No US President Has Ever Come Close to Making This Much Money in Office

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Sarah Holder** (0:07)
Out of all the income streams that Donald Trump reported in his latest financial disclosure, there was one particular industry that turned out to be especially lucrative for the president, crypto.

**Bill Allison** (0:20)
He had a better year making off of crypto than just about any of the companies that are in this business.

**Sarah Holder** (0:25)
That's Bloomberg's campaign finance reporter Bill Allison, who's covered Trump's financial disclosure since 2015, when he ran for president the first time.

**Bill Allison** (0:34)
That disclosure was all of 92 pages. The most recent one was 927 pages. So it showed that he had a tremendous amount of income from his various crypto ventures.

**Sarah Holder** (0:47)
At least $1.4 billion in total. At a time when the crypto industry at large has been reeling from losses, the president's gains stand out.

**Bill Allison** (0:58)
It's more money than he's made in any single year he's been president, and it's his biggest source of revenue.

**Sarah Holder** (1:03)
Trump also made money playing the stock market, with bets on companies whose fates are heavily influenced by federal policy. His financial disclosure shows the dollar value of his thousands of securities trades could have been anywhere between $600 million and $1.86 billion.
The disclosure is full of other new details about Trump's business dealings.

**Bill Allison** (1:26)
He's selling Trump watches, which made like more than $4 million. There's the Bibles, there's a Trump guitar.

**Sarah Holder** (1:32)
He made $77 million from his Mar-a-Lago resort, $122 million from Trump National Doral Golf Club, and $25 million from his Virginia golf club.

**Bill Allison** (1:43)
To critics who say you're profiting off the presidency, Mr. Trump.

**Sarah Holder** (1:46)
Well, you know why I'm profiting? Because the stock market's going up. Everybody's profiting. As president, Trump isn't subject to the same ethics rules as other public officials.

**Bill Allison** (1:56)
Basically, you didn't want a situation where a president would have to decide, you know, can I make a decision or do I have to recuse myself? We can't have the president recuse himself from a decision. So the position is exempted from a lot of these laws.
As a result, you know, Trump is kind of like, he interprets that to mean the president can't have a conflict of interest.

**Sarah Holder** (2:15)
Those ethics laws were written in 1978

**Bill Allison** (2:19)
We've never had a president quite like Donald Trump. The ethics laws did not take into account the idea that you would have a president who was a billionaire with a far-flung real estate empire, with properties that he's managing, or owns around the world. And what it creates is this system where anybody can buy into business with Donald Trump, you know, foreign governments, sovereign wealth funds, billionaires.
And even if there isn't a conflict of interest, it really creates the appearance of one. It really does muddy the waters whenever this president makes decisions, and it raises the question, well, does he have a financial interest in this?

**Sarah Holder** (3:01)
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, all the president's profits, what Trump's 2025 disclosure reveals about the money he's made since taking office a second time, and the ethics concerns it's raising.
So Bill, you've been covering Trump's financial disclosure since he was a candidate the first time around. What stood out about this latest disclosure?

**Bill Allison** (3:32)
Well, clearly the crypto. I mean, and he did report some earnings from crypto in his, from 2024 And I think he made about 57, 58 million dollars from crypto, which was a lot. That was enough for a headline.
And now he's up well over 1.4 billion.

**Sarah Holder** (3:48)
That is a lot more.

**Bill Allison** (3:49)
It is a lot more, yes.

**Sarah Holder** (3:50)
I mean, the other evolution has been Trump's sort of mindset on crypto, right? Back in 2021, Trump said Bitcoin seemed like a scam. Now he's made more than a billion dollars off the crypto industry.
How much has Trump's perspective on crypto really changed over the past few years? And what's behind that shift?

**Bill Allison** (4:10)
I think the changes really started post January 6th, 2021, the way that Trump left office. He had trouble doing business with normal financial institutions after that. He claims he was debanked and that big institutions wouldn't take his business.
And at the same time, you have the Biden administration cracking down on crypto and with a lot of prosecutions, the SEC made it a central thing that they went after. And they became strange bedfellows. The crypto industry saw in Donald Trump somebody who would promote their interests and they held fundraisers for him in the 2024 campaign. And Donald Trump learned to love crypto as well.