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Opinion|Crypto’s Man in the White House
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/opinion/trump-crypto-genius-act-memcoin.html
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Guest Essay
July 29, 2025
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
President Trump is methodically restructuring the federal regulatory and legislative apparatus. That much is known. What is less well understood is how that will pave the way for the Trump family to make potentially hundreds of millions of dollars from its cryptocurrency ventures.
On March 20, Trump told the Blockworks Digital Assets Summit that his goal was to make America “the undisputed Bitcoin superpower and the crypto capital of the world.” So far, Trump, his family and his investment partners are major beneficiaries.
In case anyone forgot, the Constitution prohibits the president from accepting “any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.” Even so, estimates of how much Trump has already profited from crypto are substantial.
In a June article in Forbes, “This Is How Much Trump Has Made From Crypto — So Far,” Dan Alexander wrote:
Donald Trump is cashing in on crypto. Over the last nine months, beginning slightly before the election, he has stirred up new ventures, new coins, new noise. All of it makes the president money, but how much? About $1 billion, according to Forbes’s calculations, lifting his net worth to an estimated $5.6 billion.
Bloomberg was more cautious in its estimate, which was published this month: “Crypto ventures have added at least $620 million to Donald Trump’s fortune in the span of months, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.”
Trump’s profiteering has been criticized by Democrats and Republicans.
After GD Culture Group Limited, a Nevada-based firm with ties to China, announced on May 12 that it planned to buy as much as $300 million of $TRUMP, a memecoin marketed by Trump, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, Charles Dent, who was the chairman of the House Ethics Committee, told The Times: “Make no mistake. These foreign entities and governments obviously want to curry favor with the president.”
“This is completely out of bounds,” Dent added, “and raises all sorts of ethical, legal and constitutional issues that must be addressed.”
