How Trump made $2.2B US in his 1st year back in office

U.S. President Donald Trump earned at least $2.2 billion US from investments since returning to the White House in 2025.

Most of that money came from cryptocurrency, including his own business, World Liberty Financial, and “meme” coins. American historians say no previous sitting president has ever earned quite as much.

Washington correspondents Paul Hunter, Willy Lowry and guest host Katie Nicholson explore how Trump made money in crypto, how it compares to past presidents’ earnings and how much it matters in the end to voters.    

We’ve included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the podcast.

WATCH | How did Trump make so much money in 2025?:

Willy Lowry: Let’s give this a little context. How does this all compare to what previous presidents have done to avoid accusations of using their position for personal gain? 

Paul Hunter: Well, this is the thing. I mean, and it’s not just presidents. I mean, Mark Carney has put his holdings in a blind trust while he’s prime minister. Bill Clinton did that. George W. Bush did that. Barack Obama and Joe Biden did not. But whatever holdings they had in stocks and what have you, they sold into cash or mutual funds. They cash out essentially during their time in office.

What presidents tend to do is make their money after, and it is a very lucrative afterlife through speeches, which command many tens and tens of thousands of dollars per speech. Ex-presidents, especially Barack Obama, including with his books, have made a lot of money outside the Oval Office. But that’s the point, right? For a lot of people, it’s acceptable to make money when you’re not in a position to influence policy. And that, I think, gets to the heart of all of this.

The difference with Donald Trump is all this is happening while he’s in a position to influence policy, the laws and regulations that govern the things that he is investing in, even if it’s through his family, which isn’t a blind trust. When Eric is managing his money, that is not a blind trust. The blind trust is somebody completely else who you have no real relationship with, there’s a wall between you and the person who is overseeing all that. That’s the difference here. Trump is, it’s not a blind trust, and this is happening while he’s in office as president of the United States and in a position to influence policy. 

Willy Lowry: So Katie, is this, this cannot be, uh, is this an outlier? I mean, have past presidents been surrounded by kind of these potential conflict of interests? 

Katie Nicholson: I mean you go back and Andrew Jackson brings in the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and here’s a guy who for years had been a land speculator, right?

Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, her family’s media holdings. There was always questions swirling around as a senator and even as a president. Some FCC [Federal Communications Commission] decisions that were seen to potentially benefit those empires, even though he held the, or the family held, the media empire in a blind trust during his time in the Oval Office.

And then, of course, Nixon, right? So, the way in which that, over a five-year period, he was able to enrich himself, and that included major real estate acquisitions with the help of an industrialist friend, which of course raises a lot of issues around influence. And the New York Times did some fantastic reporting around that back in the ’70s.

You see from vice-president Spiro Agnew, of course, accused of taking kickbacks from Maryland. These guys sort of leave under this sort of sheen of shame cast over them. And then you see a wave of new changes to accountability, to what is presidential propriety and rules for presidential power, laws that have existed for a couple of decades.

And now we’re at this moment where you see some legal scholars saying now, wait a second, it’s time to actually build on these, give them some teeth and sort of confront this moment now. So I guess the question is, so what happens right? When there is a change in government, eventually, do you confront this head-on, do you make the changes or do you just hope all the norms that have been busted over the last eight to whatever, 12 years, do you just hope it just kind of goes back?