The Unprecedented Personal Profits of Trump’s Presidency

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Rachel Abrams** (0:29)
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.
To an extent never before seen in American history, President Trump has turned the presidency into a cash cow for his family's businesses. A recent financial disclosure shows that the president has made $2.2 billion since he retook office. But the Trumps are not done. And today, my colleague Eric Lipton explains the family's next potential windfall and how the president's position is once again helping it happen. It's Thursday, July 9th. Eric Lipton, welcome back to the show.

**Eric Lipton** (1:25)
Thanks for having me.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:27)
So Eric, ever since President Trump returned to office, you have been trying to figure out just how much he and his family have made off of the presidency. And we recently got kind of an answer to that question when he released this enormous 900 page financial disclosure, which outlined what he made last year.
And I wonder, as somebody who's been paying such close attention to this particular area, what was your initial reaction seeing that top line number, $2.2 billion?

**Eric Lipton** (1:57)
I was completely startled by this number. I've been tracking the Trump family for a decade now, and we all knew that with Trump back in the White House that his family was getting into all kinds of lucrative business ventures, but I never imagined that he would see more than $2 billion in revenue in the first year that he's back as president. And I was so completely floored by it, I thought I had to talk to some historians.

**Rachel Abrams** (2:22)
Just to put it into context.

**Eric Lipton** (2:23)
Yeah, I get on the phone, I start calling up some of the most prominent authors of American presidential history, one after another, every single one of them that I spoke with, the word out of their mouth was unprecedented. There's never been a president in the history of the United States that has made this much money while in the White House, and none of them could come up with any parallels, except looking at other places around the world, authoritarian-styled places where there's a mixing of your job as a government official and the wealth of that country.

**Rachel Abrams** (2:56)
Basically, you have to go outside of the United States to find anything like what we are seeing here in this country.

**Eric Lipton** (3:03)
Yes.
There are parts of the world where it's normal for the royal family to both be running the government, and be enriched by the government. I think of particularly of some of the Middle East nations, like the royal families in Saudi Arabia, or in the United Arab Emirates, where there is no line. They are the government and they are the financial beneficiaries of the government. The same thing in Turkey, where Erdogan has appointed members of his family to be the finance minister, and they also own business operations. Or in Russia, where Putin and the various oligarchs are all benefiting from their access to the power. This is a tradition that isn't seen in the United States, but Trump has put us into a whole new category, where wealth is coming into the White House, in part because of the policy decisions that he's making.

**Rachel Abrams** (3:55)
Eric, when it comes to what we learned from Trump's fortune in particular, can you just tell us a little bit about where we're learning that money is coming from?

**Eric Lipton** (4:02)
The single biggest chunk of it comes from cryptocurrency, $1.4 billion. This is a sector that the Trump family had never been in prior to 2025, that it was only really during Trump's re-election campaign that he came to be a crypto enthusiast. He had been a skeptic of crypto prior to that, and then suddenly he's back in office and they are going gangbusters to try to make money off of crypto.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:28)
Right. This was actually, I think, the last time you were on the show was to explain how all of that worked. Basically, the family goes to launch several types of cryptocurrency. A lot of people bought that cryptocurrency. The value of those coins plummeted, but the Trump family, and this is what you have documented in your reporting, made money anyway, in large part on fees from trading these coins.