Harry Truman left the White House without any income other than his Army pension of $113 per month. The 33rd US president later wrote that it was wrong to "commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency". George W Bush put his investments in a blind trust before running for president, and said in his last week in office that he had no idea how the 2008 economic crisis affected his net worth. Donald Trump, in contrast, made at least $2.2bn (£1.7bn) in his first year back in office, according to a new financial disclosure report - a sum historians said was unprecedented and shattered the norm of US presidents avoiding financial conflicts of interest in the White House. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
"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." Trump's massive 2025 earnings laid bare just how much he has benefited from his return to office, through money-making ventures that often blurred the line between official government policymaking and private business dealings by the president, his family and close advisers. Trump made $1.4bn in the cryptocurrency industry alone, according to the mandatory financial disclosure that was made public on Tuesday. Trump reported $635m in royalties from Celebration Coins, the entity thought to be behind the $TRUMP meme coin he launched just before starting his second term. The president also reported more than $500m from the cryptocurrency business World Liberty Financial. The firm was founded by his sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, and 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 $622m he reported in 2024, the year before he returned to office.
The White House has denied that Trump and his family were profiting 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." Past presidents have been involved in financial scandals that raised questions of corruption. 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, among other controversies. The interior department secretary accepted bribes in exchange for awarding oil leases during Warren Harding's presidency in the 1920s, an episode known as the Teapot Dome scandal. But in those cases, the president was not directly involved or accused of personally enriching himself while in office. In the modern era starting with Franklin D Roosevelt's presidency in 1933, several presidents have had relatives who sought to profit from their ties to White House. Jimmy Carter's brother promoted a beer brand. While Joe Biden served as vice-president, his son Hunter Biden made money from a Ukrainian energy company. But historians said those past examples pale in comparison to the profits made by Trump and his family business since he returned to office. "This is the big distinction between Trump and his family and other presidents," said Perry. "Making money hand over fist in office, it's not illegal but it is unethical. Most [past] presidents didn't want to do that." Before starting his first term in 2017, Trump handed control of his family business, the Trump Organization, to his adult sons. But the move broke with the precedent set by past presidents because Trump did not place his business interests in a traditional blind trust or divest from his real estate holdings and other investments. Trump took similar steps ahead of his second term. The Trump Organization said before his second inauguration that he would not be involved in the company's day-to-day dealings while serving as president. Eric Trump said at the time that the Trump Organization would follow "robust ethical standards" during the president's second term. Still, Trump has made a number of moves in the White House that have benefited his business as well as businesses tied to other senior administration officials.