The financial disclosure the Office of Government Ethics released on June 30 shows the President’s 2025 income at roughly $2.2 billion, of which about $1.4 billion came from cryptocurrency. The New York Times spent the month running the 927 pages through a spreadsheet and reported this week that the money comes mostly from two sources – digital assets and foreign investment. That is another way of saying the President of the United States now earns his living from the two categories of transactions his own government is supposed to police. In case you are wondering, that is about $6 million a day, every day, including the ones he spent golfing.
Senator Cory Booker has spent July making a loud and accurate case that the President’s sons are pilfering the Pentagon budget. He is right, and we have covered this issue a lot around here.
But Booker is also the lead Democratic negotiator on crypto market structure, co-author of the Senate Agriculture draft that fed the bill now stalled on the floor, and one of eighteen Senate Democrats who voted the GENIUS Act into law. Trump earned $1.4 thanks to people like Booker. Just to be clear, two things can be true at once. Trump’s sons can be raiding the Pentagon budget like Uday and Quasay, AND Booker can also be one of Trump’s critical enablers, putting a legitimate gloss on the scam Trump and the Trump Princelings use to stuff their pockets.
Speaking of enablers…Elon Musk. All of this Princeling corruption is gaining more traction overseas and is causing real damage to the country’s reputation. The rest of the world has stopped giving America the benefit of the doubt (as they should). But that hasn’t stopped the tech bros. Elon Musk spent Thursday authorizing up to $120 million to elect Republicans in November.
WBUR Here and Now, July 29, 2026, carrying New York Times analysis
The filing has been public since June 30, but it was…a lot. It took a data desk to make it legible. Times data journalist Andrea Fuller walked through the findings. Crypto was the family business. CBS totaled it at roughly $2.2 billion, including $635 million in royalties from the issuer of the $TRUMP token and more than $500 million from World Liberty Financial token sales. Doral brought in $121.8 million and Mar-a-Lago $77.4 million, which now read like the hobby income of a man who found a better racket. Three former White House ethics lawyers from both parties put the other half of the ledger on the record in early July. The $TRUMP coin is down 97.7% from its high. As many as a million investors have lost a combined $3.8 billion on it. Somebody had to be on the other side of those trades. That somebody filed a 927-page disclosure and works in an office that those million investors pay taxes to maintain.
Trump Admin Pressures Law Enforcement Groups to Support Controversial Cryptocurrency Legislation
CNN, July 30, 2026
For weeks, the White House has been leaning on current and former federal law enforcement officials to endorse the CLARITY Act. Police organizations have been warning that narcotraffickers, terrorist financiers, Russia, Iran, and China want this bill. That is all true, but the crystal-clear warning sign is that Donald Trump badly wants this bill. The White House is even using the Pentagon to do Trump’s bidding. Patrick Witt, a Pentagon official who runs the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, pressed officials at the FBI and elsewhere to sign on. An official at one law enforcement group told CNN that everyone in the field “got hammered to support that legislation.” That is the signal Booker and the 16 Senate crypto-fresh Democrats keep waiving off. Shame. We wish one reporter anywhere would ask one of these Democrats to explain why Trump wants this bill so badly (hint: it isn’t to keep cryptocurrency clean of corruption).
The National District Attorneys Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police had written jointly to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, warning that provisions scattered throughout the bill would reduce transparency, weaken accountability, and create gaps in the anti-money-laundering and terrorist-financing framework that investigators depend on. Blanche has been campaigning for confirmation as Attorney General and can’t afford to lose the support of his audience of one – Blanche probably supports crypto anyway, frankly. Remember, he shut down crypto criminal investigations and dissolved the Justice Department’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. Transparency International’s deputy executive director told CNN he had never seen ethics language so plainly tailored to accommodate one politician. When the cops say a bill helps launderers and the government responds by lobbying the cops, the President of the United States sees a business opportunity, and 16 Senate Democrats captured by the crypto industry start barking like trained seals.
Cryptocurrency and AI Scams Bilk Americans of Billions
FBI, April 2026
In the same calendar year, the President earned $1.4 billion from crypto, Americans reported losing $11.366 billion to it. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 181,565 crypto-related complaints in 2025. The average loss across all fraud was about $20,000. From crypto? $62,604. Americans over sixty absorbed $4.4 billion of that. This is the industry Congress is being lobbied to deregulate, by an administration whose head of state is its largest single beneficiary, with the enforcement team that used to work these cases already disbanded.
Trump’s Sons Invest Heavily in Defense Tech as Father’s Administration Pours Money In
Washington Post, July 13, 2026
The Post built a federal contracting database spanning January 2016 through early July 2026 and cross-referenced it with PitchBook records. The result is the cleanest map yet of the Princelings’ business model. Companies backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have secured at least $3.2 billion in federal awards since the brothers invested, plus $3.1 billion in future contract options, and several have earned spots on preapproved shortlists that let them bid on nearly $200 billion in future work. Trump Jr. joined 1789 Capital within days of the 2024 election. Eric invests mainly through American Ventures and Dominari, whose offices sit in Trump Tower. In June, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth folded nearly all Pentagon drone and autonomous weapons programs into one new office, and the latest budget request earmarks $53.6 billion for autonomous platforms and counter-drone systems. The brothers have backed or advised at least four drone manufacturers, all of which secured federal business in 2025 and 2026. A White House spokeswoman says there are no conflicts of interest. Booker, quoted by La Voce di New York, put it more plainly, saying the Pentagon should not be a Trump family ATM. He is correct.
Reminder #2: In November, 2025, Booker and Chairman John Boozman released the bipartisan market structure discussion draft that became the Senate Agriculture half of the CLARITY Act. In 2025, he voted for the GENIUS Act. That law that basically created USD1, the Trump family stablecoin. A Democratic Party that spends the morning denouncing the Pentagon grift and the afternoon negotiating the crypto grift is not running an anti-corruption campaign. Or being good at politics. Or being anything but part of the problem. In Hungary, Peter Magyar went from nothing, with no national media presence, to shellacking Viktor Orbán’s kleptocratic machine by facing the corruption head-on – all of it – and never once losing focus. Prior to that, Orbán had spent 16 years defeating an opposition that couldn’t resist keeping one foot in the feed trough.
Where the CLARITY Act Stands Right Now
Disruption Banking, July 31, 2026
Stuck. No floor vote, no cloture motion, no date. Majority Leader John Thune has told reporters he does not expect the bill to reach the floor before the recess that starts around August 7, with nominations and a Russia sanctions measure ahead of it. Polymarket, the crypto-adjacent political betting market, priced 2026 passage at 28%, down from a peak of 82% in February, and Galaxy Digital cut its own estimate to 30%. Until those predictions are 0%, we will not stop talking about it.
Worth noting, New York Attorney General Letitia James has come out against the bill, warning that it would weaken states’ ability to regulate crypto and investigate fraud. Complaints to her office about crypto scams have tripled in three years, with losses approaching $500 million. We have said before that state attorneys general are the last enforcement backstop standing. Maybe this backstop feels inclined to get off the sidelines?
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Billionaires Have Already Poured $433 Million Into the 2026 Midterms
Fortune, July 27, 2026
Americans for Tax Fairness ran FEC data through March 1 and found the fifty biggest-spending billionaire families had already routed $344.3 million. Our affiliated 501c3 has something to say about this, too. About 79% of billionaires’ total went to Republican candidates and conservative groups. MAGA Inc took in $89 million, America PAC $45.3 million, and the Senate Leadership Fund $36.3 million. Musk led all individual donors at roughly $71 million at that count and at least $90 million by the end of June, followed by Jeff Yass with more than $55 million. The Washington Post put Republican-leaning donors at $880 million in the first half of 2026 against $290 million from Democratic-leaning givers. Then on Thursday, The Times reported that Musk has authorized America PAC to spend $100 million to $120 million on a new field program across at least eight states. This is the man who announced in 2025 that he had gotten a little too involved in politics. A Boligarch © does not retire. The crypto industry’s own Fairshake network, meanwhile, entered this cycle with roughly $193 million in hand.
The US Slips to Its Lowest-Ever Rank in a Global Corruption Index
Semafor, February 12, 2026, on Transparency International data
In Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, the United States fell to 29th out of 182 countries, its worst placing since the index was relaunched under current methodology in 2012, scoring 64 on a scale where 100 is clean. It now sits tied with the Bahamas, behind Lithuania, Barbados and Uruguay. The organization’s chief executive said plainly that they are very concerned and that the decline may continue. The surveys behind the score do not yet reflect most of 2025. Reputations are slow to build and fast to burn. Ask Albania, where the Flamingo Revolution is in its third month over a single Kushner-linked resort on Sazan Island and the Narta Lagoon. Foreign Policy reported on July 20 that groundbreaking has stalled amid calls for environmental review and an investigation by SPAK, the country’s independent anti-corruption body. Members of the Albanian party Lëvizja Bashkë told Democracy Now that they regard the project as a money laundering operation (they are likely correct). Tens of thousands of Albanians have filled the streets for weeks over Kushner’s deal. In contrast, Americans did not react to the 927-page disclosure by Kushner’s father-in-law. The US is becoming a case study in kleptocracy, and supporters of Albanian flamingos remain better organized than the US Senate.
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