This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 11 episode of “Velshi.”
Forty-nine years ago, in January 1977, Jimmy Carter gave up his peanut farm. It was first a key feature of his political persona as a Washington outsider, but it became a potential conflict of interest as he prepared to assume the presidency.
Put simply: If Americans knew Carter stood to make money from his own decisions on agricultural policy, how could they trust him to work in their interest at all?
The country was still grappling with Watergate fallout, and Carter had campaigned on restoring public trust in government. During his time in the White House, he established strict ethics standards and demanded full financial disclosures from his entire administration.
As a result, Carter’s farm was put in a blind trust, and by the end of his term, it wound up in debt.
Of course, a rising tide lifts all Trump-branded boats. The president is not the only Trump benefiting from his position.
Almost five decades later, and nearly a year into Donald Trump’s second term, it’s clear that Carter and the current president did not approach this issue similarly.
Trump has transformed the presidency into a moneymaking enterprise that has doubled his net worth — at least — and increased the wealth of his friends and family as well.
With Carter, the public was worried about farming policies. With Trump, conflicts of interest arise in almost every pocket of policy there is. In fact, they are bound to pop up everywhere because of the fact that the president has shown he is open for business.
First with the big number: Trump has seen his net worth skyrocket since assuming the presidency, from $2.3 billion in 2024 to $6.7 billion by the end of 2025, according to Forbes. (Net worth, I should note, is a squishy number that combines actual cash on hand, debts and assets, including real estate and stock in companies.)
Before the president’s first term, his son Eric, who runs the Trump Organization, chose to swear off foreign deals while his father was in the White House. However, that doesn’t appear to be the policy this time around.
The Trump Organization has struck branding deals on real estate projects around the world, including in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and the Maldives.
Many of these deals, like the golf course in Qatar and the hotels in Saudi Arabia, involve real estate firms with close ties to their nations’ governments. These nations have received security deals, access to American markets and diplomatic cover for their authoritarian actions.
It’s unclear just how much the president and his company make from each of these licensing agreements, although each deal is estimated to be worth millions based on other licensing deals Trump has disclosed over the years.
However, most of the money the president made last year wasn’t through real estate; it was in cryptocurrency. Three days before taking the oath of office, Trump announced the launch of the Trump meme coin, a cryptocurrency with no intrinsic value besides its speculative price.
The coin shot up in value before collapsing just as quickly, but every purchase of the coin nets a fee that goes straight into the president’s pocket.
The Trump coin, and a matching meme coin named after first lady Melania Trump, have netted the president and his business partners $427 million in sales and trading fees, according to an analysis by the Financial Times.
The Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm, World Liberty Financial, has netted them hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, according to that same analysis.
In May, Eric Trump announced that a firm backed by a sovereign fund of the United Arab Emirates would be making a $2 billion investment into another company using World Liberty Financial’s crypto coin. It was a massive windfall in fees for the Trump family. Just two weeks later, the White House allowed an Emirati company, owned by the same chairman who made that $2 billion purchase, to acquire advanced computer chips from the United States. To be clear, the hundreds of millions of dollars in fees are realized, pretax profits. That doesn’t even cover the billions of dollars on paper that the president has added to his net worth simply by having an ownership stake in these companies. Speaking of which, two weeks ago, one of the president’s businesses, Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of his social media site Truth Social, got into the nuclear fusion business, merging with TAE Technologies in an all-stock deal valued at $6 billion. Trump Media had actually been losing money year-over-year, but this deal gives the company an opportunity to enter the race to fuel energy-hungry artificial intelligence data centers. Of course, a rising tide lifts all Trump-branded boats. The president is not the only Trump benefiting from his position. According to Forbes, the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has seen his net worth jump sixfold in a year. Companies funded by a venture capital firm that added him as a partner in 2024 received at least four contracts from the Trump administration, the Financial Times reported. Along with the company’s investments in Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the defense contractor Anduril, Donald Trump Jr. has made millions of dollars from contracts doled out by his own father’s administration. The first lady, meanwhile, received roughly $28 million in a licensing deal with Amazon Studios for a documentary about her, according to The Wall Street Journal. Now, obviously, unprecedented access to the first lady is worth something, but for context, Michael Jordan reportedly made $3 million for an all-access documentary of his career. The Forbes net worth index, a useful tool for studying the world’s rich and powerful, includes some fast facts on the president’s wealth portfolio. Under the “personal stats” section, it lists Trump’s source of wealth as “real estate” — but perhaps it would be more honest to say “the presidency.” Armand Manoukian and Allison Detzel contributed.
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage. Recommended
