Trump Cashed In Big On Crypto. Trump-loving Crypto Traders Are Still Struggling.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday pointed to the stock market’s rise as the fuel behind his mammoth financial windfall in 2025, saying “everybody’s profiting.”

Ordinary investors would like a word.

Wall Street has been on a blistering run higher since Trump returned to Washington last year — an undeniable boon to the millions of Americans invested in the market. But the president didn’t make the more than $2 billion he reported on his financial disclosures on the backs of blue-chip stocks like Apple, Tesla and JPMorgan Chase.

Instead, his earnings were propelled by a string of Trump-backed cryptocurrency ventures that accounted for more than $1.4 billion of his 2025 income, according to the disclosures released Tuesday. And while those digital assets companies paid off handsomely to early supporters like Trump, many of the traders who followed him into the market are saddled with investments that are deep in the red, with few signs of hope.

“We should all only hope for such great rates of return that the president received,” said Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.

The $TRUMP memecoin — a collectible type of crypto token that Trump launched just before taking office — has plunged 98 percent from its January 2025 peak. First lady Melania Trump’s own memecoin has similarly cratered in value. And another crypto asset from the Trump family-backed firm World Liberty Financial is down 87 percent from its all-time high price from September.

The split-screen is the latest reminder of the potential risks of investing in an asset heavily tied to an individual — and particularly one like Trump, whose standing with the American public is constantly fluctuating and often underwater. Trump’s financial disclosures, meanwhile, are giving new wind to claims that the president is cashing in on his power: Engel told POLITICO that Trump’s “returns clearly demonstrate that he’s profiting from the presidency, whether he’s willing to admit so or not.”

“In the first year of his presidency, Trump made more money than in the rest of his life combined,” Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California who has regularly clashed with the president, wrote on social media late Tuesday. “Meanwhile, most Americans worked hard to just break even. This is the cost of corruption.”

The White House has repeatedly rejected claims of conflicts of interest, as has Trump himself. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said after the disclosures were released that all of Trump’s actions are made “in the best interest of the American people” and that neither he nor his family “has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest.”

While speaking with reporters early Wednesday, Trump said his investments are overseen by financial professionals with whom he does not speak before downplaying the significance of his 2025 income.

“You know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up. Everybody’s profiting,” he said. “I’m profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash.”

Buoyed by strong corporate earnings and a seemingly insatiable investor appetite for artificial intelligence-related investments, stocks have been on a tear since Trump’s inauguration. And the president himself is heavily active in the market, as evidenced by his unprecedented flurry of stock trades to kick off 2026.

Yet Trump’s income last year largely came through a series of deals tied to his interests in the $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty Financial that weren’t available to the broader investing public.

He collected $635 million from a licensing deal that the company behind Trump’s memecoin, CIC Digital, had with another entity called Celebration Coins. He also earned more than $236 million from token sales that came through World Liberty and another $197 million from an equity sale in a crypto business called Stablecoin Holdco.

Bloomberg News reported Wednesday that the haul was larger than that of any publicly traded crypto business.

Crypto prices have been rocked this year, as investors signaled newfound skittishness over risky assets that could be dented by higher interest rates. Matthew Tuttle, who leads the investment firm Tuttle Capital Management, said that while it has been a good year for stocks tied to artificial intelligence, “it’s been horrific for crypto.”

For Tuttle, whose firm oversees more than $5 billion in assets, Trump’s activities in the crypto market aren’t all that different from members of Congress dabbling in stock trading. But he cautioned that they shouldn’t become the norm over time.

“He’s playing the game the way the rules are set out,” Tuttle said. “Certainly, from a business standpoint, he’s been able to capitalize on his position. Should he be able to is a different story.”