OPINION:
Standing in front of the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office on Monday, President Trump invoked George Washington to justify his family’s extraordinary financial windfall since returning to power.
“George Washington had two desks,” Mr. Trump said. “One was for business, and one was for the presidency.”
As usual with Mr. Trump’s grand declarations, historians have found no evidence that’s true. But the claim reveals something important: The 47th president is not embarrassed by the blurring of his public duties and private profits. In fact, he is brazenly proud of it.
Mr. Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure tells a story unlike anything else in the history of the American presidency. His net worth has nearly tripled since the start of his second term, reaching $6.5 billion. In a single year back in the White House, he made more than $2 billion — from cryptocurrency, hotels, golf courses, cellphones, watches, cologne and Bibles bearing his name.
The only thing he is apparently not selling is snake oil. (He gives that away for free at his rabid MAGA events, and his supporters slurp it down like lemonade on a hot day.)
This is not the story of a wealthy man maintaining his fortune. This is the story of a sitting president systematically monetizing the most powerful office on earth.
The engine of Mr. Trump’s enrichment is crypto. Since launching his $TRUMP memecoin in the days before his second inauguration, Mr. Trump and his family have netted more than $1 billion from cryptocurrency ventures.
His sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. serve as the operational architects of this empire. They formally oversee their father’s business interests while he is in office — an arrangement the White House insists creates a meaningful separation between the president and his profits. Of course, it does nothing of the sort.
Eric and Don Jr. co-founded World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto firm. They manage it. They promote it. They travel the world on its behalf. (Eric Trump recently flew to Hong Kong to tout Bitcoin while his father negotiated trade policy with Asia.)
WLF generated more than $800 million in revenue in 2025 alone, with $515 million from token sales and $65 million from equity sales in the company’s holding firm. The president claims he never discusses any of this with his suddenly filthy rich sons. “I don’t talk to them — ever — talk to them about it,” he said.
He then added, with his trademark smirk, “I’m allowed to! I think. I’m allowed to. But I don’t bother.”
But in a recent TV interview, the president offered a blow-it-off defense. “Almost anything my kids do,” he told CNBC, “they have inside information.”
Wait, what?
Mr. Trump’s crypto windfall comes with a victim class he rarely acknowledges: his own investors. Nearly 1 million people who purchased $TRUMP lost a combined $3.8 billion as the coin’s value collapsed 97% from its peak. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, made $635 million from those same transactions — collecting fees every time the coin changed hands, regardless of whether buyers profited or lost everything.
The crypto empire is only part of the picture. In February, Mr. Trump purchased up to $5 million in shares of Axon Enterprise — the maker of Tasers, body cameras and policing software. Two weeks later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted a notice seeking a five-year, $220-million contract for roughly 17,800 new Tasers, with specifications that procurement experts told CNBC appeared tailored specifically to Axon’s products.
The company already holds about 90% of the U.S. Taser market. Axon’s stock rose more than 34% in the week after the ICE notice.
Maybe it was all a wild coincidence. After all, Mr. Trump’s disclosures with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, made public on May 14, show more than 3,700 transactions.
There is no evidence that Mr. Trump directed the Axon procurement. And under federal law, presidents are explicitly exempt from the conflict-of-interest statutes that apply to every other executive branch official.
The White House called the scrutiny a “tired narrative.” But ethics experts note that the law’s silence on presidential conflicts does not make those conflicts any less real — or any less corrosive to public trust.
Eric Trump has explained the family’s shift in posture between the first and second terms with striking directness. “The first term we did everything imaginable to avoid any appearance of impropriety,” he said, “and frankly, we got crushed anyway.”
The lesson learned was not to be more careful. It was to stop pretending. Do what you want; you’ll get away with it.
That is, perhaps, the most consequential development of all. President Trump’s presidency has not just bent ethical norms; it has abandoned the pretense that such norms matter.
His administration is, without serious contest, the most brazenly self-enriching in American history, and it is operating in plain sight, daring anyone to do something about it.
So far, no one has.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com.
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