All the President’s Money: Donald Trump and the White House lobby

There is a place in Washington that perfectly embodies the business committee atmosphere that has prevailed in the US capital since the start of Donald Trump’s second term. It is not the White House, nor is it a building bearing the usual ‘Trump’ branding on its façade. On the contrary, strangely enough, it is about as anonymous as one could imagine – an unusual choice in the era of Trumpian brazenness, with its gilded stucco, plans for triumphal arches and monumental ballrooms. And yet it is from here that we must begin if we are to try to map out the enormous wealth being amassed by the president, his sons and a large group of business associates during this second term at the helm of the world’s most powerful country.

You need to head to Georgetown, Washington’s neighbourhood of trendy bars and nightlife, and make your way down to the lower levels of a red-brick shopping centre on Wisconsin Avenue. Until 2024, there was a billiards hall here called ‘Clubhouse’, but since last year there have been no signs indicating the new club that has taken its place. There is just a solid mahogany entrance door, discreetly guarded by men who once belonged to the Navy SEALs, the elite unit of the US Navy. The venue is called “The Executive Branch” and was conceived by two partners at the investment fund 1789 Capital: one is Omeed Malik, a banker who has become one of the Trump family’s most trusted advisers; the other is Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son.

Among the other founding partners, who have each committed to a payment of $500,000, are brothers Zach and Alex Witkoff, the sons of Steve Witkoff, the special envoy to whom Trump has entrusted negotiations on all major international crises, from the war in Ukraine to the future of Gaza. Then there is the White House’s ‘crypto czar’, David Sacks, the man who liaises between the Administration and Silicon Valley and, above all, with the dynamic and emerging world of digital finance. 

Furthermore, the founders include lobbyist Jeff Miller, who is responsible for a large proportion of the fundraising activities for the MAGA movement’s election campaigns, and the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, famous for their battles against Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook (as depicted in the film “The Social Network”), who are now billionaire entrepreneurs in the cryptocurrency sector: the SEC had targeted them in recent years for their activities, but with Trump’s arrival in the White House, their legal troubles have vanished. Finally, among the small group that founded “The Executive Branch” is Chris Buskirk, one of Vice-President J.D. Vance’s closest allies and likely to be a key figure in the White House should there be a future Republican administration led by Vance.

In that venue, where journalists have never been admitted to date and of which no images circulate online, around two hundred members meet regularly, representing a large slice of the American technology, defence, pharmaceutical and energy sectors, alongside ministers and undersecretaries from the Trump administration and members of Congress. To become a member, one must pay an initial fee of $150,000, followed by an annual membership fee of $15,000, and the waiting list is reportedly very long.

Nothing new for Washington, of course, which has always operated within an ecosystem where politicians, lobbyists, capitalists and the media rub shoulders in the same spaces and share the same cocktail parties. What is different from the past is the substantial and openly flaunted shamelessness with which the Trump clan mixes business with domestic and international politics and claims the right to extract economic value from the dominant position it occupies at the helm of the federal government.

“During our first term, we did everything we could to avoid even the appearance of inappropriate behaviour and, frankly, we were still overwhelmed,” Eric Trump told the New York Times at the start of the second administration. “We cannot stand by and watch indefinitely, and I won’t,” added the son to whom the president has entrusted the leadership of the Trump Organisation. His brother Donald Jr. was more explicit: “Our new approach is: ‘Go fuck yourselves, all of you’”. And it is from this approach that ideas arise, such as creating an exclusive club whose very name promises access to executive power – that is, to the White House – and where, over a drink or two, major investments, legislative initiatives and trade agreements are decided. All this in the knowledge that it is the right place to get messages through to the president’s ears. And that one evening, you might just happen to spot The Donald himself in the club, with a Diet Coke in his hand.

Washington is not run by a kleptocracy like Moscow, but Trump’s second term certainly marks a break with 250 years of American tradition. For two and a half centuries, presidents have built legal frameworks to appear separate from their own wealth. Trump has stopped building them. He has not circumvented them; he has simply declared them unnecessary. What is taking place in the American capital is, until proven otherwise, legal: the president, his children and his friends are apparently enriching themselves legitimately and, in Trump’s case, under the protection of the law. In 1962, new criminal rules on conflicts of interest (18 U.S.C. § 208) were enacted, applying to federal officials, and in 1989 the law was amended to exclude the president and vice-president from the definition of ‘official’. The rationale was practical: presidential decisions affect everything, and applying the law would paralyse the office. Congress granted the exemption on the assumption that the president would hold himself to a higher standard than that required. For years it worked; today it no longer does.

In his very lengthy interview with the New York Times last January, Donald Trump explained that during his first term he had had qualms, had reined in his children’s activities, and had kept his political role more separate from his business interests. But this time he has changed his approach. “And do you know why?” he asked the journalists provocatively. “Because I discovered that nobody cared. I’m allowed to do it; it’s perfectly legitimate. Now I’m letting my children handle business matters. I’d forbidden them from doing so during my first term, and I received no credit for it. Then I saw what happened with Biden.” That is to say, what happened with the affairs of his son Hunter, who came under investigation for a series of activities he was conducting in the energy sector, apparently also exploiting his famous surname and connections with the Administration. None of this ever resulted in convictions directly linked to a conflict of interest arising from his father’s role, first as Barack Obama’s vice-president and then as president. Hunter’s numerous troubles were of a financial and personal nature and were subsequently covered by a presidential pardon, to protect him from retaliation by the Republicans who had returned to power.

Under the pretext of ‘what Biden used to do’, business is now being conducted in and around the White House without any filters, scruples or modesty. The latest example is Trump’s ploy to make his Truth posts available in advance to anyone willing to pay a monthly subscription fee of one hundred thousand dollars for a premium service. Trump Media (controlled by Trump via his trust) has launched Truth API, a data feed aimed at banks and trading firms that guarantees the fastest access to posts from the platform’s ten most influential accounts. First and foremost among these is the President’s account, which is very often capable of causing sharp market fluctuations with a single remark on the war in Iran or on tariffs: knowing in advance – even by a matter of milliseconds – what is about to be posted can be an advantage worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to investors. The fact that the service is primarily linked to the President’s posts is demonstrated by the discounted rate – $60,000 a month – reserved for those who sign up for a three-year subscription, i.e. roughly until the end of Trump’s term of office. But in a sense, these are ‘flamboyant’ initiatives that are part of his persona. The true extent of the President’s personal enrichment – excluding, therefore, that of family members and friends – was revealed in all its magnitude on 30 June, when the Office of Government Ethics published Donald Trump’s mandatory financial disclosure statement for 2025.

It runs to 927 pages, and the figure that sums it all up is $2.2 billion in declared revenue, compared with a low of $622 million in 2024, the year before his return to the White House. Trump’s earnings have more than tripled since he returned to the political scene, and the news is that ‘The Donald’ can no longer be considered a property magnate or an entertainer: thanks to his sons, his real business has become cryptocurrencies, which alone have earned him $1.4 billion. This revelation overturns everything we thought we knew about Trump’s wealth: not property, not golf, not the brand. Digital currencies are his most lucrative business, and they became so whilst he was the sector’s chief regulator.

Within that 1.4 billion, there are two strands. The first is World Liberty Financial, the company founded with his three sons and the Witkoffs (father and sons), which sells a token called $WLFI. In 2025, the placement was structured so that 75 per cent of each sale, after certain expenses had been deducted, would go to an entity linked to Trump. Whether the value of the token rises or falls, the proceeds are guaranteed. This generated around 500 million, compared with 57 million in 2024.

The second strand is the $TRUMP memecoin, a sort of collectable currency, which went on sale in the days leading up to the inauguration: over 600 million. The token’s price today stands at around $1.67, roughly 80 per cent below its value a year ago. On 22 May 2025, Trump hosted the 220 largest holders of $TRUMP at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia. To secure a place at the table, they had collectively spent around $148 million on tokens, with over $111 million of that coming from the top twenty-five, who were also admitted to an exclusive reception. At the top of the list was Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto financier who had invested $75 million in World Liberty Financial. Three months earlier, the SEC had suspended the fraud case it had brought against him, citing the public interest as the reason for its decision. No guest list was ever made public.

There is also a line that the document does not explain, but which has been examined in depth by various journalistic investigations. Unnamed investments totalling over 200 million. The statement does not explicitly link them to the transaction whereby, days before the inauguration, an investment company linked to the UAE government acquired 49 per cent of World Liberty Financial. Shortly afterwards, the UAE secured an agreement from the Administration regarding the export of chips for artificial intelligence.

The rest of the revenue is linked to the old empire. The Trump National Doral golf club and hotel near Miami: 122 million. Revenue from the various businesses operating around the Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida: 77 million. Licences for the ‘Trump’ brand in the Middle East have yielded at least 35 million; those in Vietnam and Romania, combined with the existing ones in India, Turkey and Indonesia, a further 20. Saudi Arabia and Qatar alone account for over 14. The securities portfolio rose from a low of 236 million at the end of 2024 to a low of 857 at the end of 2025. On the liabilities side, the balance sheet has been lightened. The civil judgement for fraud in New York, amounting to almost half a billion dollars, was overturned on appeal. Over 50 million remains owed to E. Jean Carroll, the central figure in the legal case in which the president was found liable in a civil court for sexual assault and defamation. On the income side, compensation payments have been received from ABC, Paramount and Meta, all arising from lawsuits brought by Trump. However, the document does not resolve the questions surrounding the true current extent of Trump’s wealth, which has always been a mystery. The figures reported are revenues, not profits: it is not known which of these businesses are making money and which are losing it.

Following the publication of the document on the President’s earnings, Trump told journalists never to speak to those who manage his money, and that if he makes money, it is because the stock market is rising. However, this response does not address his international activities, which have very often raised questions due to the obvious links between his institutional role and his business interests.

A notable example is the entry of the Emiratis into World Liberty Financial. On 16 January 2025, four days before the ceremony at which Trump was sworn in for his second term as president, his son Eric signed a contract. On the other side of the table was Aryam Investment 1, an Abu Dhabi-based vehicle linked to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother of the UAE president and the country’s national security adviser. Five hundred million dollars for 49 per cent of the Trump family’s crypto company. Half was paid up front: of that 250 million, 187 went to entities controlled by the Trumps, with tens of millions more going to parties linked to the co-founders, including Steve Witkoff’s sons. The very same circle that revolves around the club in the Georgetown basement.

The transaction was not made public. It only came to light a year later, in February 2026, following an investigation by the Wall Street Journal into corporate documents that had never been filed. It is the first known case in which a foreign government official has acquired a near-controlling stake in a company owned by an American president who is about to take office in the White House. Given the context, it is difficult to regard this as a private matter. Two months after the inauguration of Trump II, the UAE secured access to half a million advanced artificial intelligence chips per year, overturning the restrictions imposed by the Biden administration and overcoming the objections of some national security officials. (continued on page three)

An executive at G42, the UAE-based AI hub to which that offer was made, is among the advisers to World Liberty Financial. The company has denied any link between the fundraising and decisions regarding chips, and argued that it would be absurd to expect a private American company to meet a standard that does not apply to any other. The White House has pointed out that the President’s assets are held in a trust managed by his children. However, the President remains a beneficiary of that trust.

Then, in May 2025, a second Abu Dhabi-based fund arranged a two-billion investment in Binance using USD1, the stablecoin recently launched by World Liberty itself. This boosted Binance’s trading volume, credibility and customer base. And here it is worth recalling what Binance is: the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange platform. In 2023, it was at the centre of a scandal that rocked the crypto world, when it pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering system, paying $4.3 billion to settle the US Department of Justice’s investigation. Binance’s founder, the Chinese-Canadian Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, served four months in prison.

But with the arrival of the second Trump administration, things changed. According to the Wall Street Journal, Binance did not merely accept USD1: it helped to build the technology behind it. A source quoted by CBS was even more categorical: without Zhao, that technology would not exist. USD1 is issued on the Binance blockchain and listed on the platform. Then came the two billion from the Emirati fund MGX, settled in USD1, which suddenly turned it into a currency with a real market. Shortly after providing that support, Zhao submitted a petition for a pardon. On 23 October 2025, Trump granted it. The White House’s reasoning: he had been persecuted by the Biden administration in its war on cryptocurrencies.

In 2021, whilst going through a difficult period following the traumatic end to his first presidency, Trump described the entire world of cryptocurrencies as ‘a scam’. To a large extent, this was a generational issue; the digital world has always been alien and obscure to him – there is no record of Trump ever having personally managed an email account – with the exception of social media, which, as a man of show business and communication, is extremely familiar to him. It was his sons – not only Don Jr. and Eric, but also the youngest, Barron – who gradually introduced him to this world, which now forms the true core of the family’s business activities. And when he returned to the White House, Trump began to address the issue from a legislative and regulatory perspective as well. This has been clearly evident over the past year as we have followed the progress of the two pieces of legislation through which America is establishing the rules governing cryptocurrencies.

The first is the Genius Act, signed by Trump on 18 July 2025, the first federal framework for stablecoins – digital currencies pegged to the dollar and largely backed by government bonds purchased by the private companies that promote them. The law sets out the reserves that issuers must hold, the safeguards they must guarantee to customers, and who is permitted to enter the market. For the sector, this is the legitimisation it has been waiting for for years. Four months earlier, the Trump family’s company had launched its own stablecoin, USD1. A year on from its approval, implementation is still stalling, however, and the Federal Reserve has yet to publish its proposed regulations. The other piece of legislation is the Clarity Act, and it is an even more significant development, as it is intended to resolve the outstanding issue of which body should oversee the entire crypto sector: the SEC or the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission). Passed by the House in 2025 and cleared by the Senate Banking Committee by fifteen votes to nine, the bill immediately ran aground. It is stalled on a single point: the ethics clause that would prohibit public officials from holding significant stakes in the sector. The Democrats want it to be enforced by state attorneys-general, many of whom are at loggerheads with the Administration. The White House has not yet indicated what restrictions it would be prepared to accept. In essence, the law intended to regulate the sector from which the President derives most of his income is bogged down over the very provision that would prevent him from deriving that income. This situation alone gives an idea of the level of conflicts of interest that Washington has reached today.

But to fully grasp the spirit of the times in Washington, it is worth returning to “The Executive Branch” and the investment fund that launched that club, 1789 Capital, as it is the true embodiment of the current Trumpian model. The firm was established in Palm Beach in 2022, founded by Malik alongside Rebekah Mercer and Buskirk, co-founder of the Rockbridge Group – the exclusive network of Trump-aligned financiers in which Vance had also invested time and money. The name was chosen in honour of the year in which the package of constitutional amendments on civil liberties known as the Bill of Rights was drafted. The investment thesis at the time, during the Biden presidency, was that American institutions – from banks to the media – excluded the conservative viewpoint, and that a parallel economy needed to be built. By the end of 2023, the fund had raised around one hundred million. Less than a week after his father’s re-election, Donald Trump Jr. took to the stage at a Rockbridge event in Las Vegas and announced that he was joining 1789. From that point on, the fund’s trajectory shifted to a whole new level. Today, the firm manages over three billion dollars. The flagship fund had returned around 200 per cent as at 30 June, compared with an average of 21 per cent for venture capital funds launched in 2023. Angela Lee, who teaches venture capital at Columbia Business School, told the New York Times that she had never seen managers of a first fund raise so much, and offered a plausible explanation: people are paying for proximity to power. Just like the members of the Georgetown club.

The cases are all similar. Take Polymarket, the prediction betting site: when 1789 joined, it was worth 300 million and was prohibited from accepting cash bets from US residents. Then a federal regulator granted it a licence. Today it is worth fifteen billion. Or take Vulcan Elements, a producer of rare-earth magnets: it was worth around 200 million when 1789 invested last autumn. A few months later, it secured a 620-million loan commitment from the Pentagon and is now worth two billion. Democrats in the House of Representatives have launched an investigation, which is still ongoing, to determine whether the fund influenced that loan. But Malik and Trump Jr. counter that they did not receive any confidential information; it was simply a matter of betting on a sector that had enormous growth potential. “It didn’t take a genius to see that,” said Don Jr.

1789 Capital seems to be pulling off many such coups. Take Reflection AI, for example, which saw its valuation rise from $3.5 billion to $25 billion in a single year, with Malik securing one of its first clients within his Korean network and the Department of Commerce designating the resulting project as the flagship initiative of its programme to export American AI.

Malik and Trump Jr. defend their work consistently and without any embarrassment. Don Jr. says he speaks to his father every few weeks, never discusses business, and plays no role in the Administration. Malik boasts that he has never set foot in the White House, but admits that knowing people in the Administration personally helps them to shape their investment strategies. This seems to be at the heart of the current approach: the ability to know sooner and better than anyone else where public spending is headed, because they pick up on it over dinner or whilst having a drink at the club. At the same time, for companies, having 1789 in their share capital becomes a signal. During a recent call with investors, the CEO of VulcanForms repeatedly mentioned that investment, hinting at what opportunities it might open up.

On the surface, everything appears to be legal and largely above board. The same applies to the activities of Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, who is less visible than during the first administration but remains very active. Today, he is the lead US negotiator in the Middle East alongside Witkoff, whilst also running Affinity Partners, the private equity fund he launched in 2021 after leaving the White House. The fund manages $6.16 billion, of which $1.2 billion was raised in the last year. According to the findings of the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, 99 per cent of the capital comes from foreign sources: sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar. Two billion came from the Saudi PIF, against the advice of the fund’s analysts, which was overruled by the Crown Prince.

In March 2026, the American press revealed that Kushner was raising a further five billion from the very same governments with which he was negotiating on behalf of the United States. This triggered several parliamentary inquiries, prompting the fund to declare that it would not seek any further money from allies whilst Kushner was serving in a voluntary capacity for the Administration. Meanwhile, the President’s son-in-law is also overseeing the thirty-billion-dollar plan for the reconstruction of Gaza.

For over two centuries, things had been different when it came to the presidents’ affairs. Lindsay Chervinsky, who heads the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, summed it up by saying that historically, public office has, if anything, been a source of debt, not of income. Megan Gorman, author of a study on presidential wealth, describes what is happening as simply unprecedented.

Examples are worth more than definitions. President Warren Harding owned a newspaper in Ohio that had been in his family for almost forty years: as soon as controversy arose over his new political role, he sold it, shortly before his death in 1923. Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of the then Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had bought and turned round an Austin radio station, transferred her radio and television stations to an external trustee following Kennedy’s assassination. Jimmy Carter entrusted his peanut farm to an independent administrator. George W. Bush sold his stake in the Texas Rangers before the election. From Johnson onwards, blind trusts were the norm for everyone: Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton and Bush Junior. Obama did not set one up simply because he held only unit trusts.

The threshold for what constituted a scandal was much lower back then than it is today. James Roosevelt, son of Franklin Delano, was a co-owner of an insurance company that sold policies to businesses and government agencies whilst serving as an adviser to his father. The Saturday Evening Post and the New York Times built a case around this that went down in history as ‘Jimmy’s Got It’, and the president’s son was forced to resign from his post. Billy Beer, the beer brand owned by Jimmy Carter’s brother, sparked weeks of controversy.

The most extreme case is that of Harry Truman. He left the White House in 1953 virtually penniless, turning down corporate appointments and television appearances. His tax returns tell the story of his financial collapse: $100,539 in his final year as president, $34,176 the following year, and $13,564 in 1954. He wrote that he could never bring himself to take part in any venture, however respectable, that commercialised the prestige of the presidential office. In 1958, Congress passed the law on pensions for former presidents because Truman had no means of support. Seventy years later, a sitting president declares 2.2 billion in income and calmly explains to reporters that if he is earning money, it is because the stock market is rising.