A recent investigation alleges that since US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the Trump family’s crypto fortune has surged to over $1 billion from his multiple digital asset ventures.
The investigation explained that Trump’s crypto ventures have significantly boosted the US President’s net worth on paper by billions of dollars. However, they calculated the potential income only from the realized profits of World Liberty Financial’s WLFI token and USD1 stablecoin, and the official TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins.
According to FT’s calculations, the TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins, which launched just days before Trump took office in January, have made around $362 million and $65 million, respectively, for a total of $427 million in sales and trading fees.
Meanwhile, the report’s data estimates that the WLFI token has generated approximately $550 million so far, and potentially made $42 million from the USD1 stablecoin, which recorded $2.71 billion in total sales.
To maintain the value of USD1, the company must hold assets in reserve to back the token, so sales of these coins do not immediately become profits. But if the money raised from the sales had been placed into short-term US debt, World Liberty Financial would have made around $40mn in interest and fees from the assets it holds to back its USD1 stablecoin so far.
“At that time, I realized how fragile the financial system was and how easily it could be weaponized against you,” he stated in August, claiming that the decisions were likely political, leading him and his family to turn to the industry.
As the report noted, the questions about potential conflicts of interest mount, with many highlighting that, unlike most of his predecessors, President Trump has not put his crypto ventures in a trust managed by an independent party. Instead, most of his businesses are owned by a revocable trust, of which he is the sole beneficiary, and managed by his son Donald Trump Jr.
Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush, told FT that he believes President Trump should divest from all financial interests that potentially pose a conflict with his official responsibilities.
“Every other president since the Civil War has avoided any significant financial conflicts of interest with their official duties,” Painter added. Nonetheless, the White House has argued that in his first term, Trump was the only president to lose money in office and “His sole motivation to leave behind his life of luxury to run for office was to save our country and people.”
