Article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
One expert who has studied presidential wealth called Trump’s windfall “completely unprecedented” in American history
Annual financial disclosures released Tuesday reveal that US President Donald Trump pocketed at least $2.2 billion—more than half of it from his family’s crypto grift—during his first year back in the White House, a windfall that experts say is without precedent in American history.
The disclosure report shows that Trump pulled in $635 million in royalties from Celebration Coins, an entity linked to the president’s meme coin. The president also disclosed around $527 million in proceeds from token sales by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto venture spearheaded by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
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“It is completely unprecedented,” Megan Gorman, a tax attorney who has studied the history of presidential wealth, told The New York Times of the president’s windfall.
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement that “Trump’s obscene income is driven by various cryptocurrency schemes, leveraging his political position to exploit a scam-driven industry that he once said was nothing more than a racket.”
“In doing so, he’s ripping off investors—to the tune of billions—who want to get in on the game with him, or think that buying his crypto products is an innocent means to show their support,” said Weissman. “Most troubling, Trump’s personal profit interest has now aligned him with the crypto industry, paving the way for dangerous legislation that will facilitate mass rip-offs and even threaten financial system stability.”
Trump’s massive profits from an industry he’s tasked with regulating represent what the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center (CLC) described as an “unprecedented” conflict of interest, notwithstanding the White House’s laughable claim that “neither the president nor his family has ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest.”
“We have never seen a president have direct conflicts of interest with his financial holdings and the policies he supports, and it’s another example why we need widespread ethics reform now,” Kedric Payne, CLC’s senior director of ethics, told The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal noted that, in addition to crypto profits, “Trump reported $4.7 million in income last year from Trump-branded watches, as well as $1.9 million in royalties from his ‘Save America’ book.”
“Multimillion-dollar licensing deals linked to real-estate developers stretched from Romania to India to across the Middle East. A $6,484-a-month pension from the Screen Actors Guild continued paying out,” the newspaper observed.
The disclosures also include tens of million dollars in legal settlements stemming from Trump’s lawsuits against major companies, including ABC, CBS, and Meta.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said Tuesday that lawmakers must add language to the upper chamber’s crypto legislation that prevents “the president, vice president, senior administration officials, members of Congress, and their families from profiting off the crypto industry.”
“If it does not,” the senator warned, “it will only turbocharge Donald Trump’s brazen crypto corruption.”
Article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
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