Trump’s $1.4bn crypto haul built on supporters’ $3.8bn losses

A machinist in Indiana put $40,000 into Donald Trump’s family crypto tokens. He has lost $32,700 of it. A woman who put $2,000 of her savings into the president’s $TRUMP coin in late May now holds a stake worth less than $120. Nicholas Pinto, a Trump voter in 2024, is down roughly half of the $500,000 he put in.

They are three of the 988,905 people who bought $TRUMP and lost money on it, a rate of almost two in every three buyers, for total losses of $3.81bn by the end of June, according to New York Times data reported this week. The coin, launched three days before Trump’s inauguration, once traded at $75.35. It now sits at $1.76, a fall of 98%.

The president’s ledger

Trump’s mandatory 2025 financial disclosure, released by the Office of Government Ethics on 30 June, shows why the coin’s collapse did not touch him the way it touched his buyers. He earned more than $1.4bn from cryptocurrency last year, including $635m in royalties from the “Celebration Coin” scheme and $550m-$600m from sales of World Liberty Financial tokens, a ninefold jump on the previous year. Total 2025 income came to at least $2.2bn, against $662m the year before. The structure guaranteed him fees on every trade, whichever way the price moved. His buyers had no such guarantee.

The Gulf money and the pardon

Days before the inauguration, representatives of the Emirati royal Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed bought 49% of World Liberty Financial for $500m, of which $187m was steered to Trump-family entities, the Wall Street Journal has reported. The firm’s stablecoin was then used to close a $2bn investment by the Abu Dhabi state fund MGX in the crypto exchange Binance. Months later the UAE was cleared to import roughly 500,000 Nvidia AI chips, despite reported objections from US security officials. In October, Trump pardoned Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, whose company had donated the software used to launch World Liberty Financial’s coin. No official finding has established a link between the money and the pardon, and Zhao denies any business relationship with Trump; Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley are seeking the underlying records. Ty Cobb, who served as a White House lawyer in Trump’s first term, put it more bluntly: “we are seeing the greatest onslaught of corruption in the history of mankind in the last 18 months.”

Paying for the president’s economy

While Trump’s crypto income was compounding, his tariffs added an estimated $1,700 a year to the average household’s bills, according to the Yale Budget Lab, with clothing prices up 14% and household goods up 5% over the year. Inflation hit a three-year high of 4.2% in May. Asked about the rising cost of living on 17 June, Trump said: “I love the inflation.” Voters disagree by a margin of 58 to 21 that his decisions have made the economy worse, and fewer than one in five say his policies have left them better off.