Geoff Bennett:
Welcome to the “News Hour.”
President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosure shows his various businesses generated more than $2 billion in income in 2025, his first year back in the White House.
Amna Nawaz:
That is more than triple his reported income from the year before. The biggest gains came from the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures. The president was asked about his finances this morning before leaving for North Dakota.
President Donald Trump:
You know, you saw the cash, and you report the different things. And what they do is, we gave it, I think it’s called a blind account, but they basically — they take it.
And I purposely — I never speak to any of the people that run the money, but they’re at big institutions, and they invest in whatever they invest in.
Amna Nawaz:
For more on this, we turn now to Eric Lipton. He’s an investigative journalist for The New York Times and has reported on President Trump’s business interests for years.
Eric, thanks for joining us.
Before we talk more broadly about his finances, I want to ask specifically about a big chunk of it that’s from cryptocurrency specifically. The president made more than a billion dollars just from crypto businesses in his first year as president. Break that down for us. How did he do that?
Eric Lipton, The New York Times:
The two biggest chunks come from his meme coin, which he launched three days before his inauguration. It was a kind of a collectible that surged in value initially, and the people who quickly invested made a boatload of money, but then it crashed, and hundreds of thousands of people then lost money.
Trump made hundreds of millions of dollars from that gamble that he asked people to follow on him on. And many of his followers ended up as losers. The second big chunk of revenue comes from World Liberty Financial, a company that he and his sons started in October of 2024.
That company is now one of the biggest issuers of what’s called stablecoins in the world, and it was bought secretly and — half of it — by the United Arab Emirates in January of 2025, just as he was being sworn in to be president.
And the UAE separately has invested $2 billion into its stablecoin, making it one of the biggest stablecoin issuers in the world. So, I mean, the it is really intensely tied up with a foreign government. And the president is profiting from that foreign government’s investment in his own business at the same time as he is acting as commander in chief and working with that foreign government to negotiate a war in the Middle East.
Amna Nawaz:
And we should say it’s not just crypto that’s fueling the president’s wealth. What other businesses and ventures and deals and settlements contributed to his income last year?
Eric Lipton:
I mean, there are new real estate deals in the Middle East, in Vietnam, in Romania, in the Maldives. He’s struck a bunch of deals that include some deals that are actually with foreign governments, like the government of Saudi Arabia and in Qatar as well.
And then there are, as you mentioned, settlements from lawsuits and that are being paid to him from media companies. And there’s also money in there from Melania, from Jeff Bezos and Amazon for the documentary. I mean, there’s just — it’s quite a crazy array of sources of revenue going to a sitting president.
We just — there’s nothing like this in American history.
Amna Nawaz:
And more than $80 million in settlements, according to your reporting there, from some various networks and others.
But what about what we just heard from the president there about how his finances are structured? He says his investments are run by other people, it’s in a blind account, that he doesn’t talk to the people making those investments. Is that all true?
Eric Lipton:
He was referring there specifically to his stock trades. And his stock trades are handled by professional investors who they assert to my colleague Ben Protess that they are making those individual stock purchases, and there are thousands of them, but they are making them without consulting with President Trump or his family.
So that specific quote that you pulled from, he was referring only to his stock and trades, which there are hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stock trades. Again, unheard of that a president is — at least in his name, is seeing this much buying and selling of stocks while he’s president of the United States.
Amna Nawaz:
You know, in a statement to our White House correspondent, Liz Landers, the White House spokesperson, Anna Kelly, said this in part.
She said: “Neither the president nor his family has ever engaged or will ever engage in conflicts of interest. All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”
Eric, I guess the big question here is, if Mr. Trump was not president, could he or would he have made the same amount of money that he did?
Eric Lipton:
It’s hard to imagine that if he were not president that there would — that his meme coin or — it would be as profitable as it has been, or that there would have been the scale of investment in World Liberty Financial and the stablecoin.
It is — it seems as if his status as president is intimately intertwined with the success of those companies. And, I mean, the fact that he launched the meme coin as they were gathering in an auditorium in D.C. three days before his inauguration for what was called the Crypto Ball — it was a bunch of crypto executives and administration — soon-to-be administration officials there to celebrate his inauguration.
And that’s the night he launched it. And it was like, follow me as I lead the world. These things are so intertwined, I think it’s hard to imagine he would have made as much money. He’s never made this much money in his entire life as he’s made in this one year. So I think that’s part of your answer right there.
Amna Nawaz:
And in less than a minute or so we have left, how does that compare to how past presidents have handled their finances while in office?
Eric Lipton:
Again, nothing anything remotely like this from any president in the history of the United States. Other presidents for the most part have attempted to disassociate themselves from investments that could create conflicts of interest.
Famously, Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm into an independent — with an independent trustee. Lady Bird Johnson sold off radio stations — or — I’m sorry — hired an outside lawyer to run radio stations when her husband became president after Kennedy was killed. I mean, again and again, we see — George W. Bush sold his stake in the Texas Rangers.
We see presidents who are looking for ways to avoid conflicts, whereas President Trump has embraced all kinds of new businesses that bring conflicts.
Amna Nawaz:
Eric Lipton, investigative journalist for The New York Times joining us tonight.
Eric, thank you so much.
Eric Lipton:
Thank you.
