Running for a second term may be President Donald Trump’s best business decision yet.
Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth is around $7.3 billion — a $3 billion increase from the previous year — while The New Yorker calculates that the Trump family has taken in $3.4 billion since his first term.
Trump’s business ventures since his first term ended span real estate, social media, and financial services, with some explicitly capitalizing on his political following. Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social in which he owns a 57% stake, filed applications in August for five “America First” themed exchange-traded funds, including a “Red State” product. It has all the hallmarks of $TRUMP: just three days before his inauguration, Trump launched the meme coin and soon offered its top holders a private dinner with him. He is estimated to have already pocketed $385 million from the token, which Columbia Law’s Richard Briffault has called “doubly corrupt,” given that Trump has simultaneously overseen the cryptocurrency industry’s deregulation.
Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon described Trump’s crypto ventures as the “Mount Everest of corruption” in June.
Perhaps more shocking than the scale of the cash grab is the fact that it’s possible. Trump’s ballooning fortune highlights the weak legal guardrails against presidential profiteering, fueling calls for reform once this administration ends.
“The legal framework needs to be changed,” said Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush. “I was hoping that after the first Trump administration, [Congress] would’ve passed laws that would restrict this kind of thing.” Even though Painter has spent decades warning that U.S. presidential power is ripe for corruption, he “didn’t know it would be this bad.”
Why has Trump become the CEO of America Inc.? Because he can. Here’s how he’s done it.
The Constitution’s Emoluments Clauses prohibit presidents from accepting gifts or profits from foreign states or the federal government (excluding their salary). Trump has arguably done both.
For example, in May he expressed interest in accepting a $400 million airplane from Qatar, dubbed “the palace in the sky,” to serve as Air Force One. In April, MGX — a tech firm backed by the UAE government — announced it would purchase $2 billion of the stablecoin USD1, issued by World Liberty Financial, a crypto protocol in which Trump and his sons hold a $5 billion stake.
Trump has also profited from the federal government, both implicitly — using the presidency as a marketing tool — and explicitly. The Secret Service, for instance, spent more than $1.4 million on Mar-a-Lago perimeter contracts between August 2024 and February 2025.
But the Emoluments Clauses are only enforceable through impeachment. That requires a majority in the House and a two-thirds vote in the Senate. With Republicans controlling both chambers — and Trump’s reputation for punishing intraparty critics — impeachment remains highly unlikely.
That leaves the matter to federal courts and regulators. But they are constrained, because unlike many of its allies, the U.S. has no law requiring presidents to divest from private holdings.
The criminal conflict-of-interest statute , 18 U.S. Code § 208, prohibits government employees from participating “personally and substantially” in official matters in which they or their family have a financial interest. But it does not apply to the president.
Previous presidents have voluntarily eliminated such conflicts. Jimmy Carter famously sold his peanut farm. George W. Bush sold his stake in the Texas Rangers. Trump refused to sell his businesses in 2017 because he wasn’t required to.
Since then, Trump’s empire has expanded into “two momentously important new areas: social media and cryptocurrency,” Painter told the Senate Banking Committee in July. Without divesting from crypto, he warned, Trump could “feed a financial bubble to personally profit from it” and risk a “government-sponsored pump and dump.”
Just months after World Liberty Financial launched USD1, Congress passed its first-ever crypto legislation — the GENIUS Act — creating a framework for stablecoin regulation. More broadly, Trump’s businesses have profited from a crypto boom his administration is credited with fueling. Bitcoin has more than doubled over the past year. In July, Trump Media purchased roughly $2 billion in Bitcoin and related assets.
Trump’s ventures represent “the most profound cases of presidential conflict of interest of the modern era,” Norman Eisen, executive chair of watchdog State Democracy Defenders Fund, told The Boston Globe in May.
Presidential exclusion from criminal conflict-of-interest laws was formalized in 1989, when Congress codified a carve-out. The Department of Justice had long argued that applying such laws could “disable” core constitutional duties, like signing or vetoing bills, but presidents “should conduct themselves as if they are so bound.” But Painter dismisses that rationale, saying divestiture rules would prevent such scenarios from arising in the first place.
Given Republican control of Congress, amending the statute to cover the president is unlikely. What’s more, lawmakers also exempted themselves in 1989, citing constitutional protections for legislative acts and internal discipline . Removing presidential immunity could mean forfeiting their own.
“Members of Congress are trading stocks and cryptocurrencies themselves,” Painter notes, who has long called for the statute to include the president. “They don’t want to stop doing that.”
Indeed, attempts at reform have repeatedly stalled. In 2016, the “Presidential Accountability Act” proposed criminalizing self-dealing by presidents, but it died in committee. In 2017, Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the “Presidential Conflicts of Interest Act,” which would have mandated divestiture, but it met the same fate.
Another possible avenue is the criminal bribery statute , 18 U.S. Code § 201, which prohibits public officials from accepting anything of value in exchange for official acts. Unlike § 208, it does apply to the president.
There are cases where Trump may have crossed this line. Billionaire crypto mogul Justin Sun was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with fraud in 2023, but the case was dropped in February. Since then, Sun has purchased $30 million in USD1 and topped the $TRUMP leaderboard. Freight Technologies, a cross-border logistics firm, also bought $20 million worth of $TRUMP, calling it “an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced, and free trade between Mexico and the U.S.”
Meanwhile, the Trump Organization has struck billions in real estate deals this year across Vietnam, Serbia, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — countries engaged in sensitive trade negotiations with the U.S.
But enforcing the bribery statute has been complicated by Trump v. United States . In July 2024, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for official acts, reasoning that otherwise difficult decisions could be chilled by the threat of prosecution.
Painter calls the ruling “dangerous” because it means presidential power takes precedent over torture or international law. “Had this rule existed in the past, it would have been hard to prosecute the Nuremberg cases after the war,” he says.
The ruling creates a de facto “law-free zone” around the presidency, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in dissent, warning it upends centuries of precedent. The Constitutional Accountability Center noted “The president — or the former president — is not a king,” as the Founding Fathers explicitly intended presidents to be “punishable by the laws of his country.”
The Court also barred prosecutors from using evidence of motive in criminal cases involving official acts — making bribery cases nearly impossible to prove.
“Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune,” said Sotomayor. Even Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, conceded the ruling “would hamstring prosecution” in such cases.
The president’s senior advisors also might have de facto immunity from prosecution in bribery cases following the ruling, Painter adds. “The impact of this case on the prosecution of corruption and other crimes is profound,” he wrote in a legal journal earlier this year.
With Congress showing no signs of bringing impeachment charges against Trump, and the Supreme Court effectively immunizing him from criminal prosecution, the President may have many more billions in the bank by the end of his term.
In the meantime, regulating the president’s businesses is left to federal agencies — the very ones Trump has hollowed out.
For instance, political committees have spent more than $931,000 at Trump properties this year. Campaigns and committees may use candidate-owned facilities if they pay fair-market rates and disclose spending, according to the Federal Election Commission. But filings show that only lump sums are reported, making scrutiny difficult. What’s more, the FEC is now down to just two employees, meaning its work is at a standstill.
Regulators also lack the authority to investigate the unprecedented conflicts-of-interest before them, or even the legal framework to articulate them.
“Ethical issues that have to do with the President and his family — that’s not something a regulator like the SEC would be concerned with,” said a former SEC enforcement lawyer. Historically, fear of public backlash, not legal barriers, deterred such conduct. “I was surprised with World Liberty Financial — and with all of them — that there wasn’t something stopping this from happening.”
She added it’s “very possible” the SEC will approve Trump Media’s America First ETFs: “In any prior world, this probably wouldn’t happen.”
Painter’s conclusion is blunt: “Congress has an obligation to act. It needs to start doing its job.”
