The president has side-stepped accusations of conflicts of interest by claiming he has "nothing to do" with the business dealings of the Trump Organization.
President Donald Trump was a businessman long before he was a politician. In his second term in office, it seems he's perfected the combination for maximum personal profit.
This week The New York Times' editorial board released a review of Trump's finances that opens with a scathing accusation: "President Trump has never been a man to ask what he can do for his country. In his second term, as in his first, he is instead testing the limits of what his country can do for him."
In total, the report estimates that Trump has earned $1,408,500,000 since returning to office one year ago.
Not only that, the Times wrote, "We know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view. And they continue to grow."
While some of his business dealings may remain private, Trump seems to have taken few steps to conceal the connections between his political efforts and his personal pockets.
Earlier this month, the Trump Organization announced expanded real estate plans in Saudi Arabia, with developments totaling $10 billion. This came less than two months after Trump controversially hosted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House.
The prince has maintained a public friendship with Trump, despite protests against welcoming him as an ally, in part because a 2018 C.I.A. investigation concluded that he ordered the assassination of opposition journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
However, when reporters mentioned Khashoggi, whose widow protested the November 2025 White House visit, Trump was quick to jump to bin Salman's defense.
"You're mentioning someone that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about," he said of Khashoggi. "Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen. But [the prince] knew nothing about it. You don't have to embarrass our guest."
The president also brushed off any reporter who questioned whether his friendship and defense of the Crown Prince was related to the Trump Organization's business dealings in his country.
"I have nothing to do with the family business," Trump insisted. "What my family does is fine. They do business all over. They've done very little with Saudi Arabia, actually. They could do a lot."
Real estate isn't the only way Trump has made money since returning to office -- though the Times report did also note that he agreed to lower threatened tariffs on Vietnam shortly after the Trump Organization broke ground on a $1.5 billion golf complex outside of Hanoi.
He and wife Melania Trump have also dipped into filmmaking, earning a whopping $28 million from Amazon for the rights to her upcoming documentary, Melania. The streaming service, headed by billionaire Jeff Bezos, acquired the rights to the doc after a $1 million donation to Trump's reelection campaign, according to The Wall Street Journal.
There have been gifts as well, like a $400 million jet from Qatar, which Trump plans to use as Air Force One and take with him upon leaving office. The jet was gifted in May 2025, just weeks after the Trump Organization struck a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Doha. A few months later, Qatar received approval from the Trump administration to build a facility at an Air Force base in Idaho.
"We are gonna protect this country," Trump said during a visit to Doha last year. "It's a very special place with a special royal family...It's great people and they're gonna be protected by the United States."
But Trump and his family's biggest moneymaker by far over the past year has been cryptocurrency.
When Forbes reported in September 2025 that the president had upped his net worth by $3 billion from the previous year, the publication noted that $2 billion of that was thanks to his crypto efforts, split between his World Liberty Financial company and a meme coin.
Exact profits from crypto can be difficult to estimate, as some tokens are "locked up" and cannot yet be traded. But the Times report estimated that the family -- including 19-year-old Barron, who was the one to introduce his father to the futuristic finance -- has made at least $867 million through various cryptocurrencies.
"All told," the Times reported, "Mr. Trump has profited from his return to the presidency by an amount of money equal to 16,822 times the median U.S. household income."
Perhaps this is why, in a recent interview with POLITICO, Trump graded the economy in his second term an "A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus," despite recent polls saying a majority of Americans would rate the economy as "weak."
Any economic maladies, the president has insisted, are the fault of his predecessor, President Joe Biden.
"I inherited a total mess. Prices were at an all-time high when I came in," he told POLITICO'S Dasha Burns last month. "Prices are coming down substantially... It's amazing what we've done."