Trump made more money in the first year of his second term than he ever did as the “successful businessman” he purported to be. It wasn’t the stock market, as he claimed. It was mostly cryptocurrency.
President Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses, a new filing shows.
All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.
Of course, there was money from merch, from caps to goldish sneakers to bibles to NFTs of a manly and muscled Trump to “Rump” watches to cellphones that were never delivered. But it was mostly crypto, what he accurately called a scam until he realized it could be his scam, whereupon he embraced it.
One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.
Mr. Trump also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.
That Trump used the presidency to pad his wallet would have been a scandal under any other president. That Trump’s nepo boys did the same might even be analogized to Hunter Biden, even if what Junior, Eric and Jared-in-law did was far worse. And yet, there was no outcry within the ranks of the MAGA faithful that Trump had corruptly monetized the presidency.
I suspect that it could fall into some variant of what Tammany Hall called “honest graft.” Somebody was going to make coin, so why not Trump? After all, the wealth Trump made didn’t come out of their pockets, so who cares if he’s selling pardons?
But as it turned out, there were victims of Trump’s corruption, and the victims worse red caps.
An up-to-date tally of Trump followers turned crypto investors is in. And for them, the overall results are remarkably bad.
Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion.
That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of money. And they came from a select universe of suckers.
Three days before his inauguration, Mr. Trump unveiled a second Trump-branded investment — the $TRUMP memecoin, a type of novelty currency with little practical value.
“It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “Join my very special Trump community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW!” But that turned out to be bad advice.
Bad advice, indeed. More to the point, it was bad advice directed at the MAGA faithful, who took a $3.8 billion hit. To paraphrase Everett Dirksen, that’s real money. Do they care? Do they realize that they took this big hit to line Trump’s pockets, and this time it came out of their own pockets? There is no serious indication that any of this has shaken the MAGA faithful’s adoration of the guy who fleeced them. Why?
Trump’s “joke” was that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and no one would care, except maybe the guy he shot. And that’s just a “maybe.” It’s long been an article of faith that people’s passions are rarely inflamed until some wrong touches them personally. Sure, they may be critical about wrongs, but they won’t get out of their La-Z-Boy unless it touches them or their loved ones. But this time, it does, and still their butt is firmly planted in a cushion.
Are Trump’s supporters masochists, who inexplicably enjoy being conned out of significant sums of money? Is it different when they can chalk up the loss to their leader? Is there some sort of psychological conflict that precludes their ability to face the fact that they just got fleeced by the fat man in whom they reposed their faith for the future of a white Christian nation? Why don’t they care? Why don’t they learn? Why don’t they see it at all?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
For the same reason people gladly handed their cash to P.T. Barnum to experience his museum of curiosities.
Not sure i agree. They went to PT barnum for the curiousities. To make this analogy work they should have paid PT Barnum to ‘revel in his light or associate with him in any way possible’. I would argue it is completely different
Slightly off topic, but if there’s a “Weekend at Bernie’s III”, who’s more likely to get the title role, Mitch McConnell or Rudy Giuliani?
OK, completely off topic, but it’s Tuesday.
Sunk-cost fallacy maybe? The sheer amount of personal identity, devotion, and now money his supporters have poured into this over time prevents them from breaking free because they can’t acknowledge that what they’ve spent has no bearing on current or future events. The payoff is just beyond the horizon even if it stays there.
Paradoxically, they might be more willing to throw good money after bad than actually stop and reevaluate. Otherwise the nasty discomfort of cognitive dissonance might arise where one’s actions and beliefs don’t align. Or else they must acknowledge being fooled, which doesn’t feel the best even if it’s necessary. Yet another example of cognitive bias aka support for the idea from eminent thinker Dirty Harry, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
A tiny bit of philosophy or even bog standard critical thinking would cure them of the delusion that what you did in the past should have any bearing on what you do now or in the future. That was then, and this is now. A =/= B. Evaluate anew and proceed. It’s no fault of theirs that they don’t, mind. We’re all only human.
Twofer Tuesday.
It’s all the stuff that you talk about, plus they live in the “alternative facts” or “fake news” world, as popularized by Kellyanne Conway.
You can tell them everything that Trump does, and they just won’t believe you, even if he did kill someone in cold blood on 5th Avenue, I think some of them would still yell “fake news”.
It takes a big person to admit they’re wrong. Those kind of people didn’t support Trump in the first place.