What did Donald Trump do today?

He made his daily $5.5 million, give or take, on something even he calls a "scam."

Trump's financial disclosure forms for 2025 were released today. These documents are not even close to a comprehensive or specific accounting of Trump's wealth, and given that Trump is a convicted felon because of his willingness to lie about his finances, there's reason to doubt he's told the whole truth here. Nevertheless, they do confirm some of the broad brush strokes of how sharply Trump's wealth has increased since he returned to office, and where some of it is coming.

The topline result is that Trump's net worth increased by about $2,200,000,000 in 2025, with the majority of it, $1.4 billion, coming from cryptocurrency sales and marketing. Trump called cryptocurrency a "scam" before he was able to use his resurgent political career to get into selling it.  

Trump's crypto revenue comes from two sources. One is a novelty coin, $TRUMP, which is a kind of thing usually referred to as a "shitcoin" by crypto enthusiasts: something built from the ground up not for security or ease of use or a peg to real-world value, but purely to buy low and sell high. Virtually all of the investors in $TRUMP have lost money, as the token has lost 95% of its initial value as of today.

 

Even by the Wild West standards of the crypto industry, Trump's tokens come with strings attached that make them a terrible prospect for buyers. The terms mean that every transaction, no matter who is involved, generates a fee for Trump—giving him an incentive to churn the market every so often, which he's done from the White House.

The other source is the profits from World Liberty Financial, a Trump-owned company that sells other digital tokens. It appears to exist mostly as a vehicle for bribes and influence-buying. The United Arab Emirates bought a 49% stake in the company immediately on Trump's return to office, essentially gifting him about $500 million dollars. Last year, Trump pardoned a Chinese billionaire for money laundering—but only after the recipient's company agreed to take financing on an unrelated project in Trump's crypto tokens, which made Trump millions of dollars in processing fees. A different crypto mogul saw his fraud case set aside by Trump's DOJ after he bought $90 million in Trump coins.

The figures released today do not count quasi-official pass-through "gifts" by foreign countries to entities Trump controls. One example is the $400 million luxury plane Qatar gave him to use as Air Force One came with a stipulation that Trump could retain use of it through his presidential library after leaving office. Likewise, it doesn't include the multi-billion-dollar budget of the so-called "Board of Peace" he created, funded exclusively by foreign countries with authoritarian governments. The charter of that organization gives Trump himself, not the sitting President of the United States, control of it in perpetuity.

Trump's daily take from his crypto business works out to about $5.5 million, or roughly 3.5 times what the median American earns in an entire lifetime.
 

Why does this matter?

• It's really bad that the sitting President of the United States is treating the country like a pig-butchering scam.   

• Just because the corruption happens every day doesn't make it better.

• It's wrong to sell pardons, for crypto tokens or real money.