Trump Grows Richer From Crypto While Regulating the Industry, Ex-Lawyer Charges

A former government ethics lawyer sounds the alarm

Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer under the George W. Bush administration, does not mince words: in his view, Donald Trump's cryptocurrency activities amount to a "clear conflict of interest," unique in recent American presidential history. Speaking to Michigan Public, he says no sitting president has ever amassed a personal fortune so directly tied to the regulatory decisions he oversees from the Oval Office.

This assessment rests on a hard-to-dispute official document: the 927-page financial disclosure report filed with the Office of Government Ethics, which details the scale of the income Trump and his family have drawn from their cryptocurrency-linked businesses over the past year.

Over a billion dollars in a single year

According to that report, Trump and his relatives pocketed more than one billion dollars from their crypto ventures in 2025 and early 2026, a sum that includes more than 500 million dollars from the World Liberty Financial platform and more than 600 million dollars from meme tokens bearing the president's likeness. The rest comes largely from media settlements and other related business ventures.

This figure places Trump in uncharted territory for a sitting American head of state, where the line between personal wealth and public policy grows harder to trace for outside observers, whether they support or criticize his administration.

The White House waves the accusations away

Faced with these revelations, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly flatly rejected any notion of conflict of interest, preferring to tout the administration's record on financial innovation. According to her, Trump's policies have made the United States the "crypto capital of the world," an argument that never actually addresses the question raised by Painter and other government ethics experts.

This communications strategy, pitting a broad economic record against a precise accusation of personal conflict of interest, has become a constant feature of how the executive branch has handled this file for months, according to several observers in Washington.

Investor losses that mirror presidential gains

A Reuters investigation separately found that the Trump family had pocketed roughly 2.3 billion dollars from its crypto activities, a sum that nearly matches the losses suffered by thousands of ordinary investors who bought tokens tied to the presidential name before their value collapsed. This parallel between presidential gains and citizen losses feeds much of the current controversy.

A platform born during the campaign, now a profit machine

World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance platform launched by people close to Trump, has become in a matter of months the main vehicle for his personal enrichment in the crypto sector. This entity has directly benefited from a regulatory climate markedly more favorable since the president took office, a climate his own appointments atop federal financial regulators helped shape.

Critics point out that this dynamic creates a hard-to-break cycle: the more the administration adopts a crypto-friendly posture, the more the value of the president's personal assets rises, with no clear separation mechanism ever put in place between his private interests and his public decisions.

Meme tokens, a phenomenon of their own

Beyond World Liberty Financial, meme tokens bearing Trump's name or image have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, often at the expense of retail buyers drawn in by the perceived proximity to executive power. This type of financial product, extremely volatile and largely unregulated, illustrates, according to several financial experts, the scale of the legal void in which these presidential activities operate.

Industry-friendly regulators appointed by the administration

Several of Trump's appointments atop federal agencies overseeing financial markets, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, have been welcomed by the crypto industry as choices particularly favorable to lighter regulation. This favorable regulatory backdrop lines up directly with the period when the president's personal income from the sector exploded.

According to several governance experts interviewed by the American financial press, this timing overlap between regulatory easing and personal enrichment is precisely the kind of situation government ethics laws are supposed to prevent, even absent proof of deliberate intent.

The absence of a blind trust, a contested choice

Unlike other presidents who placed their financial assets in a blind trust to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest, Trump has never adopted such a measure for his crypto holdings, a choice that directly fuels the criticism from Richard Painter and other former government ethics officials across the political spectrum.

Criticism from every corner of the political spectrum

Notably, the criticism voiced by Richard Painter, himself a former Republican turned independent, echoes that of government watchdog organizations traditionally associated with diverse political leanings. This cross-partisan convergence on the specific question of the crypto conflict of interest shows that the problem extends well beyond Washington's usual fault lines.

Several Democratic lawmakers have also demanded hearings in Congress on this file, without success so far, as the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate has so far blocked any attempt at a formal inquiry into the president's crypto-linked financial activities.

A financial disclosure system put to the test

This file is stress-testing a federal financial disclosure system designed at a time when American presidents generally did not hold direct interests in emerging, lightly regulated technology sectors like cryptocurrency. The Office of Government Ethics, tasked with collecting these disclosures, has no binding power to impose a structural separation between a president's personal holdings and his regulatory decisions.

Several constitutional scholars believe this legal void could encourage future presidents, regardless of party, to replicate this kind of financial arrangement if no reform arrives before the end of the current term.

The press's role in bringing the file to light

It is largely thanks to the investigative work of outlets like the New York Times and Reuters that the scale of these presidential crypto earnings could be documented with precision, with the official financial disclosure report alone remaining difficult to interpret without that complementary journalistic work.

Other Western democracies impose stricter rules

Several Western democracies, including Canada, the United Kingdom and most European Union countries, impose far stricter asset-separation rules on their leaders than those currently in force in the United States. This international comparison, regularly cited by governance experts, underscores how much of an outlier the current American case is among the major Western democracies this columnist otherwise defends without reservation on geopolitical grounds.

This creates an uncomfortable paradox: the United States, which traditionally presents itself as a model of institutional transparency against authoritarian regimes like China or Russia, now finds itself lagging behind its own Western allies on this specific question of presidential financial ethics.

Polls reveal cross-partisan unease

Several opinion polls published in recent weeks show a majority of Americans, across the political spectrum, say they are uncomfortable with the scale of the president's personal crypto income during his term. That unease crosses the usual partisan divide, aligning with criticism voiced by experts like Richard Painter, himself from the historic Republican camp.

This convergence between public opinion and government ethics experts could, according to several political analysts, eventually weigh on discussions in Congress as the midterm elections approach, even though no concrete legislative initiative has yet emerged.

A precedent that goes beyond Trump alone

Beyond the person of the president, this file raises a broader institutional question: how should the American system of financial disclosure and ethics oversight, designed for an era when presidents held no direct interests in emerging, unregulated technology sectors, adapt to this new economic reality. Richard Painter himself insists his concern goes beyond Trump alone: it is about the very soundness of ethical guardrails for future administrations.

As long as no clear structural separation is imposed between a president's personal financial interests and his regulatory power, this kind of controversy will keep resurfacing, no matter who occupies the Oval Office.

Congress's silence, a political tell

It is striking that beyond expert statements and press coverage, no serious legislative initiative has yet been launched in Congress to more strictly regulate this kind of presidential conflict of interest. This parliamentary silence, amid extreme political polarization, illustrates how hard it is to treat this issue as anything other than a partisan matter.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

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