After Trump’s astonishing $2.2B financial disclosure, revisiting his crypto venture with the UAE, including the pardon of Changpeng Zhao in the middle of it all.
In 2021, President Trump described cryptocurrency as a scam that could undermine the U.S. dollar. Yesterday, on the eve of the long holiday weekend observance of the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary (i.e., when he had to figure attention to political news would be at its low ebb), the president released a mandatory annual financial disclosure acknowledging that he’d raked in a shocking $2.2 billion dollars last year while holding the nation’s highest public trust and the world’s most powerful office.
About $1.4 billion of the windfall is estimated to have come from the Trump family’s sundry crypto ventures.
Forbes estimates that, since beginning his crypto ventures while gliding toward his return to the presidency in 2024, Trump’s net worth has climbed by about $4 billion — to roughly $6.5 billion (as of three months ago). During his presidency, Trump’s private financial interests are at least nominally overseen by his oldest adult sons. Forbes estimates that since 2024, the fortune of Donald Trump Jr. has grown six-fold, from $50 million to $300 million; and Eric Trump’s has grown ten-fold, from $40 million to $400 million.
That Trump is monetizing the presidency in a manner that would not only have appalled the Founders but would have been inconceivable just a decade ago is patent. In 2024, before entering office (although assumed to have a good chance to win the office) the magnate’s businesses generated around $622 million. That’s impressive, but he has nearly quadrupled that amount while in office as president, while making American economic and foreign policy, while stocks are traded in his accounts at a staggering pace, and while his family businesses do lucrative deals with the countries that deeply affect — and are deeply affected by — American relations and interests.
The usually slow holiday news cycle notwithstanding, the president’s compelled disclosures have naturally spurred extensive reports in, among other outlets, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — the latter of which adds a scathing editorial aptly titled, “The Trump Family and ‘Honest Graft.’”
National Review has been on the crypto case from the start (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here). In that vein, I’m reviving my five-part series from last February, relating the sordid story of how Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, a top official of the United Arab Emirates government (and royal family), invested $2.5 billion (with a b) in the Trump family crypto enterprise — the main vehicle, run by the Trump’s and the family of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s emissary to Russia and Iran, is World Liberty Financial.
The funds starting pouring in four days before the president’s 2021 inauguration. The UAE lobbied heavily for influence, access to advanced American microchips (a national security matter that required government approval), and a pardon for Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance the world’s largest crypto platform, which Zhao was effectively relocating to the UAE. Zhao had been convicted of felony money-laundering charges (as the Justice Department put it, for turning Binance into a covert funding channel for terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers). While Zhao went to prison, Binance had to pay $4 billion to settle the criminal case.
As the months passed and Zhao, too, lobbied for the pardon, Binance lent its expertise to help Trump’s crypto business develop $USD1, a stablecoin (a cryptocurrency pegged roughly to the dollar, designed to make it easier to use crypto in financial transactions). As my series details, Trump gave the UAE the influence and chips it was seeking, and gave Zhao his pardon — immediately after which Binance created new programs to promote the Trump stablecoin, markedly increasing its reserves, to as much as $5 billion. Because stablecoin issuers operate like a bank, they generate tens of millions in investment revenue for every billion dollars of stablecoin in circulation; $5 billion could be expected to generate roughly $200 billion annually.
The five installments of the series are at the following links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. The last installment is a useful timeline of the relevant events.
In closing, I’ll repeat two things I said at the time we ran the series.
First, the $24 million in self-dealing revenue the Biden family earned over the course of several years (but not during Biden’s presidency), over which Republican-controlled House committees opened an impeachment investigation against President Biden, would barely amount to a rounding error compared to the dimension of cashing in on U.S. government power and influence over the past 18 months.
Second, as I observed at the end of Part 1: “Even if crypto makes your head hurt, you’re going to be hearing a lot about this in the months to come. It’s important to grasp what happened and why it matters.” You’re hearing it now, you’ll be hearing even more as the midterms approach, and if — as expected — the Democrats take control of the House next year, rest assured that it will be the dominant topic of news and congressional investigations.