Former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s wife owned a profitable radio station. George W. Bush sat on the board of an oil company while his father was in the White House. And when Joe Biden was vice president, his son Hunter Biden received payments from a Ukrainian natural gas company.
But nothing in American history compares to Donald J. Trump. A financial disclosure report published on Tuesday showed that in his first year back in power, Trump earned approximately $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency ventures. His various presidential decisions have benefited multiple business interests.
In total, Trump’s income in 2025 rose to at least $2.2 billion, up from a minimum of $622 million in 2024 before his return to power.
Tax attorney and author Megan Gorman, who wrote “All the Presidents’ Money” and researched 250 years of presidential wealth, described the situation as “completely unprecedented.”
Gorman and other historians said US presidents traditionally kept their distance from corporate involvement and were consistently careful to avoid conflicts of interest. Historian Lindsay M. Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, said: “Public office was a source of debt, not income.”
Trump and his family have done the opposite, launching new ventures that have flourished on the back of presidential decisions. For example, last October Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, which is a major partner in the Trump family’s own crypto business.
In July, Trump signed a law encouraging a type of cryptocurrency called “stablecoins” — just four months after his family’s business launched its own stablecoin product.
Gorman said Trump’s conduct represents “a kind of betrayal of the social contract” that has existed since George Washington’s era — the principle that the nation’s leaders put the country above their personal interests.
The White House and the Trump family have repeatedly dismissed all questions about the president’s earnings, arguing that Trump’s two eldest sons — Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. — manage the family business independently. Ethics experts have rejected that characterization.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report