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- [00:04]
A
This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm David Green in for Shumita Basu. Today inside the revelations from Trump's recent financial disclosure. President Trump earned more than $2 billion in his first year back in office. That's according to a mandatory financial disclosure released in June. The disclosure has drawn attention to the tith between the president and his businesses. The bulk of his earnings, over $1.4 billion came from cryptocurrency ventures, including a company co founded with his sons called World Liberty Financial. In 2025, a significant share of that company was bought by an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates. Trump has pushed back on questions related to these earnings and his supporters see them as a validation of his business expertise. But others say that the disclosure is evidence of conflicts of Some of the most lucrative deals intersect with the administration's cryptocurrency policies and dealings with foreign governments. The disclosure has highlighted just how different Trump is from past presidents when it comes to his business practices.
- [01:19]
B
There's been no president doing it at this scale. There's no one even close to this amount of money.
- [01:25]
A
That's David Kirkpatrick, a staff writer for the New Yorker who has been tracking Trump's streams of income for years. I wanted to talk to David about what exactly this recent financial disclosure reveals and the potential implications for everyday Americans. And a note before we start. David reached out to representatives from President Trump's businesses in his reporting. They declined to answer his questions, but told him that they employ an outside ethics adviser to avoid, quote, even the appearance of impropriety.
- [01:58]
C
Maybe we can just start with these new disclosure forms from President Trump telling us that he made $2 billion in 2025. So what is new here?
- [02:08]
B
Well, let's break this down a little bit. There's a couple of categories of why we care about presidential profiteering. The first category, the thing that really springs to mind is the pay for play, buying influence. Right? If a president or other public official is taking a personal payment to provide some public favor, that's corruption. That's really bad. That's the worst thing. Most of the profiteering that Trump and his family have done off of the presidency doesn't look exactly like that. It looks more like something else that makes people feel kind of queasy, which is generally using the office of the presidency for personal gain, selling a meme coin that you can sell because you're the president and the money goes into your own pocket. It's not like everybody who bought a meme coin from Trump got a favor from the US Government. So most of the money that Trump has made falls into that second category of unseemly, because he's profiting off of this thing that ought to be a property of the public, the White House.
- [03:14]
A
Right.
- [03:15]
B
A little bit falls into the is he selling favors category. And that's really hard to prove. It's very rare that someone turns up with a smoking gun, you know, or a tape recording where a public official says, yes, I will do this public act with my public office for your private payment.
- [03:35]
C
But you also might sometimes not even realize it. Like a foreign government that gets involved in a Trump related real estate deal is not gonna come out and say, you know what? You know, we now expect Trump to attack Iran or we now expect this. Like, we never can really tell where that influence is happening.
- [03:51]
B
That's right. It might just mean that there's a greater sense of affinity and communication happens more smoothly and the presidential decision making changes in ways that even the President is unaware of. But of all these. So after that long preamble about quid pro quo versus just unseemly, the thing that has emerged in the last year is the deal with the United Arab Emirates right before he took office, to sell a share, a roughly 50% share, in a company called World Liberty Financial. This is the one that, to my mind, stands out above all others, partly because a lot of Trump's profiteering has been not only disclosed, but loudly disclosed. But not this one. So World Liberty Financial is a company set up by Donald Trump and his friend Steve Witkoff and their sons shortly before the election. In fact, he took time out from the campaign to announce its creation almost with no business plan. It was going to be a crypto company, very unclear what. It didn't have any real business yet by the time he was about to be inaugurated. And yet on the eve of the inauguration, they sold roughly half the company to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates for half a billion dollars. That's a lot of money for nothing, basically for vapor. And what's especially telling about it is he didn't disclose that at the time, and the company didn't disclose that at the time. We only know about it because it was reported months later by the Wall Street Journal. So to my mind, what was interesting about the financial disclosure forms with 2.2 billion is tucked in, there appeared to be a few hundred million that Trump made as his cut of those proceeds. There's a couple other things at World Liberty Financial that even as I was reporting on them, I thought, this is so crazy, it can't be right. And the financial disclosure forms actually showed that it was right. By that I mean one of the ways that World Liberty Financial, this at first nebulous crypto company, was making money as they were selling tokens. And 75% of token income, according to the fine print, went to the president and his family. And there was some language in there like 75% of token sales after certain expenses goes to the President and his family. So as I was reporting on that and looking at the few hundred million that had come in in token sales and calculating what 75% of that was going to mean flowing into the pockets of the President himself, I thought to myself, this can't possibly be right. But you know what? It is, right? In the financial disclosure forms, he recognized an amount of money from World Liberty Financial and its token sales. That is roughly 75% of what they were bringing.
- [06:47]
C
And people buying these coins, what are they getting? What value?
- [06:52]
B
There's a variety of things. The first ones were these NFTs where you get a kind of a digital cartoon. He moved on then to the meme coin, where you really are just buying the right to say, I bought a meme coin.
- [07:05]
C
It's just the cool factor. You can tell your friends that you have a Trump meme coin. That's it.
- [07:08]
B
That's right. You could think, oh, this is going to gain in value and I'll resell it later. That's the most of the meme coin. World is what people on Wall street call the greater fool theory, which is where you buy something thinking, someone later on will pay me even more for this. That hasn't worked out. The Trump meme coins have plunged in value in the case of World Liberty, which of all the Trump crypto enterprises is maybe the most like an actual business. There's the tokens, where what you're buying is a sort of nominal right to vote or participate in the decision making about what the company will do in the future. And then they've gone into selling what's called a Stablecoin. And a Stablecoin is pretty simple. It's like a bit of digital currency that is worth a dollar, right? Suppose you don't want to put your money into a checking account and write a check. You want to buy stablecoin and then transmit stablecoin to someone else instead of writing a check to that person. You can do that with your digital wallet. That's just a way to keep your cash, to move your cash around. By owning Stablecoin I mean, if we
- [08:09]
C
accept that this is unseemly to a lot of people, if we accept that it's un precedented in terms of scale, what Trump is doing, is this in some ways though, like a victimless crime? I mean, can you tell people who are sitting there listening to this in their kitchens or in their cars or wherever that this profiteering that Trump is doing could really impact your lives in concrete ways? You, your family.
- [08:36]
B
Well, there's sort of two categories there. The quid pro quo category is arguably affecting your life. That's the case where a powerful person pays a large sum of money and then subsequently receives some public benefit from the government. If it's a foreign country, this is the most egregious example. When Trump was thinking, should I join Israel in attacking Iran, was he influenced by the historic enmity towards Iran of the many Persian Gulf monarchies that are now enriching him? We don't know. But that's one that I think is gonna raise a lot of concern for people.
- [09:12]
C
Then we're talking about foreign policy decisions that could actually change the course of history. Kill, I mean, many, many people. I mean, that goes deep.
- [09:20]
B
Oh yeah, all that big weighty historical stuff and also gas prices. So from the, you know, the sort of world historical to the day to day mundane, that's a decision that is affecting everybody's lives. When you step back a little bit further, you know, World Liberty Financial is also deeply intertwined with a company called Binance. Binance is a giant crypto platform and its founder serve time for money laundering. The company agreed to government monitoring to make sure that it wasn't involved in further money laundering crimes. It's said to have helped Iran evade sanctions and abetted other criminal activity. After providing a lot of benefit to the Trumps through World Liberty Financial, the founder of that company got a pardon for his crimes. And it looks like the federal monitoring is going to be withdrawn. So to the extent that people out in the streets care about money laundering or Iran sanctions or public policy more generally, that's something that affects you personally. But again, I understand you're victimless crime comment. You know, the people who bought Trump Meme Coin lost their shirts, but maybe those people, you know, if they enjoyed spending that money, then they got what they paid for. But again, somehow using the White House, using the office of the Presidency to sell stuff like Meme Coin or beach towels or flip flops has to demean it somewhat.
- [10:55]
C
So Trump is making a lot of money personally off this cryptocurrency Stuff. You have the United Arab Emirates, who are like, nearly 50% owners of this company. Is there any evidence that you've found that there is some sort of quid pro quo here that the United Arab Emirates, either they've gotten, or they expect to get some sort of favor when it comes to foreign policy of the United States, when it comes to decisions that this president might make?
- [11:22]
B
Do I have the recording in the room where Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed shakes hands with Trump and says, you know, if I give you this money, will you bomb Iran? No, I don't have that, and I don't think anybody will. On the other hand, the United Arab Emirates is really in a class by itself in its use of its financial resources to lobby Washington to hire former officials, to cultivate close relations with successive presidential administrations. They play the money and influence game very, very well. So it fits into that broader pattern. And in this administration, has the Trump administration done things that appear to benefit the United Arab Emirates in a special way? Yes. A few months after they bought half of World Liberty Financial and then bought a bunch of stablecoins sold by World Liberty Financial, the Trump administration announced that. That they were going to approve a big deal for a massive set of data centers, artificial intelligence servers, to be built with US Technology inside the UAE and take advantage of its inexpensive energy sources. That's a huge coup for the UAE and would allow them to sort of leapfrog ahead of much of the rest of the world in the race to be ahead in the AI game. Now, it may be that the war in Iran and the new level of danger to everybody else in the Persian Gulf because of Iranian missiles, it might have taken some of the wind out of that sails, but it looked like a huge favor to the uae. Shortly after the UAE had provided Trump personally a vast financial benefit.
- [12:59]
A
President Trump's position on crypto, though, has changed. Right. Do we know why?
- [13:05]
B
Yeah, I think there's three ways to answer that. The most cynical way is if you look at the crypto business, it was a quick way to get rich. And what it. What crypto as a business suffered from was public distrust. A lot of people, frankly, accurately thought that what it's really good for is crime and speculation, right? Money laundering, evading the laws, or speculating that someone is going to buy it for more later and it's just going to go up and down. So gambling. So a kind of miasma of doubt hovered over it. And if you take crypto, then, and you add the presidential imprimatur, bingo, you're Right away in the money, because you add that extra credibility of being associated with President Trump, and it's a real advantage over other players in the crypto business, since its biggest obstacle is that general distrust. So the first thing is they saw that opportunity. The brothers, Don Jr. And Eric Trump often say that the story goes like this, that after January 6th, a lot of financial institutions said, you know what? This is unseemly. We're not eager to do business with the Trump family anymore. It looks like this president has just orchestrated a mob attack on the U.S. capitol in an effort to interrupt the peaceful transition of power, that we've got rules about condoning violence, and so we're not going to do business with you. They feel that they were unfairly debanked. And in the telling of Don Jr. Trump and Eric Trump, the experience of debanking led them to look at crypto as a terrific alternative. They find banking to be cumbersome and slow and painful and too much paperwork. And they think crypto can expedite a lot of that. The third thing, and Trump, if you listen to his comments closely, has alluded to this. He found during the 2024 campaign that the crypto industry was ready to support him, was enthusiastic about backing him, had a lot of money to contribute, and even wanted to contribute some of it in the form of crypto. So his campaign accounts began accepting crypto from these donors. And he would find that when he would say positive things to these crowds, they would just go wild. Robert F. Kennedy, who, it's hard to remember now, but was actually running for president at the time, initially kind of led the pack in reaching out to the crypto world. And I think the Trump campaign noticed that RFK was getting some mileage and some money out of this fast growing industry and kind of outbid RFK in terms of being pro crypto. And Trump started on the campaign trail vowing to pardon various people who had gotten in trouble for violating money laundering rules because of their crypto involvement.
- [15:57]
C
Well, I'm glad you brought up the family, because I do want to ask you about Trump's sons and other family members, because their involvement goes beyond crypto. I mean, there's all of this real estate and real estate ventures throughout the Gulf that are largely through the president's family, children, spouses. How worrisome are those deals, particularly when they involve countries that, again, might want a curry favor? And obviously, we have Jared Kushner, for example, who's taken money from Gulf states who are trying to negotiate peace in the region. What is your take home from kind of that real estate empire?
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B
I mean, Jared Kushner, you might say, well, he's separate. The Trump brothers are running the Trump business and are very close to their father and really feel like a single business entity with their father. You might say that Jared Kushner is separate, except that he actually is once again, effectively part of the administration. He's overseas all the time working alongside Steve Witkoff, trying to do deals for the US Government, sometimes involving more or less directly, countries that he's done business with privately.
- [17:03]
C
Witkoff is Trump's Middle east advisor and works closely with Jared Kushner. Of course.
- [17:07]
B
I'm sorry, that's right. Yeah. Steve Wykoff. And also Steve Wykoff is a partner in World Liberty Financial. It's something that never would have been accepted under a previous president to do a real estate deal in another country while you're president in a deal that involves the state in the first term. Trump himself very forthrightly said, I'm not going to do this because it would look bad. And he has since said, you know what? I found out? No one cares. Which I would think raises some concerns, I should say. The Trump family will often say, and this again is a difference from that UAE deal we talked about where it was a member of the royal family. They'll often say, well, our hotels in Saudi Arabia, in Qatar, in the uae, in Oman, those are private. We're doing those deals with private developers there. I covered the Middle east for a little while. I will tell you, the private developer state distinction does not hold up that well in the Persian Gulf. So the Arab Gulf monarchies, every businessman, especially the successful ones, is completely dependent on the monarch. These are absolute monarchies. The royal family is the make or break factor in your business. In a few of these cases, the royal family is, to one extent or another, an actual partner. But in all of these cases, the nominally private individual who is signing the contract with Donald Trump is not really fully independent of the sovereign. He's completely dependent on that person. So I don't put a lot of water in that distinction.
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C
And we should say there's been some new reporting recently from the Washington Post that Eric and Don Jr have a lot of investments in some of these defense tech firms that it sounds like are seeking business with the Pentagon. The response has been these companies are not getting special treatment, that they're just in the competition for some of these Pentagon contracts. But I assume it's, you know, that's a murky place to make an Argument like that as well.
- [19:13]
B
Yeah, it's the kind of thing that until now, I would have thought would be completely unacceptable. Now, I have a certain faith in the Pentagon procurement process. Like, I don't think it's easy for the President to call up someone who's making a contracting decision in one of the service branches and say, you know, will you do me a solid? My son's invested in this company. Buy their drones. I don't think it can possibly be that simple. On the other hand, does Don Jr. Or Eric hear from their father or people around their father what the military is looking for with urgency before the public does not impossible. Does the fact that your startup to produce drones or what other missile technology is associated with the president, does that help you raise other money and leapfrog other competitors because people think, oh, this guy's got an inside track? Very likely. Does it even help you with foreign countries that may want to influence the administration, or just believe that you're not going to have trouble getting your foreign sales of technology approved because one of your investors is the son of the president? That's also very possible. So there's a lot of ways that having that connection, just having the involvement of one of the president's sons as an investor gives you an unfair advantage or the perception of an unfair advantage, which can be its own unfair advantage.
- [20:38]
C
I want to bring up one other name because he's in the news so much, and a lot of President Trump's supporters sort of see him as enemy number one and an example of political corruption. That's Hunter Biden. Is he a family member of a former president who has benefited in business dealings in some way and fall into the category of some of the things that we're talking about?
- [20:59]
B
Sounds like it. I think 100%. From what I've read, he definitely was receiving lucrative business opportunities because he was the son of the president. 100%. Now, the number of digits is different, and I don't think he was the first. I think there have been other sons or nephews of presidents who have capitalized on that, but again, not anywhere near this scale.
- [21:22]
C
You've said that making comparisons like between Donald Trump, given the scale and everything we're talking about and someone like Vladimir Putin is not a perfect comparison, that we should be careful kind of applying labels that we might use for other leaders around the world. Where does he fit in the larger context of leaders around the world who are benefiting from their power?
- [21:44]
B
I guess there's two things. The first is we need to remember that we actually are still a rule of law country. In other countries, which are not rule of law countries, actual autocracies, often your head of state, your authoritarian ruler, will just take some money from the public treasury and transfer it to his bank account or her bank account. That's straight up old fashioned corruption. We really can't do that here. Right. People on the left, when they get excited, will sometimes say, you know, he's stealing from the Social Security fund. No, he is not stealing from the Social Security fund. Vladimir Putin might just take money that is Russian treasury money, and through a friend, buy himself a giant yacht or build himself a vacation home. He can just take public money. There are lots of leaders around the world who do that. In the Persian Gulf monarchies, there isn't even really a distinction between the royal family and the state. We have those things. Suppose you're an American president and you want to capitalize on the presidency. You have to do a lot of work. It turns out you have to go to the trouble of hawking meme coins or investing in crypto. You wouldn't have to do all of that somewhat demeaning work if you were a real proper autocrat around the world. Now, that said, the United States of America is also the world's biggest economy. So it may be harder for an elected president to really profit off of his public office the way a foreign autocrat could. But the potential is really there because it is a very big country and a very big economy. And so I think he's doing fine. Even though, as plutocrats go, he's not really in the Putin league, if you will.
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C
So we're a nation where there is a rule of law, as you said. So what guardrails are in place here? I mean, are there laws that President Trump might be breaking?
- [23:42]
B
Well, so there's a few things to keep in mind, I guess. You know, we have laws, they haven't really been tested before, right? We have laws, but more than that, we have norms. We have disclosure laws, mostly disclosure laws, Right. It's difficult to regulate a president for good, sound reasons. You don't want the head of state to be in some way subordinate to some lower bureaucrat. Right. Because then they're almost not the head of state anymore and there's a lot of opportunities for corruption. So it sort of makes sense. And the conflict of interest problem is tricky too, because you don't want to allow only the penalists to run for president. Right. We don't wanna say like, okay, someone who's been successful in making Money can't be our president. We don't want to do that. So there has to be some flexibility there. So we've mostly relied on norms. We've mostly relied on an expectation that presidents would be ashamed to be seen to be profiting off the presidency. Trump has just blown through all of that, and it raises questions, I think, about whether or not we need laws. Right. We've gotten by more or less with this system of norms and kind of not that great disclosure. You know, the disclosure forms aren't perfect transparency, however, it's not impossible that we could have laws like there's a clause in the Constitution, the emoluments clause, which got a lot of ink in the first term, that is designed to prevent the president from, you know, getting a salary from a bureaucracy or a gift from bureaucracy that works for him. What Trump has done raises questions about whether or not he's getting paid or some financial benefit from the government. There are ways to make that toothier, to require financial disclosure, not just from the president, but from any company that the president is invested in. Right. So, and if you put an onus on those companies and a legal liability on those companies, then that is going to shed a lot of light on the conflicts of interest that a president might be getting into, that his own financial disclosures don't. A lot of our current government public ethics infrastructure was adopted after Watergate. It was a backlash to the excess of the Nixon administration that put in place most of the rules we have now. Is not impossible that in the aftermath of Trump's second term, we could have a new round of those kinds of legislations, that sort of tightening of the network of rules.
- [26:12]
C
And.
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B
And I don't think it necessarily has to be Democrats. I mean, I think what's really happening here is an expansion of presidential power and presidential privileges. And I can tell you that both Republicans and Democrats in Congress don't like that. The Republicans don't like it more when it's a Democrat in the White House and vice versa. But generally, if they're honest, none of them like it. And so I think it's quite reasonable to think that there's a possibility that there could be bipartisan legislation after the second Trump administration to tighten some of these rules.
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C
David, thank you so much for chatting about this.
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B
It was a great pleasure, great talking to you.
- [26:57]
A
We will include a link to David Kirkpatrick's reporting for the New Yorker on our Show Notes page. And every weekend, you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab, the little headphones at the bottom, to find.