Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion – The New Yorker
Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion
In August, I reported that the President and his family had made $3.4 billion by leveraging his position. After his first year back in office, the number has ballooned.
By David D. Kirkpatrick, January 31, 2026
Illustration by Erik CarterAt the start of Donald Trump’s first term, he promised that he and his family would never do anything that might even be “perceived to be exploitive of office of the Presidency.” By contrast, his second term looks rapacious. He and members of his family have signed a blitz of foreign mega-deals shadowed by conflicts of interest, and they’ve launched at least five different cryptocurrency enterprises, all of which leverage Trump’s status as President to lure buyers or investors. Ethics watchdogs say that no other President has ever so nakedly exploited his position, or on such a scale. Trump recently explained to the Times why he cast aside his former restraint: “I found out that nobody cared.”
Is Trump right about the public’s nonchalance?
Last summer, I tallied how much money he and his immediate family had made off his high office. My method was conservative. It seemed unfair to begrudge Trump the profits from the many businesses he owned before entering the White House. So I excluded from my calculation preëxisting hotels, condos, and golf courses, along with plausible extensions of those long-standing businesses. Likewise, Trump is hardly the first President to trade access or potential influence for political fund-raising, and he generally cannot spend such money on personal expenses, so I set that aside, too. Lastly, I left out funny-money assets he couldn’t readily cash out without setting off a fire sale that would eviscerate their value, such as his shares in the company behind Truth Social, his social-media platform.
Even excluding all that, by August, the Presidential profiteering reached $3.4 billion. (You can review my judgments in the article, “The Number.”) And since then the First Family has kept busy. The end of Trump’s first year in office seemed an opportune time for an update. Did the family business slow down or speed up for the Trumps?
AMERICAN BITCOIN REDUX
Many investors and consumers understandably distrust cryptocurrency and digital finance. Crypto heists are alarmingly common, and the best-known uses of digital currency are money laundering and casino-like financial speculation. President Trump himself, before his most recent campaign, maintained that Bitcoin “seems like a scam” and that crypto “can facilitate unlawful behavior.” But an association with a sitting President can furnish a valuable credibility boost. Think of the premium that investors will pay for U.S. Treasury bonds compared to notes from some little-known bank. That appears, in a nutshell, to be the Trump family’s strategy with crypto.
The Trumps’ first windfall since my August tally occurred through American Bitcoin, a company that mines new bitcoin with the intent to hoard it. (Under the algorithm that created bitcoin, miners get paid in new tokens for the computer work of tracking digital transactions.) Last spring, Eric and Donald Trump, Jr., contributed their family name—and nothing else of obvious value—to a complicated series of transactions that yielded them approximately a thirteen-per-cent stake in American Bitcoin.
Eric, who is now listed as its co-founder and chief strategy officer, has become the company’s public face. If Eric and Donald, Jr.,’s father had lost the 2024 election, surely no one would have handed them such a large stake in a business that they had virtually no experience in and to which they had contributed so little—so their stake should be categorized as Presidential profit. In August, I calculated that the brothers’ thirteen-per-cent stake in the company’s computer hardware alone added at least thirteen million dollars to the family’s profiteering tally.
In September, the company floated shares on the stock market, capitalizing in another way on the cachet of the Trump name. American Bitcoin merged with a penny-stock bitcoin miner as a way of going public without the cost—or scrutiny—of an initial public offering. And the stock market, as expected, has put a far higher price on the company, in part because it owns a stockpile of bitcoin. The brothers’ stake now appears to be worth around two hundred million dollars. A caveat: Eric Trump, as a large and active investor in American Bitcoin, must report any sale of shares, and that might trigger a selloff. So it seems excessive to add it all to the Presidential-profit ledger. I will add only the approximate value of Donald Trump, Jr.,’s stake: about a hundred million dollars.
The number in August: $3.4 billion
Additional profit: $100 million
New total: $3.5 billion
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion | The New Yorker
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