Senate Democrats urge Wall Street groups to reject Truth Social data feed
President Donald Trump’s business interests earned $2.2bn in 2025 revenue, at least $1.4bn of it from crypto, according to financial disclosure forms he filed in June and The Guardian’s reporting on those documents. Ethics specialists, former federal officials and congressional Democrats described the earnings as an unprecedented monetization of the presidency, pointing to a paid early-access product on Truth Social, a $10bn lawsuit settlement against the Internal Revenue Service, and a $400m plane Trump accepted from Qatar.
The disclosure forms showed Trump earned $1.4bn in 2025 from crypto — a reversal for a president who in 2021 called crypto a “scam” and a “disaster waiting to happen.” Trump shifted his position after the industry poured millions into his 2024 campaign and pledged to make the United States “the crypto capital of the world” with less regulation.
“Trump has figured out a way to monetize the presidency, political power and public policy in ways no other president has achieved,” Princeton historian Julian Zelizer told The Guardian. “In the first term, he created the thinnest of firewalls between his business and policy. In the second term, he didn’t put up any firewall and smashed all guardrails that existed.” Zelizer added that “the precedent is dangerous in general, as we are moving to a virtually unregulated era where there will be unending opportunities for corruption.”
Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at American University, said Trump “has openly rejected restraints on presidential conflicts of interests and is using the powers of the presidency, both real and imagined, to financially benefit his and his family’s business interests on an unprecedented level.” Noble said Trump “reported his business holdings earned over $2bn” in the first year of his second term, adding: “While Trump’s second term is less than half over, it already looks like the most openly corrupt administration in our history.” Asked about the pattern, Noble said: “Whether you’re a foreign country, a company or an individual who wants the government to approve a business deal, stop an investigation or just be a friend when you need a favor, the message is that this is a pay to play administration.”
The crypto component of Trump’s 2025 revenue included $799m from World Liberty Financial, the venture Trump and his sons launched in fall 2024 with the family of Steve Witkoff, who is now Trump’s special Middle East envoy. The disclosure forms also reported $636m from the $TRUMP memecoin, which Trump began marketing days before his January 2025 inauguration. The same disclosures coincided with steep losses for many retail investors: Sens. Warren and Schiff wrote earlier this year to Fight Fight Fight LLC, the marketing firm for the $TRUMP token, that “We have previously raised concerns with President Trump’s willingness to use the presidency for personal profit.” The senators said “not all $TRUMP holders have benefited from their investment,” and cited a February industry report finding that $TRUMP and the first lady’s $MELANIA memecoin “erased an estimated $4.3 billion in retail wealth in recent months, with 2 million holders currently underwater.” The same report identified 45 other crypto wallets that were early $TRUMP holders and profited by about $1.2bn.
The most immediate flashpoint is the Truth Social product dubbed Truth API, which would charge institutional buyers $100,000 per month for advanced early access to Trump’s Truth Social posts. In July, Sen. Warner wrote to six major Wall Street financial trade groups urging them to “not legitimize an arrangement that sells privileged access to market-moving presidential communications, especially for the president’s personal financial benefit.” Virginia Canter, chief counsel for ethics and anti-corruption with Democracy Defenders Action, said the product is “not simply Trump’s newest act in self dealing” but “a significant escalation in exploiting and monetizing the presidency for his personal private gain.” Canter added that the offering “is a step towards normalizing insider trading and public corruption, disregarding the damage it may cause to regular investors who will not have the same access as his wealthy institutional customers.”
Canter said “Trump is increasingly dependent on the presidency to generate business profits since his media company has been losing money over the past several quarters.” Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, reported on Aug. 10 that it lost $238m in the three months through June as it branched into new businesses including crypto. In a separate July letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Schiff and Warren called the Truth Social deal “an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets, while enriching Wall Street and other wealthy insiders.”
The White House has defended Trump’s handling of his business interests. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is “abiding by all conflict-of-interest laws that are applicable to the president.” Trump told the New York Times in January that he has a “very honest family” and noted that he has not taken his presidential salary. Unlike prior presidents, Trump has declined to put his assets in a fully blind trust or divest from his businesses.
Ethics specialists have also raised questions about a Justice Department-engineered settlement of a $10bn lawsuit Trump had brought against the IRS over a leak of his tax returns. The settlement gave Trump and his family immunity from IRS audits of prior tax returns and could save him about $100m, The Guardian reported. Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor for eastern Michigan who now teaches at the University of Michigan law school, said “the biggest concern is not simply that the president is making money from his office, but the potential for corruption.” McQuade said the deal “typifies his self-dealing,” adding that “the judge assigned to the case later found that because Trump controlled both sides of the case, there was no adversity of parties to provide the court with jurisdiction. Instead, Trump used the court to legitimize what was essentially a gift to him at taxpayer expense.”
Critics have also pointed to a $400m plane Trump accepted as a gift from Qatar and to other wealthy foreign interests backing Trump family hotel and golf deals abroad, moves they say circumvent the Constitution’s prohibition on foreign emoluments.
The administration’s regulatory posture in the crypto sector has come under parallel scrutiny. Cornell economist Eswar Prasad told The Guardian that “The Trump administration has clearly shifted the priorities and focus of the government’s regulatory apparatus to look past any and all sins of the crypto industry, thereby directly benefiting the Trump family’s financial interests.” Prasad and other critics pointed to a $2bn investment in Binance by MGX, an Abu Dhabi fund, in which Trump’s World Liberty Financial played a central role: as part of the deal, MGX bought $2bn of a WLF stablecoin called USD1. Binance in 2023 pleaded guilty to U.S. money-laundering charges and other violations and was fined $4.3bn; its founder and former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, served a four-month jail term in 2024 and received a pardon from Trump last year. Internal investigators later found that about $1.7bn in crypto reportedly moved through Binance to Iranian entities linked to terrorism, The Guardian reported.
A CNN poll conducted in late July among roughly 1,225 respondents found that 66% said Trump does not put the good of the country over his personal gain, while 34% said he does. Beyond Trump personally, “monetizing his office and transactional governing style has proved lucrative to his sons, some top advisers, billionaire buddies, big donors and other allies, say critics,” The Guardian reported. McQuade called for “new rules and new consequences to protect the public from a president willing to put his own financial benefit ahead of the public interest.”