New Investigation: Trump Approves Himself a Bank, the Family Collects 75 Percent

Back in July, we had already published an investigation into this issue. A regulatory agency appointed by Trump himself has given the cryptocurrency company World Liberty Financial preliminary approval to operate like a bank. The company is backed by his family. That puts Donald Trump in a role no president of the United States has ever held before him. Senator Elizabeth Warren summed up the decision this way: “President Trump is now the first president in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank. This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen, and Congress cannot allow it to stand.” This belongs among the sleaziest things any sitting president has ever done. The fact that the public is barely pushing back shows how deeply political life in the United States has changed during his second term.

Read also our article: Two Billion Dollars, and the Losers Are 764,000 Supporters

The office is a tool for him to make his own family rich, and the history of the country has no second example like it. He governs in the style of a family boss in organized crime. He dodges every form of oversight by either smashing the offices that could restrain him or wearing them down. In Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court gave him what a man like that needs, immunity from prosecution for everything he presents as an official act while in office. Where punishment no longer threatens, the office becomes a business model. His dealings in cryptocurrency show where that leads, and in the past year alone he is said to have made more than $1 billion from it.

Not long ago, he was still sounding the alarm. In June 2021, he trashed Bitcoin as a scam and warned that digital money could knock the dollar off its throne as the world’s reserve currency. Crypto was “potentially a disaster waiting to happen,” he said at the time. But Trump holds onto no conviction longer than it serves him, what counts is the money. During the 2024 campaign, his opinion flipped as soon as the industry showed him what kind of money could be made from these coins and how easily they could move across every border. It helped that crypto companies were among the most generous donors of the election year.

The coin itself shows Trump with his fist raised, in the same gesture he made after the 2024 assassination attempt. It has no intrinsic value, no product, no company behind it. It is a pure bet on an aura, on the idea that everything carrying that name must rise along with his presidency.

World Liberty Financial was founded in 2024 by Trump and his sons, along with special envoy Steve Witkoff and his sons. The Trump family owns 38 percent of the publicly traded company. According to an investigation published in January 2026, nearly half belongs to an investment firm from the United Arab Emirates. Even so, the family collects 75 percent of all revenue from the business. The godfather always gets the biggest cut from the deals made on the lower levels. The ownership question is secondary as long as the family takes the profit. Foreign countries hold stakes in the company, the White House holds out its hand. The company was founded in the middle of the campaign so Trump could get in as a private citizen, while at the same time it openly used its ties to him to raise money.

Shortly before taking office, in January 2025, Trump threw his own joke currency, $TRUMP, onto the market and pocketed hundreds of millions. No one drew a line anymore between public office and private cash, and in 2025 alone he took in nearly $800 million from World Liberty tokens. The coin carried his name, and every purchase landed with the man who also controls regulation and law. Some saw it as the next stage in turning the highest office in the country into cash. These tokens draw their value from nothing but the bet that the next person will pay more. Digital tulips whose bloom lasts only as long as the belief does. Crypto is useless as a means of payment, none of it is legal tender in the United States, but it is perfectly built for shady deals. World Liberty will not be a place for savings books either. No one looking for a checking account or an installment loan will have any luck there. The company is supposed to issue and manage its own stablecoin, called USD1, whose value is pegged to the dollar. The label bank borrows a kind of trust the thing itself does not deserve.

One has to look at that contrast to understand what is actually happening here. A president profits from a product bearing his own name while the people who trusted that name lose their money. According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, fifty eight investors in the TRUMP coin each made more than ten million dollars in profits, earning a combined 1.1 billion dollars. Most were early traders who exited before the price collapsed. At the same time, approximately 764,000 cryptocurrency wallets, most holding relatively small positions, lost money on that very coin. Every single trade generated transaction fees for Trump and his partners, producing hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue.

Donald Trump’s 927-page financial disclosure was released. It shows what income the sitting president of the United States earned in 2025:

$635 million from the TRUMP cryptocurrency, while the meme coin’s price fell from $74 to $1.68 and many small investors suffered heavy losses.

$594 million from the sale of tokens and stablecoins from the World Liberty Financial crypto project, which Trump founded together with his sons.

$65 million from the sale of ownership stakes in the same company.

More than $80 million from settlement payments by ABC, CBS, Meta and YouTube that went to his presidential library.

In total, Trump earned more than 1.4 billion dollars from cryptocurrency during a single year while serving as President of the United States.

His estimated net worth is reported to have increased from 2.4 billion dollars to 6.3 billion dollars since taking office, nearly tripling in value.

While Trump earned more than 1.4 billion dollars from cryptocurrency, many buyers of his memecoin lost money. According to the disclosure, 764,000 wallets ended up in the red.

Kaizen Blog's conclusion: This is the most corrupt presidency in the history of the United States. Period.

Its most important function could be to make corruption socially acceptable, especially because U.S. federal regulators have long since taken their hands off the wheel when it comes to crypto. Companies and foreign governments seeking access to the Trump administration could move huge sums through World Liberty tokens without attracting attention. The envelope under the table would become unnecessary, the payment could run openly through a company from which the president’s family profits.

Foreign influence travels more easily across borders with this technology, and the far right is strikingly eager to reach for it. Both live off the same promise, escaping oversight. In Britain, Nigel Farage, who leads the right-wing Reform Party, took more than £5 million from a crypto billionaire living in Thailand without disclosing it. Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei came under suspicion of taking part in a cross-border crypto scam in which thousands of token buyers lost around $250 million combined. Both deny everything. The investigation into Farage is continuing, while calls were made for Milei’s impeachment.

Trump, the king of cryptocurrency and the sleaziest representative of the global far right, has seen the future of digital money, and he likes it. That is exactly why World Liberty Financial applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter. The application will be decided by a regulatory apparatus staffed by the president himself. For the family’s open self-enrichment, it would be the perfect tool. The president becomes the banker, the office becomes his startup capital. A currency based on nothing but trust fits an office he now treats only as collateral for his business deals.