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.