty during the 2src24 campaign, Trump predicted, grandly, that the future of crypto would be “gigantic” and said that, for the good of the country, “crypto is one of those things we have to do, whether we like it or not.” Trump and his sons have often described World Liberty and their other crypto ventures as efforts to make such digital assets available to small and unsophisticated investors, and Eric and Donald, Jr., have both repeatedly urged mom-and-pop investors to jump in with both feet. In one speech last year, Donald, Jr., implored every “average American” to “buy as much as you can,” and he and Eric, who together founded a bitcoin-mining company, have repeatedly predicted that the price of bitcoin would soar to a million dollars, from its peak last year of about a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.

Yet the President’s disclosure of his own stunning crypto profits has arrived at a painful moment for anyone who has bought what the Trumps have been selling—often, his own political supporters. The World Liberty tokens that Sun may have sought to unload have plunged in value by more than eighty per cent, to less than six cents each. The price of $TRUMP memecoin has fallen from a peak of nearly seventy-five dollars before Trump’s Inauguration to about a dollar and seventy cents. Bitcoin has fallen by more than sixty per cent from its peak last year, to less than sixty thousand dollars. Shares of American Bitcoin, the crypto company owned by Don, Jr., and Eric, have fallen by more than ninety per cent from their peak, to about sixty cents. Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, which operates Truth Social and has turned itself into a bitcoin-holding company, have also fallen by more than ninety per cent, to less than ten dollars a share.