U.S. President Donald Trump has earned billions of dollars from family business ventures and his investments over his past 16 months in the White House, according to research by watchdog groups and media outlets.
The various ways that Trump and his family are profiting off his presidency have been closely tracked since his inauguration in January 2025, but they are drawing fresh scrutiny in the wake of disclosures about stock trades made by Trump’s personal investment advisers.
The White House insists Trump has done nothing that violates any U.S. laws, nor has he broken any ethics rules that apply to the presidency.
Still, independent observers are describing the scale of Trump’s personal enrichment in dramatic terms.
- “Donald Trump has presided over the most lucrative presidency in American history, adding billions to his net worth, largely by cashing in on crypto,” said Forbes magazine.
- “Trump has enriched himself financially on a scale that dwarfs even the most infamous scandals in American history,” said Eric Petry, counsel in the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan law and policy organization at New York University.
- The Trump family has made billions in “ill-gotten dollars” during his term, said Barbara Perry, a historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, an institute for the study of the U.S. presidency. “Presidents have had corrupt, even criminal, family members … but none of them succeeded to the extent of the Trump family in the level of graft achieved,” Perry told the New York Times this week.
Will Ragland, vice-president for research at the Center for American Progress, a Democrat-leaning think-tank in Washington, D.C., says the way Trump has personally profited from his time in office is unprecedented.
“I think that this is an open, pay-for-play, corrupt presidency,” Ragland told CBC News.
“There really is no historical precedent for the amount of personal cash he has brought in and the political money he’s been able to raise since being elected the second time.”
The Trump administration set up a roughly $1.8 billion US fund to support Americans facing domestic political persecution — but there are questions about accountability and who may benefit most from the cash. Andrew Chang explains how the Anti-Weaponization Fund originates with U.S. President Donald Trump’s own lawsuit, and the concerns about a conflict of interest.
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Trump has gained ‘at least $4 billion’
A lengthy report by the New Yorker last August tallied Trump’s financial gains since his 2025 inauguration at $3.4 billion US.
More recently, updated trackers put the wealth amassed by Trump, his family and his companies even higher.
- “Ventures launched since Trump’s re-election generated at least $4 billion [US] in proceeds and paper wealth for the family as of December, according to company statements and securities filings,” reports the Wall Street Journal’s graphic depicting the Trump family’s expanding business empire.
- Forbes Magazine’s latest estimate of Trump’s net worth suggests he has added $4.2 billion US to his holdings since 2024.
- Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have published what they call the “Trump family digital grift wealth tracker,” which, as of Thursday, claimed the family has amassed additional wealth totalling $5.1 billion US.
The trackers all indicate that cryptocurrency ventures are responsible for the biggest share of Trump’s financial gains.
The crypto gains began just a few days before Trump was sworn in, when he launched a meme coin, sales of which went on to generate some $320 million US in four months, The Associated Press reported, citing data from cryptocurrency tracker Chainalysis.
The trackers suggest Trump is also pulling in profits from his golf courses, hotels and licensing of the Trump brand.
He has also won tens of millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements, although the money is ostensibly to be directed to his presidential library.
Pumped companies whose stocks he’d bought
A spotlight was shone on his stock market investments this week when independent journalist Judd Legum reported that Trump publicly praised three companies on the day or the day after he had bought tens of thousands of dollars of their shares, according to official disclosures.
Trump’s stock market holdings are controlled by investment advisers who neither give him advance notice of trades nor get his input on decisions, said a spokesperson for The Trump Organization, his privately owned conglomerate.
“Neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments,” the organization said in a statement to Reuters News Agency.
Vice-president JD Vance vigorously defended Trump in the wake of the report.
“He has independent wealth advisors who manage his money,” Vance told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “He’s not making these stock trades himself.”
Defending the stock trades by saying Trump didn’t personally make them completely misses the point, argues Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank in Washington.
“Even if independent financial managers make his investment decisions, the issue is that Trump retains financial interests while exercising extraordinary discretion over companies and sectors affected directly by his administration’s policies,” DeHaven wrote in a blog post last week.
Trump’s assets controlled by his children
Although there is no law requiring the U.S. president to move assets into a blind trust, every U.S. 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.
“Most presidents go out of their way just to avoid even the appearance of any conflict of interest,” said Ragland. “What President Trump has turned this [presidency] into is a payment portal, and to be honest, he and his sons are very open about it.”
News reports have revealed several examples of Trump family ventures doing business with the U.S. government or Trump family investments profiting off U.S. government policies.
- The U.S. 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. joined the investment firm 1789 Capital shortly after his father won the 2024 presidential election. In August 2025, the firm invested in a critical minerals startup called Vulcan Elements, which soon received the largest loan ever made by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, for $620 million US, the Financial Times reported in December.
Then there’s the new Anti-Weaponization Fund, a $1.8 billion US taxpayer-funded pot to compensate people the White House claims were victims of the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the justice system.
While Trump and his family are not eligible, they benefit from the settlement that created it: a deal in which the Internal Revenue Service is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing any pending tax claims against Trump, his family and his businesses.
Norms, sense of shame ‘out the window’
Ragland says presidents before Trump generally observed a set of ethical norms and had “a sense of shame” around separating their personal financial interests from their duties.
“The norms and sense of shame are out the window. The Office of Government Ethics really has no teeth, and if it did, it would submit its charges to a Department of Justice that is under [Trump’s] thumb,” Ragland said.
He believes only Congress can hold Trump accountable for any questionable financial dealings.
That would start with impeachment, a process that would only conceivably happen if the Democrats manage to win control of the House of Representatives in the midterms this fall.
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