On MS NOW’s Morning Joe today, Steven Rattner follows the money to show how the President has made billions off his second term.
Just hours before the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner last Saturday, President Trump met with the 297 largest buyers of his meme coin at his Mar-a-Lago club, just one of many crypto-related activities that Trump has undertaken to reel in billions of dollars of profits for himself and his family. In addition to purchasing $TRUMP coins, attendees were selected based on their purchases of other Trump merchandise, including sneakers, watches and fragrances.
During Trump’s first term, his net worth dropped from $4.5 billion to $2.4 billion, partly due to limitations he voluntarily put on his business activities and partly due to the impact of Covid. Not so during Trump 2.0. No more guardrails helped Trump increase his net worth to an estimated $6.5 billion, with almost all of the increase due to a vast array of crypto activities undertaken by Trump and his family. Forbes, which tallies the fortunes of the ultra-wealthy, called crypto Trump’s “primary vehicle for enrichment.” (Note that in his first term, Trump was hostile to crypto.)
All told, according to figures compiled by David Kirkpatrick for The New Yorker, Trump’s profit from his second term as president has totaled more than $4 billion. His former communications head, Anthony Scaramucci, called it “Idi Amin-level corruption.” More than a billion dollars of his gains came from crypto purchases by Trump Media, the company controlled and largely owned by Trump that was initially launched to operate the Truth Social service. Then came nearly $400 million in profits from selling $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins. (They aren’t actually cryptocurrencies; they’re simply a kind of collectible with no intrinsic value.) Other profits came from ventures including new real estate deals, many of them with Middle Eastern partners.
The $TRUMP meme coin has functioned as a particularly egregious form of grifting. The coins were launched three days before the inauguration at about $7 and quickly traded up to $45.47. Then they began a dizzying descent (slowed only by Trump’s first summit for its largest holdings) and are now down to $2.38.
But in the course of all that volatility, there were both winners and losers. Various investigations found that there were 45 “whale wallets” – large purchasers who bought at or even before public trading began and sold at substantial profits, a total of $1.2 billion for the group. But an estimated two million retail purchasers weren’t so fortunate; they ended up losing more than $4 billion. As for the Trump family, it appears to have earned between $400 million and $600 million in trading fees and still hold 80% of the tokens.
One notable feature of Trump 2.0 has been its entanglement with foreign entities. An estimated 76% of the top purchasers of $TRUMP coins have been foreigners. Similarly, about 72% of the leading buyers of coins issued by World Liberty Financial, another Trump affiliate, have been foreigners. (Notably, the U.A.E. national security adviser bought a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial for $500 million four days before the inauguration; $187 million of that went to the Trump family; months later, the Trump administration approved the sale of 500,000 advanced semiconductors to the U.A.E., a sale that the Biden administration had blocked.)
Perhaps not surprisingly, crypto enforcement collapsed in 2025. Leading crypto companies (including Coinbase, Gemini, Robinhood, Ripple and Kraken) all had federal investigations quietly terminated after Trump took office. In addition, Trump pardoned one of the leading crypto entrepreneurs – Changpeng Zhao – after his company, Binance, financed the aforementioned U.A.E. investment in World Liberty.
