If you are paying attention, you know that Trump is using his office to line his pockets, but the scale still requires attention. The NYT reports: Trump’s Moneymaking Run: Unrivaled in Presidential History.

never before in American history has there been anything like Donald J. Trump, a president who in his first year back in office has collected about $1.4 billion in new revenues from cryptocurrency businesses that directly benefited from his actions as president, a financial disclosure report made public on Tuesday shows.

Overall, Mr. Trump’s revenue in 2025 jumped to at least $2.2 billion, compared with a minimum of $622 million in 2024 before he returned to office.

“It is completely unprecedented,” said Megan Gorman, a tax attorney and the author of a recent book, “All the Presidents’ Money,” that studied the history of presidential wealth dating back 250 years.

[…]

“Public office, if anything, was a source of debt, not a source of revenue,” said Lindsay M. Chervinsky, a historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.

Mr. Trump and his family have done the opposite, creating new business ventures that are profiting from actions Mr. Trump has taken since he returned to the White House.

It is impossible to ignore the exploitation of his office for his memecoin and other ventures, his dealings with Gulf state countries that have directly benefited him and his family, and his manipulation of the crypto industry to his advantage. While it may well be true that he ran for re-election to avoid jail, there is little doubt that he also saw it all as one big business opportunity. That there are voters out there who think he is working for them and not himself is some terrible combo of quite sad and maddening.

In regard to crypto (and a Gulf state):

Those include the pardon Mr. Trump issued in October to Changpeng Zhao, the richest man in crypto, who founded the company Binance, which has been a critical business partner to the Trump family’s own crypto venture. They also include legislation that Mr. Trump signed last July to promote a form of cryptocurrency called stablecoins, four months after his family-backed firm introduced its own stablecoin.

[…]

The bulk of the new revenue for Mr. Trump comes from the cryptocurrency industry, which the family aggressively moved into starting in late 2024, just as Mr. Trump was about to be re-elected to a second term.

Mr. Trump served as a co-founder of his family’s crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. That business has now generated $799 million for the president, the financial disclosure made public on Tuesday shows, a significant share of which came from a payment from the government of the United Arab Emirates, which bought a stake in the company.

Memecoins:

Three days before Mr. Trump was inaugurated, he separately helped launch a memecoin, $TRUMP, a kind of collectible version of a crypto token. That business has generated another $636 million for Mr. Trump, the disclosure shows, equal to slightly more than the entire amount of money Mr. Trump made from all his other business operations worldwide in 2024.

His memecoin business directly benefited from a February 2025 statement from the Securities and Exchange Commission notifying the industry that such tokens would no longer be subject to the agency’s oversight, reversing the position taken by the agency’s chairman during the Biden administration.

Plus:

Real estate deals with a Saudi Arabia-based developer, including one that involves the Saudi government, have also brought tens of millions of dollars in new revenues to Mr. Trump and his sons, as have real estate deals in other parts of the world, including Vietnam and Romania.

This does not include business endeavors by Mr. Trump’s sons like recent investments in military contractors, or predictions market companies or companies pursuing billions of dollars of federal assistance to build mines that supply critical minerals — all of which stand to generate new profits for the Trump family, but not Mr. Trump directly.

It is all quite grotesque.

By contrast, most former presidents in modern times have sold off businesses that they owned or even held stakes in, as well as individual stock holdings. George W. Bush, for example, sold his stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team before his election, while Jimmy Carter turned over operation of his peanut farm to an independent trustee.

Presidential historians said they could identify no other president in American history who entered into new business enterprises just before moving into the White House, and then continued to personally profit from them during his term.

But at least we won the war with Iran, tamed global inflation, are helping the poor and sick globally, and have strengthened the global order!

Wait. What?