Harry Truman left the White House with nothing but his Army pension of $113 a month, later writing that it was wrong to “commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency”. George W Bush put his investments in a blind trust before taking office and said he had no idea how the 2008 economic crisis affected his net worth. Donald Trump, by contrast, made at least $2.2bn (£1.7bn) in his first year back in the White House – a sum historians say is unprecedented and shatters the long‑held norm of presidents avoiding financial conflicts of interest.
More than $1.4bn of that came from the cryptocurrency industry alone, according to a mandatory financial disclosure made public on Tuesday. Trump reported $635m in royalties from Celebration Coins, the entity thought to be behind the $TRUMP meme coin he launched just before starting his second term. He also declared more than $500m from World Liberty Financial, a crypto business founded by his sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump together with the sons of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and Ukraine. The president’s 2025 income was nearly four times higher than the $622m he reported in 2024.
“Trump made at least $2.2bn in his first year back, largely from crypto, shattering presidential norms.”
In his first term, Trump was a vocal crypto critic, calling Bitcoin a scam. That stance has been abandoned. The White House has previously declared that Trump’s policies have made the US “the crypto capital of the world”, but insists there is no conflict of interest.
“There’s just no precedent for this,” said Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “It’s beyond anything we’ve ever seen in the presidency.”
The White House has denied that Trump and his family are profiting from his return to office. “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged – or will ever engage – in conflicts of interest,” White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement. She added: “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people – and any so‑called ‘reporters’ pushing otherwise are recycling the same, tired, false narrative that Democrats and the legacy media have been pushing for a decade.”
Past presidents have been involved in financial scandals that raised questions of corruption, but historians say Trump’s scale of personal enrichment while in office is without parallel. The disclosure laid bare how much he has benefited from his position through money‑making ventures that blur the line between government policymaking and private business dealings by the president, his family and close advisers.