All the President's Profits

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2:00Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. 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. He had a better year making off of crypto than just about, you know, any of the other companies that are in this business. That's Bloomberg's campaign finance reporter Bill Allison, who's covered Trump's financial disclosures since 2015, when he ran for president the first time. 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.

2:45At 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. It's more money than he's made in any single year he's been president, and it's his biggest source of revenue. 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. He's selling Trump watches, which made like more than$4 million.

3:28There's the Bibles. There's a Trump guitar. 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. To critics who say you're profiting off the presidency, Mr. Well, you know why I'm profiting? Because the stock market's going up. Everybody's profiting. If you have a four-year-old... As president, Trump isn't subject to the same ethics rules as other public officials. 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.

4:03So 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. Those ethics laws were written in 1978. 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.

4:40And 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, you know, well, does he have a financial interest in this?

5:00I'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.

5:21So, Bill, you've been covering Trump's financial disclosure since he was a candidate the first time around. And what stood out about this latest disclosure? Well, you know, 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, you know, a lot. That was enough for a headline. And now he's up, you know, well over 1.4 billion. That is a lot more. It is a lot more. Yes. 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.

5:57Now 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? 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, you know, with a lot of prosecutions, the SEC made it sort of a central thing that they went after.

6:33And they kind of 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. His first ventures into crypto, you know, were selling these tokens that presented him like a superhero and stuff. And they sold very well. And I think he made a couple of million from it. And, you know, he never looked back. And at this point, can you give us a sense of what Trump's crypto empire looks like? How exactly did he make this$1.4 billion he did last year?

7:07There's three components to it. One is World Liberty Financial, which is the company that he started before the presidential election in 2024. Before, Steve Whitcoff, his Middle East envoy, and Donald Trump are sort of the high-level names as co-founders. Basically, it markets something called a stablecoin, and USD1 is the name of it. And it's gotten some big, heavy hitters buying into it. There's an investment fund in the Middle East that used$2 billion worth of USD1 to buy into the Binance exchange. And so token sales have generated a huge amount of money for Donald Trump. and it's about$594 million.

7:47So that's component one. And then one of his sources of income, this is from Stablecoin Holdco, the name of the company. It's an LLC. And they got capital contributions from new members. So there's people buying into this company. And they sold, you know, Class C units to other people, as the disclosure tells us. So basically, he's selling equity stakes in these ventures. So that's one way that he made money. And then the other thing is a separate company called CIC Digital LLC, which sells his meme coins. And these are like, you know, these Trump tokens and cards and whatever that people buy.

8:24And that made him$636 million. And the thing about the meme business, the dollar sign Trump coin, is that it says right on the website that markets them that these are not for investment purposes. These are to show support for the president. And yet at the same time, he kind of like pumps up the value of these by hosting an annual conference that you get to meet the president if you're one of the top holders of this. It's just generated a huge amount of revenue for him. You have these huge spikes in price. Certainly the first time he did one of these conferences where people could come. And it's almost that this is a way to kind of get access to the president, the way he's operating the tokens.

9:05Well, it is interesting, though, because the World Liberty token has not done so well. Neither has the meme coin, according to our colleagues. The World Liberty token is down 75 percent. The meme coin has fallen 95 percent in value. You know, The New York Times reported that, according to cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen, nearly a million people who lost money on Trump's meme coin collectively lost more than$3.8 billion. So explain how Trump's crypto ventures can be bringing in so much income while the cryptocurrency tokens themselves are doing badly. Yeah, because he's essentially selling it.

9:42And it's the old cliche, he's selling high and everybody else is stuck with it when it's low. It's almost like an IPO. Like if the IPO is really hyped and the initial price is$100, and then in two weeks people find out that the company isn't making any money and it drops to$50, the people who sold it for$100 don't lose that$100. They get to keep the cash. And that's essentially how Trump has managed to make money off of these various crypto ventures. And put that in perspective for us, how significant are Trump's crypto earnings compared to how other crypto investors or the industry at large has fared this past year?

10:18The past year has been a bad year for crypto. There was a huge sell-off in October of like$19 billion of unwinding risky positions. This cost a lot of people a lot of money. So the industry has not been thriving. Bitcoin is way down. The Trump family itself has lost money from their own venture, American Bitcoin, which is investing in Bitcoin. So, you know, they're not making money across the board, but Trump has done very well with his, you know, in some ways, maybe the best place to be is at the beginning of the chain of transactions and, you know, take the money and run. So part of what you're describing is the president using his fame and his renown to sell meme coins, stable coins.

11:02Trump is also ultimately in charge of regulating the crypto industry as president of the United States. The fact that he has his hands in so many of these crypto enterprises has raised questions because of that about conflict of interest. I'm wondering, Bill, what are the biggest ethical concerns here? Well, certainly for crypto, it's a huge ethical concern. One of the things that some Democrats have been saying about the Clarity Act is, let's put in a provision there that the president can't make money off of crypto, essentially. And obviously, that's something that Trump is probably not going to want to sign.

11:37It does create this situation, though, where his administration has made recommendations for how we're going to regulate, you know, what kind of market guardrails do you need? What kind of things do you need to do to make this industry safe? And when he's profiting from it so much, he has a skewed perspective somewhat on what is useful and what isn't. And I think that, you know, anytime you have somebody like you wouldn't want the head of General Motors making all the decisions about auto safety. You wouldn't want anybody who has a vested interest in a particular industry being the final word on regulation in an industry.

12:10And that's kind of what Trump has become with the crypto industry right now. After the break, we unpack Trump's aggressive trading strategy.

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15:13Bill, how do presidents typically handle their finances upon taking office? Generally speaking, and if you go back to Jimmy Carter, when the Ethics for Government Act was passed, The act doesn't obligate the president to divest or do any of the things that it does for cabinet-level officials. And Jimmy Carter, he took pains to get his businesses so that they wouldn't be causing conflicts, so that he put, you know— He famously put his peanut farm in a blind trust. Exactly, yes. And, of course, I'm sure he still knew he had a peanut farm, but he tried to, like, comply with it. George H.W. Bush put all of his assets into a blind trust when he became vice president and kept it, you know, through his 12 years in office as vice president and president.

15:54Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, they put their assets into a blind trust that I think stuck around like long after he became president until they dissolved it. So generally the way that you try to do this is either you have somebody independent of you running your assets and making the decisions or you kind of divest. You put things into broadly based mutual funds where, you know, they're thought not to hold and cause conflicts of interest. And that's sort of what presidents have done in the past to avoid these conflicts. So there's no federal law that mandates that you have to divest from your assets.

16:24You have to put your assets in a blind trust. But it's just what's been done. And if you go back to Trump's first term, Walter Schaub was the head of the Office of Government Ethics and tried to explain to Trump that this is done so that it sets an example and the tone for the rest of your administration, that you're going to have to make sacrifices, that you're going to have to divest things. And it's much harder to make that case to high-ranking administration officials when the president's not doing it. Right. So what has Trump said about why he hasn't done this, why he hasn't stuck to this precedent, why he hasn't sent the signal?

16:58His famous line is that the president can't have a conflict of interest beyond that. He says that his assets are managed independently. It doesn't have anything to do with it. I certainly don't believe that the president has time to sit around day trading the Bloomberg terminal on his desk. I don't think he's doing that. But the problem is, is that there's no kind of blind trust. And he has to see because he has to sign the disclosures about what he's been buying. So he knows what he owns and he knows what's going on with his businesses. And I think that that's what creates, you know, the real sense that there are conflicts of interest that play out potentially every day in his administration.

17:35Yeah, as Trump was departing for North Dakota ahead of July 4th celebrations, he spoke to this question. What message does this send to average Americans, especially those who may be struggling right now financially? I don't get involved in my personal. We have funds that run my money. But you are benefiting. Well, I've made a lot of money before I became president. And they invest my money and I don't talk to them. I don't even speak to them. What do we know about how Trump's money is managed? What we know is what the disclosures tell us, which isn't a whole lot. He has eight separate investment accounts.

18:10Where those accounts are held, who manages them, we don't know. That's not part of the information that they provided us with. We know that he's making huge amounts of trades. In the most recent year, he was making, on average,$85 per trading day. And lots of times within the same company will be traded, like, sometimes on the same day. So there's a huge amount of churn, a huge amount. And most of these trades, interestingly enough, are between$1 ,000 and$15 ,000, which doesn't sound like a lot of money. but it certainly adds up. And the president has said he has nothing to do with any of these decisions.

18:47They're independently managed. The trades follow indexes. They're the automatic trades in all kinds of companies with business before the federal government. And it does kind of raise certain questions about what kind of investment strategy are they following? We don't know what indexes they're following. They do look like, in fairness, given the volume of trades and the number of trades. Like this is some kind of automated trading strategy. But at the same time, it does raise these questions. There's huge trading activity around the times that there's huge trading activity for everybody else.

19:21You know, when he started putting tariffs on foreign countries that cause all kinds of market activity. And as you mentioned, he's making a really remarkable amount of these trades. His disclosure showed he made 21 ,000 trades in 2025, an average of 85 trades per day. It's a very aggressive trading strategy. Yeah. What do we know about how much he made on these trades? That's very hard to say because of the way that the disclosures report the activity. So it'll give you a range in which the asset price or sale price was, but you don't know what time the trade was made. You don't know exactly how many shares were sold.

20:01So you really can't chart his performance over time. Instead, you're left with these broad ranges that really don't tell you that much. Because if you look at the total volume of his trades, it could be as much as like$1.8 billion. So he could have made a killing. He could have gotten, you know, lost his shirt on a particular trade. You know, this is sort of the problem with the disclosures are not very detailed in that sense. Many of the transactions that were disclosed involve big companies that have business with the federal government. What are the rules around trading equities or investing in the stock market as president?

20:38There really are none. In the same way with members of Congress that, you know, they're allowed to trade equities. Several members do, several members don't. Sometimes they use like an independent person to try to shield them from any kind of appearance of impropriety. But generally speaking, you know, that elected officials are allowed to trade in the market. This is very different from appointees that if you were the head of a treasury or commerce or defense, there's a huge amount of ethical review if you want to trade something or buy something. And the stuff that these folks are investing in users are those broad-based mutual funds that don't cause conflicts of interest.

21:16They're not buying individual equities. It's incredibly rare to see that happen at that level. But the person who's their boss is allowed to trade stocks. And Trump is certainly the first president to trade like this. Yeah, I mean, some of the companies that he bought and traded shares of include Amazon, NVIDIA, Netflix. I can think of a lot of federal policies that impact these companies on the day to day. These are companies that the Trump administration has done deals with directly in some cases. Certainly a lot of people have been talking about, you know, the number of trades that he's made with companies that have business before the government, like NVIDIA, like Amazon, including companies that, you know, he's met with their CEOs.

21:57He's touted their stocks. He's talked about what great companies some of these organizations are. A number of Democrats in Congress have been somewhat upset about this and been raising questions about the timing of these trades. I can tell you one thing with certainty. If Democrats take the majority in either the House or the Senate, this would be one of the things they'll be looking at very closely. Is there a risk for Trump that these disclosures could lead to legal action or further investigation? Certainly further investigation. I think the real fallout potentially is political. When you have a president who, and let's face it, one of the big issues that we're heading into with the midterms is that people feel worse off than they did before he was elected.

22:41Obviously, they didn't feel great under the Biden economy either, but with the Iran war, with the rise in gas prices, with other prices staying up or not coming down as quickly, and he had promised that he was going to solve the price problem. And instead, when he's making$1.4 billion off of crypto and a lot of money off of other things and stock trades and everything else and talking about, well, he's doing fine because the stock market is doing fine. That's the kind of message that rubs the wrong way. And I think that people start to think, well, maybe this president isn't on my side.

23:17This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.