Americans already knew that President Donald Trump is getting richer than ever. After all, he often tells us himself. “We’re all profiting,” he told reporters on Wednesday, citing the rising stock market. “I’m profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash.”
Yet Trump’s financial disclosure released the same morning shows something very different about the state of his estate. Rather than stocks or even real estate, nearly two-thirds of his income last year—a staggering $1.4 billion—came from a pair of cryptocurrency ventures that he created before his reelection and which surged around the time he took office.
Trump’s shyness about discussing his crypto windfall suggests that he knows the ethics don’t look good, as my colleagues discuss in our latest editorial. At the same time, we can infer something important from his painstaking approach to reporting the details, in the form of a 927-page disclosure. That is, he’s pretty sure it’s all legal.
It’s an amazing proposition, given how brazen the arrangement appears. It’s rare enough that Trump isn’t known to have divested from any significant non-diversified holdings for the sake of avoiding a conflict of interest, as both Presidents Bush did before they took office. Trump put his assets in a trust and turned over management to his sons. But he still knows what he owns, and there’s nothing stopping him from making policy choices meant to boost it.
