Does Trump Worry About Conflicts of Interest? ‘I Found Out That Nobody Cared.’

 

Does Trump Worry About Conflicts of Interest? ‘I Found Out That Nobody Cared.’

 

American presidents have generally tried to avoid appearing to profit from the office. President Trump has chosen a different path.

 

Zolan Kanno-Youngs

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent. He reported from Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/us/politics/trump-money-conflicts-presidency.html

July 1, 2026

 

President Trump returned to the White House with an epiphany about mixing business and politics during his first term in office.

 

“I found out that nobody cared,” Mr. Trump told The New York Times in January, revealing a remarkable indifference to potential conflicts of interest.

 

That was months before Mr. Trump’s latest financial disclosure revealed on Tuesday that he made about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses during his first year back in office — even as the Trump administration has relaxed regulation of crypto companies.

 

By tradition, American presidents have generally tried to avoid appearing to profit from the presidency, often taking actions to separate themselves from the kinds of corporate entanglements that could create conflicts of interest.

 

Mr. Trump has chosen a different path, smashing through the few norms he paid even glancing attention to in his first term, like having his family restrain its international business activity.

 

“I got no credit in the first term,” he said in January.

 

Now, he and his family have amassed a mammoth windfall, and so far at least, Mr. Trump appears largely unconcerned that he will face the kind of political fallout that would discourage other leaders from similar moneymaking endeavors.

 

Even before the release of his financial filing, polling showed disapproval among Americans when it came to Mr. Trump’s handling of his family’s business. One Pew Research Center survey from September found that more than 60 percent of Americans felt that Mr. Trump in his second term “definitely or probably” had “improperly” used the office of the presidency to enrich himself, friends and his family.

 

The same poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believed that Mr. Trump had not set a high moral standard for the presidency.

 

Overall, Mr. Trump pulled in at least $2.2 billion during his first year back in office, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, like real estate assets. That is compared with at least $622 million his enterprises brought in for all of 2024, before he returned to the White House. And it eclipses the revenue reported by Mr. Trump’s family business in 2020, the last full year of his first term, when it suffered steep declines as the pandemic upended the hospitality industry.

 

In his first term, Mr. Trump’s family business promised to not make foreign deals while Mr. Trump was in office. But in his return to the White House, Mr. Trump’s sons have shifted the focus of the family business from domestic real estate to financial deals that monetize the Trump name, renewing questions over conflicts of interest. Mr. Trump is also benefiting particularly from the cryptocurrency industry, even as his administration guts the primary regulator of the industry.

 

“This is an unprecedented level of conflict of interest and what appears to be some corruption,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, acting vice president of policy and government at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan government watchdog.

 

He said Mr. Trump in his second term had appeared to fully internalize that he is exempt from civil and criminal conflict of interest laws that would otherwise require a senior federal official to sell holdings in companies that might benefit from his or her actions.

 

“It’s just ethically odious,” he said.

 

The White House has repeatedly dismissed questions of conflicts, maintaining that Mr. Trump’s two older sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., run the business operations.

 

Mr. Trump, too, brushed aside the news of his financial disclosure filing.

 

“I purposely, I never speak to any of the people that run the money,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Wednesday morning before boarding the luxury plane donated by Qatar that now serves as Air Force One. “You know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market is going up.”

 

In fact, Mr. Trump has declined to make use of a traditional ethical guardrail: putting his assets in a blind trust. That means that he could potentially know what stocks he owns, and influence their performance with policy announcements or contracts even if he cannot direct how or when they are traded.

 

The stock market’s movements also do not explain the bulk of his financial haul in 2025, including when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company.

 

“That is an extraordinary conflict of interest unfolding in plain sight,” said Gary Kalman, executive director of Transparency International U.S., an anti-corruption group.

 

Mr. Trump’s regrets over limiting his power in his first term have appeared to motivate other actions in his return to the White House. Mr. Trump has told advisers that his biggest regret from his first term was appointing Republican veterans who went on to criticize him after leaving his administration. He has now installed loyalists throughout the federal government.

 

He has put election deniers in key positions in the administration as he continues to express grievances about the integrity of the 2020 election. He has pushed out independent watchdogs, amassed executive power and shown little hesitation to push the limits in ways that were taboo in his first term.

 

And Mr. Trump and his family in his second term have only doubled down when it comes to business ventures that are profiting from his administration’s actions. Donald Trump Jr. has also expressed similar sentiment to his father, saying that his family got no credit for its restraint in Mr. Trump’s first term.

 

That includes legislation that Mr. Trump signed last July to promote a form of cryptocurrency called stablecoin, four months after his family-backed firm introduced its own stablecoin.

 

With his two sons standing just feet behind him on Wednesday, Mr. Trump appeared unconcerned when asked about criticism that he was profiting from his presidency.

 

“We’re all profiting,” Mr. Trump said as he once again spotlighted the stock market. “I’m profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash and I give it to institutions. I don’t know if they know what they’re doing or not, but they buy a vast array of things.”

 

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.