Today on Morning Joe, Steve Rattner charts how the Trump family turned the presidency into the most profitable business of Donald Trump’s life.
Seemingly with each passing day, more revelations emerge of the extraordinary financial “success” of the Trump family. We shouldn’t be surprised. Donald Trump and his sons have been clear that the more traditional approach to avoiding conflicts of interest that marked the first term was not going to be maintained during the second term. “The first term, we did everything imaginable to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and frankly, we got crushed anyway,” Eric Trump told The New York Times in late 2024. “We can’t just sit out in perpetuity, and I won’t,” he said.
Last week, President Trump released his 2025 financial disclosure, and Forbes estimated that his net worth had more than doubled, to $6.5 billion from $3.1 billion in 2019. How did Trump achieve such remarkable success? Not in his traditional stomping grounds of hotels and hospitality but in the new territory of cryptocurrencies and social media. After having disparaged crypto since it emerged as a new financial instrument, Trump embraced it, to the point of now having $2.1 billion of holdings. And he launched a public company, Trump Media, on the back of Truth Social.
That’s just the president. His sons have been busy following Eric Trump’s signal. Donald Trump Jr. joined a venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, whose assets quickly jumped to $1 billion from $150 million. The firm then invested in a number of companies that quickly garnered federal money – a total of more than $800 million. The biggest piece of this was a $620 million Pentagon loan (the largest ever from the Office of Strategic Capital). ProPublica reported that the White House initiated the request to the Pentagon.
Much of the family’s success came at the expense of the public. Reuters calculated that the Trump family garnered $2.3 billion from four crypto ventures while individual investors lost almost exactly the same amount. Each followed a similar pattern: The family launched a coin or token and sold them to the public, pocketing both the proceeds and an additional fee every time one of the tokens changed hands. More than $600 million came from $TRUMP, a token with no intrinsic value or use purpose.
The flagship token has been $WLFI, which also has no use case (other than some theoretical governance rights). The coin, which was launched last August, quickly jumped to 31 cents each and then fell steadily, to less than 6 cents, a fall of more than 80% — a classic “pump and dump” scheme. That alone put $1.1 billion into the Trump family coffers. “Fun fact”: Two days before the inauguration, the national security adviser to the United Arab Emirates bought 49% of the venture for $500 million.
Trump’s family has also used the presidency to garner an estimated $13 billion in foreign investment capital. The biggest piece came from Qatar, a $5.5 billion commitment to a golf resort. Meanwhile, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, which raised almost $3 billion after Trump’s first term from Persian Gulf countries, raised another $2.7 billion from these same investors, much of it while Kushner was serving as a principal Middle East negotiator.
Then there’s clemency, which turns out to have a price. Many of the happy recipients of pardons from the President provided him with substantial financial benefits. Some sent money to his inaugural committee. Others contributed to his Super PAC. But crypto pardons appear to have yielded the biggest rewards to the family; Binance’s CZ Zhao parked $2 billion in another of the family’s tokens, USD1, to receive clemency. It was estimated that the pardons cost the U.S. Treasury and victims at least $1.5 billion in forgone penalties and restitution.
