Karoline Leavitt said Trump has ‘actually lost money’ in office — while he was raking in over $2 billion. Here’s how he earned it

Among the other key contributors to Trump’s massive $2.2 billion revenue, per the 927 page disclosure from the US Office of Government Ethics, was the sale of a stake in his crypto company, World Liberty Financial, which benefitted from his policies promoting digital assets, as well as $635 million in licensing royalties from his meme coin — that has presented a loss for two-thirds of investors — along with millions in branding deals.

Before this windfall was quantified in 927 pages of financial disclosures released this week, the White House had criticized reporters who suggested Trump was profiting off his time in office, telling them, “this is a president who has actually lost money for being president of the United States… he left a life of luxury and a life of running a very successful real estate empire for public service, not just once, but twice.”

CNN declared in fall 2020 that Trump was “a lot less rich than when he was elected president,” largely due to property depreciations and hits to his businesses over COVID. And to be fair, the leader’s net worth did indeed fall some $600 million the year he started his first term, and another $100 million the following year.

But during his current term, Forbes estimates that the president is now worth some $6.3 billion, and a large chunk of this is the $2.2 billion he made in 2025, which, though it didn’t come from his role as the president, has drawn condemnation from the likes of Senator Elizabeth Warren and others.

Most of Trump’s payday is attributable to crypto windfalls

The staggering billions-strong figure is, in part, due to $1.4 billion in gains that the Trump family made from their cryptocurrency investments in 2025. Trump’s defense is that he’s profiting because “the stock market’s going up, so everybody’s profiting,” and while the stock market has gone up, critics are crying corruption, citing Trump’s position of power over crypto policy.

Warren is now demanding that the president (whose tax forms still aren’t public), the vice-president, senior administration officials, members of Congress, and their families be barred from being able to profit off of the crypto sector. “If not, it will only turbocharge Donald Trump’s brazen crypto corruption,” she wrote in a statement on June 30.

The president, meanwhile, has asserted that the investments in question have been held in blind trusts handled by third parties.

“I don’t get involved in my personal (finances), we have funds that run my money. I’ve made a lot of money before I became president, and they invest my money, and I don’t talk to them,” he said in response to inquiries on the subject outside Air Force One on July 1. His team has firmly denied any conflicts of interest.

Trump has been open about his goal to make America the crypto capital of the world, which has involved introducing the first Federal regulatory system for stablecoins and other changes to red tape that range from “ending regulatory efforts that deny banking services to the digital assets industry” to “eliminating existing gaps in regulatory oversight.” Some of these increase oversight, and many diminish it, cutting Biden-era restrictions to support sector growth.