US President Donald Trump has made billions of dollars from family businesses and investments in the past 16 months in the White House, according to research by watchdog groups and media sources.
The various ways in which Trump and his family have profited from the presidency have been closely followed since his inauguration in January 2025, but they have come under renewed scrutiny after the disclosure of trades made by Trump’s investment advisers.
The White House insists that Trump has not done anything that violates any American laws, nor has he violated any ethical rules that apply to the office of president.
Nevertheless, independent observers describe the extent of Trump’s personal enrichment in astonishing terms.
- “Donald Trump has run the richest presidency in American history, adding billions to his net worth, mostly by making money from crypto,” Forbes magazine said.
- “Trump has enriched himself to a degree that dwarfs even the worst scandals in American history,” said Eric Petry, an election and government policy adviser at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy organization at New York University.
- The Trump family has made billions in “ill-gotten dollars” during his time, said Barbara Perry, a historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, an American presidential research institute. “Presidents have been corrupt.but none of them have succeeded on the level of the Trump family on the level of association they have achieved,” Perry told the New York Times this week.
Will Ragland, vice president of research at the Center for American Progress, a Democrat-leaning think-tank in Washington, DC, says Trump’s personal gains while in power are unprecedented.
“I think this is an open, paid, corrupt president,” Ragland told CBC News.
“There is no record of the money he has brought in and the political money he has been able to collect since he was elected for the second time.”
The Trump administration has established a $1.8 billion fund to support Americans facing political persecution at home — but there are questions about accountability and who would benefit most from the money. Andrew Chang explains how the Anti-Weaponization Fund began in the case of US President Donald Trump himself, and concerns about conflicts of interest. (Image credits: The Canadian Press, Reuters, Adobe Stock and Getty Images)
Trump received ‘at least four billion dollars’
A lengthy New Yorker report last August put Trump’s financial gains from his inauguration in 2025 at $3.4 billion.
Recently, updated trackers put the wealth accumulated by Trump, his family and his companies at the highest level.
- “Programs launched since Trump’s reelection have generated at least $4 billion [US] in the family’s income and wealth as of December, according to company statements and stock filings,” reports a Wall Street Journal graphic showing the Trump family’s growing business empire.
- Forbes Magazine’s latest estimate of Trump’s net worth shows that he has added $4.2 billion to his assets as of 2024.
- Democrats on the House Oversight Committee published what they called the “Trump family digital grift wealth tracker,” which, as of Thursday, said the family had amassed an additional $5.1 billion in wealth.
All trackers show that cryptocurrency businesses are responsible for a large share of Trump’s financial gains.
Crypto gains started a few days before Trump was sworn in, when he introduced the meme coin, whose sales continued to generate 320 million dollars in four months, reported the Associated Press, citing data from the cryptocurrency tracker Chainalysis.
Trackers suggest that Trump has also reaped profits from his golf courses, hotels and licensing of the Trump brand.
He also won tens of millions of dollars in settlements, although the money should be directed to his presidential library.
Pumping companies whose stocks he bought
His stock market investments came to the fore this week when independent reporter Judd Legum reported that Trump publicly recommended three companies a day or so after buying tens of thousands of dollars worth of their stock, according to official disclosures.
Trump’s stock market management is managed by investment advisers who do not give him advance notice of trades or get his input on decisions, said a spokeswoman for The Trump Organization, which is his private organization.
“President Trump, his family, or the Trump Organization have no role in selecting, directing, or approving any investment,” the organization said in a statement sent to Reuters News Agency.
Vice President JD Vance strongly defended Trump after the report.
“He has private wealth advisors that manage his money,” Vance told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “He doesn’t make these clothes himself.”
Defending stocks by saying Trump didn’t make them miss out completely, said Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.
“Even if independent financial managers make his investment decisions, the problem is that Trump maintains financial interests while exercising extraordinary discretion over companies and industries directly affected by the administration’s policies,” DeHaven wrote in a blog post last week.
Trump assets controlled by his children
Although there is no law that requires a US president to remove property he has invested in people who disagree, every US president since the 1970s has done so, until Trump, according to research by the Brennan Center for Justice.
Trump’s assets are in a trust controlled by his children.
“Many moderators do their best to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of opinion,” said Ragland. “Why did President Trump change this? [presidency] went into the pay zone, and to be honest, he and his sons were very open about it.”
News reports have revealed several examples of Trump family schemes doing business with the US government or Trump family investments profiting from US government policies.
- The US Air Force has agreed to buy interceptor drones from Powerus, an Arizona-based company backed by Trump’s sons, Bloomberg reported on April 30.
- Donald Trump Jr. he joined the investment firm 1789 Capital shortly after his father won the 2024 presidential election. In August 2025, the company invested in a precious mineral startup called Vulcan Elements, which quickly became the largest acquisition of all. loans once made by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, of $620 million US, reported the Financial Times in December.
Then there’s the new Anti-Gun Fund, a $1.8 billion pot funded by American taxpayers to compensate people the White House claims were victims of the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the justice system.
Although Trump and his family are ineligible, they benefit from the settlement that created it: an agreement in which the Internal Revenue Service is “banned and permanently barred” from pursuing any pending tax claims against Trump, his family and his businesses.
Habits, sense of shame ‘out the window’
Ragland says presidents before Trump were generally conservative and had a “sense of shame” about separating their financial interests from their careers.
“Courtesy and a sense of shame are out the window. The Office of Government Ethics has no teeth, and if it did, it would refer its cases to the Justice Department under [Trump’s] six,” said Ragland.
He believes only Congress can hold Trump accountable for any questionable financial dealings.
That will start with impeachment, a process that can only happen if Democrats can win control of the House of Representatives this fall.
