Inside the revelations from Trump’s $2 billion financial disclosure

**David Greene** (0:04)
This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm David Greene, in for Shumita Basu.
Today, inside the revelations from Trump's recent financial disclosure.
President Trump earned more than $2 billion in his first year back in office. That's according to a mandatory financial disclosure released in June. The disclosure has drawn attention to the ties between the president and his businesses. The bulk of his earnings, over $1.4 billion, came from cryptocurrency ventures, including a company co-founded with his sons called World Liberty Financial. In 2025, a significant share of that company was bought by an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates. Trump has pushed back on questions related to these earnings, and his supporters see them as a validation of his business expertise. But others say that the disclosure is evidence of conflicts of interest, because some of the most lucrative deals intersect with the administration's cryptocurrency policies and dealings with foreign governments. The disclosure has highlighted just how different Trump is from past presidents when it comes to his business practices.

**David Kirkpatrick** (1:18)
There's been no president doing it at this scale. There's no one even close to this amount of money.

**David Greene** (1:25)
That's David Kirkpatrick, a staff writer for The New Yorker, who has been tracking Trump's streams of income for years. I wanted to talk to David about what exactly this recent financial disclosure reveals, and the potential implications for everyday Americans. And a note before we start. David reached out to representatives from President Trump's businesses in his reporting. They declined to answer his questions, but told him that they employ an outside ethics advisor to avoid quote, even the appearance of impropriety.
Maybe we can just start with these new disclosure forms from President Trump telling us that he made $2 billion in 2025 So what is new here?

**David Kirkpatrick** (2:08)
Well, let's break this down a little bit. There's a couple of categories of why we care about presidential profiteering. The first category, the thing that really springs to mind is the pay for play, buying influence, right? If a president or other public official is taking a personal payment to provide some public favor, that's corruption, that's really bad, that's the worst thing. Most of the profiteering that Trump and his family have done off of the presidency doesn't look exactly like that. It looks more like something else that makes people feel kind of queasy, which is generally using the office of the presidency for personal gain.
Selling a meme coin that you can sell because you're the president and the money goes into your own pocket. It's not like everybody who bought a meme coin from Trump got a favor from the US government. So most of the money that Trump has made falls into that second category of unseemly because he's profiting off of this thing that ought to be a property of the public, the White House.
A little bit falls into the, is he selling favors category? And that's really hard to prove.

**David Greene** (3:22)
Yeah.

**David Kirkpatrick** (3:22)
It's very rare that someone turns up with a smoking gun or a tape recording where a public official says, yes, I will do this public act with my public office for your private payment.

**David Greene** (3:34)
But you also might sometimes not even realize it. Like a foreign government that gets involved in a Trump related real estate deal is not going to come out and say, you know what, we now expect Trump to attack Iran, or we now expect this. We never can really tell where that influence is happening.

**David Kirkpatrick** (3:50)
That's right. It might just mean that there's a greater sense of affinity and communication happens more smoothly, and the presidential decision making changes in ways that even the president is unaware of. But of all these, so after that long preamble about quid pro quo versus just unseemly, the thing that has emerged in the last year is the deal with the United Arab Emirates right before he took office to sell a share, a roughly 50% share in a company called World Liberty Financial.
This is the one that to my mind stands out above all others, partly because a lot of Trump's profiteering has been not only disclosed, but loudly disclosed, but not this one. So World Liberty Financial is a company set up by Donald Trump and his friend, Steve Wittkopf and their sons shortly before the election. In fact, he took time out from the campaign to announce its creation almost with no business plan. It was going to be a crypto company, very unclear what. It didn't have any real business yet by the time he was about to be inaugurated. And yet on the eve of the inauguration, they sold roughly half the company to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates for half a billion dollars.