Trump’s presidency is a cash grab

According to Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president is a very generous man. “I am proud to be the only President (with the possible exception of the Late, Great George Washington) to donate my Salary,” he said in a Truth Social post. “My first ‘Paycheck’ went to the White House Historical Association, as we make much needed renovations to the beautiful ‘People’s House.’”

In his first term, Trump made a big show about donating his government salary. And he’s doing the same now too. The whole spectacle is just that: Trump is trying to imply that he doesn’t need the presidency, and that he’s not interested in making money through the job Americans elected him to do.

Trump’s 2020 tax returns cast doubt on whether he has donated every paycheck as president. But regardless of how much of his salary Trump is actually donating, it’s clear that the presidency has greatly benefited Trump financially. From the very beginning, Trump has used the presidency as a money-making instrument, using his perch from the White House to funnel money into his businesses. When he first won the presidency in 2016, foreign governments started spending money on his private businesses by staying at his hotels. The Secret Service spent millions of dollars — taxpayers’ money — on Trump’s properties. And Trump never divested from his businesses to ensure that there would be no conflict of interest.

Now, in his second term, the way Trump is profiting from the presidency is more brazen than ever before. While running his campaign in 2024, Trump’s media company went public, allowing anyone to buy a stake in his business. He has made millions selling Trump-branded merchandise, from cologne to sneakers to bibles. He even accepted a plane worth hundreds of millions of dollars — which will be transferred to his presidential library after he leaves the White House — from the Qatari government.

But to put into perspective just how much money Trump is extracting from the presidency, look no further than the Trump family’s crypto ventures. Just before his second inauguration, Trump launched a meme coin, as did his wife, Melania Trump — a blatant display of how the Trumps use the presidency for financial gain. If Trump weren’t about to become president when they launched these coins, then would they have attracted as many investors as they did?

So just how much money is Trump actually making from the presidency?

The amount of money Trump is making from his crypto schemes dwarfs the government salary that he routinely reminds people that he donates. Since 2001, American presidents have made a salary of $400,000 a year. So that’s about the amount of money Trump says he selflessly donates. But since becoming president in January, Trump and his family have made billions from their crypto businesses, at least on paper.

Earlier this month, the Trump family’s latest venture, World Liberty Financial — which was co-founded by Trump’s three sons and lists Trump himself as “co-founder emeritus” — opened trading on its crypto token, $WLFI. Previously, people bought WLFI tokens privately through World Liberty Financial, but weren’t able to trade them. Now, it’s all public, and WLFI tokens can be bought and sold on the open market. This latest launch alone has expanded the Trump family’s net worth by as much as $5 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. While those gains only exist on paper for now, since the Trumps can’t sell their tokens yet, it’s a window into just how much money the presidency is generating for the Trump family.

But that’s not all. The meme coins they launched in the days before Trump’s inauguration — $TRUMP and $MELANIA — have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, according to the New Yorker.

It’s hard to pin down an exact number when it comes to how much money the president and his family have made from these sorts of schemes, in large part because the Trumps aren’t exactly known for transparency into their finances. Moreover, much of the wealth they’ve generated remains unrealized, since they haven’t sold all of their assets. But while the Trump family’s various businesses — from finance to Trump-branded merchandise to his media company — have hauled in hundreds of millions of dollars, all of those ventures pale in comparison to the family’s crypto earnings.

What’s clear is that Trump and his family have leveraged the presidency to draw investors to their cryptocurrencies and greatly expanded their collective wealth as a result. Since becoming president, Trump himself has more than doubled his net worth, from an estimated $2.3 billion in 2024 to more than $5 billion this year, according to Forbes.

What makes this all the more alarming is just how nakedly corrupt these crypto investments are. Just like when Trump made Truth Social a publicly traded company, the Trump family’s crypto coins allow anyone to invest money to boost Trump’s wealth. And what might draw people to do that is not just their love or admiration for the president, but the potential opportunity to curry favor with him and his administration. In fact, earlier this year, Trump hosted a dinner at his Virginia golf club for the top investors in his $TRUMP coin. To put it more plainly, that wasn’t some kind of elite political fundraiser, where rich donors gather to fill a campaign fund for the next election. Trump was instead actively luring people to heavily invest in his private business — to enrich him personally — by promising investors an opportunity to gain access to the president of the United States.

So while Trump likes to tout his donations — particularly his paycheck giveaways — as evidence of his generosity, that is just for show. In the end, how much more brazenly corrupt could the president be than hosting a private dinner for his top investors? With Trump, it’s impossible to know the answer, because he seems to keep finding more blatant ways to turn the presidency into a money grab.