Daly: The Self Enricher-In-Chief

Americans should care that their president is self-dealing at an unprecedented level.

In 2025 alone, President Trump personally earned a whopping $2.2 billion.

That number (more than three and a half times what he made in 2024, before returning to the White House) didn’t come from some Trump-hating “fake news” outlet. It came from Trump himself, through his personal financial disclosure released last month.

Perhaps needless to say, those earnings — driven by cryptocurrency gains and personal trading — far surpass those of any sitting president in U.S. history.

The 927-page disclosure revealed breathtaking details. As The Dispatch reported, Trump’s “personal financial advisers made more than 21,000 securities trades, many involving companies directly affected by White House policies.”

One such example was the administration’s July 2025 announcement of its “AI Action Plan,” the same day on which Trump’s advisors purchased millions of dollars in stock in each of six major tech companies deeply involved with AI.

The Dispatch added, “The advisers also sold stock hundreds of times in the days following the announcement of ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs in April,” and “made 327 stock purchases on April 8, the day before Trump announced broad pauses to the tariff program.”

Of course, the president additionally made millions off of novelty products (including Trump-branded Bibles), but most of his earnings came from cryptocurrency tied to his $TRUMP memecoin.

“Cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen found that the nearly 1 million people who bought Trump’s memecoin, $TRUMP, had lost a collective $3.81 billion through the end of June,” reported The Dispatch. “Meanwhile, Trump himself received a payout of $636 million tied to his memecoin business, and in total reported more than $1.4 billion from his cryptocurrency ventures in 2025—topping the net income of every U.S. publicly traded crypto company, including Coinbase, the most profitable of them.”

Some may recall that during Trump’s first term in office, the president repeatedly called cryptocurrency a “scam.” He complained that its value was “based on thin air.” But as he was running for president in 2024, he either had a profound change of heart on crypto… or perhaps came to understand that it was a “scam” that he, himself, could make a lot of money off of.

Trump created World Liberty Financial (WLFI), his own crypto company (along with his sons, Steve Witkoff, and Witkoff’s sons). The organization has a pretty interesting history and revenue model… as well as notable foreign ties.

Per The Dispatch:

Its key product is USD1: a fiat-backed stablecoin, pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, that traders use to trade more volatile crypto without converting back to cash each time, and from which World Liberty earns money through interest on the Treasury bills and cash it holds in reserve. World Liberty’s profits have also been boosted by its ties to Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by user count and daily trading volume.

In May 2025, World Liberty revealed that the MGX fund, backed by the government of the United Arab Emirates, had used USD1 to settle its $2 billion investment in Binance—propelling the fledgling stablecoin’s growth. Binance now holds 87 percent of USD1’s circulating supply. In October 2025, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had completed a four-month prison sentence after pleading guilty in 2023 to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering laws after prosecutors said Binance had allowed transactions benefiting terrorist groups including Hamas and al-Qaeda.

Four days before Trump’s 2025 inauguration, World Liberty sold a 49 percent stake in the company to investors tied to the United Arab Emirates. Then during Trump’s May 2025 visit to UAE capital Abu Dhabi, the U.S. and UAE struck a deal allowing the Emirates to import hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips a year and build an Nvidia-powered “Stargate UAE” data campus, reversing Biden-era limits on such exports. According to his disclosures, World Liberty made Trump $594 million in 2025 from token and equity sales—or $799 million including a related UAE-linked stablecoin stake sale.

“As head of the executive branch,” we’re reminded in the report, Trump “directs the regulation of an industry he has a multi-billion-dollar financial stake in.”

Case in point (again per The Dispatch):

The first week of his second term, Trump signed an executive order that created a working group to draft crypto-friendly regulations, and in March 2025 he signed an order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile meant to position the U.S. as a leader in “government digital asset strategy.” The SEC under Trump has also refused to regulate memecoins as securities, claiming they are more akin to “collectibles.”

We’re now half-way through 2026 (only a year and a half into this presidential term), and Trump has already tripled his net worth since returning to office. It now sits at $6.5 billion.

This isn’t America First. It’s Trump First.

With no signs of his stock trading and crypto action slowing down, next year’s financial disclosure should be another banger.

“It’s not just the moneymaking that’s unrivaled,” the Free Press editorial board argued. “It’s also the flagrant appearance of corruption that those billions represent. You do not need to think Trump is the end of American democracy, or that everything he does is evil, to see this for what it is: the biggest grift in American history. For all the condemnation of the so-called ‘Biden Crime Family’ by Republicans—and Burisma and Hunter Biden were not high moments—it pales in comparison to what is happening in this presidency.”

The editors added, “Most Americans should understand what is happening: a transfer of wealth from them—and perhaps foreigners—to the president.”

But most Americans likely don’t understand that. They’re understandably busy with their own lives, and don’t have time for politics (especially with how ugly our politics have become). And sadly, I think an uncomfortable number of those who do understand it — including lots of Trump supporters — simply don’t care. They’ve either priced in such corruption (knowing who Trump is), or think he’s owed a pass — as a victim of perceived persecution and the leader of their tribe — to do whatever the heck he wants (even if it’s at their own expense).

Legally speaking, Trump assuredly will get a pass. While wildly unethical, none of the above actions appear to be illegal. There’s a federal criminal statue that forbids employees of the executive branch from engaging in matters that affect their personal financial interests, but that statue notably does not apply to the president and vice president of the United States.

In other words, any oversight of Trump’s massive financial gains as president, and any related conflicts of interest, would have to come from Congress. Congress can certainly hold hearings, begin investigations, and even impeach Trump (for a third time). But if members really want to close the loopholes that have allowed for such abuses of power — abuses our Founding Fathers likely never envisioned — they can do their job and actually pass legislation to impose restrictions.

They absolutely should, and we should have enough self-respect as Americans to encourage them to.