Donald Trump made at least $2.2 billion in his first year back in the White House, according to a mandatory financial disclosure report made public Tuesday. Historians say the figure is without precedent in the history of the American presidency.
According to BBC News, Trump made $1.4 billion from the cryptocurrency industry alone. That includes $635 million in royalties from Celebration Coins, the entity believed to be behind the $TRUMP meme coin he launched just before beginning his second term. He also reported more than $500 million from the cryptocurrency business World Liberty Financial, which was founded by his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, along with the sons of Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy to the Middle East and Ukraine.
Trump's 2025 income was nearly four times higher than the $622 million he reported in 2024, the year before he returned to office.
Presidential historians said the numbers broke with every modern norm around presidents and personal financial gain.
"There's just no precedent for this," said Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. "It's beyond anything we've ever seen in the presidency."
The White House pushed back on the characterization that Trump had benefited financially from the presidency.
"Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged - or will ever engage - in conflicts of interest," White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement. She added: "All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people – and any so-called 'reporters' pushing otherwise are recycling the same, tired, false narrative that Democrats and the legacy media have been pushing for a decade."
The disclosure report drew comparisons to earlier presidents who took deliberate steps to separate their finances from the office. Harry Truman left the White House with no income other than his Army pension of $113 per month. He later wrote that it was wrong to commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency. George W. Bush placed his investments in a blind trust before running for president and said in his final week in office that he had no idea how the 2008 economic crisis had affected his net worth.
Past presidents have faced financial scandals before. Historians point to the period after the Civil War, when officials in the treasury department under President Ulysses Grant were involved in scandals around gold sales and customs collection.
