A Marketplace on the Potomac
On the evening of May 22, 2025, Marine One carried President Donald Trump from the White House to his golf club in Sterling, Virginia, for a dinner with more than 200 guests. Every one of them had qualified for a seat by buying the $TRUMP cryptocurrency, competing for position on a public leaderboard that determined admission. More than half of the attendees were believed to be based outside the United States, and the White House released no guest list. At the top of the leaderboard sat Justin Sun, a China-born crypto entrepreneur whose qualifying wallet held roughly $18.5 million in the token.
Sun’s presence carried its own history. He had committed $75 million to World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture launched by Trump and his sons, becoming its largest publicly known investor. He also had unresolved business with the federal government: the Securities and Exchange Commission had sued him for fraud in 2023, and in February 2025, with Trump back in office, the agency asked a court to pause the case. By March 2026, the SEC had dropped its claims against Sun personally, with a company he was affiliated with paying $10 million to settle what remained.
A Global Expansion of the Family Business
Trump had used the presidency to advance personal financial interests before, but the scale changed dramatically in his second term. New Trump-branded developments were announced in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — a break from his first term, when the Trump Organization had avoided new foreign deals. In Vietnam, the company pursued a $1.5 billion golf and real estate project near Hanoi even as the government negotiated with the Trump administration over tariffs. Trump’s foreign licensing business alone generated about $61 million in 2025, according to his own financial disclosures, with the largest share flowing from the UAE.
The clearest example of that entanglement came four days before Trump’s second inauguration, when an Abu Dhabi investment firm backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — the UAE’s national security adviser — agreed to pay $500 million for a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial. Of the first $250 million installment, $187 million went directly to Trump family entities. Tahnoon also chaired G42, an Emirati AI company whose access to advanced U.S. chips had been restricted under the Biden administration over concerns about its ties to China. Months after Trump took office, the administration cleared the way for the UAE to obtain hundreds of thousands of those chips.
Crypto, a Pardon and an Exchange
Tahnoon’s orbit extended further. Another firm he chaired, MGX, announced a $2 billion investment in the crypto exchange Binance, structured through USD1, the stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial. Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, had pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating federal anti-money-laundering laws and later sought a pardon from Trump. In October 2025, Trump granted it. The White House and World Liberty Financial have denied that any of these transactions influenced U.S. policy.
Corporate Settlements and the Price of Access
American companies found their own reasons to accommodate the administration. Meta paid $25 million in January 2025 to settle a lawsuit Trump filed after Facebook suspended his account, with $22 million earmarked for his future presidential library. Paramount faced higher stakes: while Trump sued the company over CBS’s editing of a 60 Minutes interview, and Paramount needed federal approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance, the company agreed to a $16 million settlement in July 2025. The Federal Communications Commission approved the merger three weeks later; FCC chairman Brendan Carr denied any connection between the two events. Trump’s second inaugural committee, meanwhile, raised more than $245 million — over twice the previous record — with Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft each contributing $1 million.
Pressuring the Bar and the Ivy League
Law firms and universities faced more direct forms of leverage. After Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 restricting Paul, Weiss’s access to the federal government, the firm’s chairman met with Trump at the White House and agreed to $40 million in free legal work for causes the administration supported; Trump withdrew the order the next day. Other firms followed suit without waiting for an order, and roughly nine major firms ultimately committed nearly $1 billion in pro bono services combined. Columbia University, after the administration froze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding, agreed in July 2025 to pay $200 million and adopt a series of policy changes; Harvard chose to fight in court instead.
A Pattern of Pardons
Trump’s use of the pardon power showed a similar logic. In March 2025, he pardoned Nikola founder Trevor Milton, convicted of securities and wire fraud, after Milton and his wife had donated more than $1.8 million to Trump-aligned committees before the 2024 election. Asked why, Trump said simply that Milton “liked Trump.” Twelve days after pardoning Florida nursing-home executive Paul Walczak — convicted of withholding payroll taxes from employees — Trump acted following his mother’s attendance at a $1-million-a-person Mar-a-Lago fundraiser.
Building a Bank of His Own
The clearest evidence of Trump’s financial entanglement with the presidency emerged in his crypto ventures. His 2025 financial disclosures reported more than $1.4 billion in income from crypto activities, including hundreds of millions from World Liberty Financial and $TRUMP token sales. In August 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave conditional approval for a national trust bank charter to World Liberty Trust Company, an entity affiliated with World Liberty Financial, which says it is 38 percent owned by an entity tied to Trump and his family. The charter would let the company bring stablecoin issuance and custody in-house rather than relying on third parties.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who had urged regulators not to approve the application without Trump divesting his interests, called him “the first President in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank.” Reuters has separately estimated that the Trump family earned about $50 million from the USD1 stablecoin through the end of June 2026, and that World Liberty Financial had directed more than $1.6 billion to Trump and his relatives by April.
Gifts, Real Estate and a Golden Ballroom
Not all the benefits took the form of income. In May 2025, the Defense Department accepted a Boeing 747-8 from Qatar, valued at roughly $400 million, which Trump said would serve as Air Force One before eventually being transferred to his presidential library; the aircraft entered service in July 2026. That same year, Trump began raising private money for a new White House ballroom, a project whose cost climbed to roughly $400 million even as contractor estimates put the true figure closer to $600 million. Disclosed donors included Lockheed Martin, Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Coinbase and Ripple, though the funding agreement — obtained by the watchdog group Public Citizen through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit — allows other donors to remain anonymous.
Donors and Dollars
A June 2026 Public Citizen analysis, titled “Ballroom Billions,” found that 14 of the 27 publicly identified corporate donors had received more than $50 billion in new or expanded federal contracts in the six months after giving — and that 19 of the 27 had collected $338 billion in federal contracts over the preceding five and a half years. Lockheed Martin alone accounted for nearly $44 billion of that total. “These giant corporations aren’t funding the Trump ballroom fiasco out of the goodness of their hearts,” said Jon Golinger, the report’s co-author, adding that donors “hope to curry favor with” the administration.
Democratic lawmakers seized on the findings. Rep. Jason Crow said the companies were “receiving billions of dollars in kickbacks — paid for by your tax dollars,” while Sen. Warren described the arrangement as a “pay-to-play loyalty program for wealthy donors.” Public Citizen was careful to note that the data does not prove any single contribution bought a specific contract.
The Ballroom’s Day in Court
The ballroom also became a test of presidential power. In March 2026, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled that construction had to halt until Congress authorized it, a decision the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals later upheld. The administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which on August 31, 2026, allowed construction to continue in a 5-4 decision holding that the plaintiff, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, likely lacked standing to sue. Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by the court’s three liberal justices, dissented, writing that Congress had explicitly barred new construction on federal property without its “express” approval. The ruling let work proceed without resolving whether the project itself was lawful.
A Reshaped Court, A Compliant Congress
The Supreme Court’s ballroom ruling followed a broader trend of expanding executive latitude. In June 2026, the justices struck down statutory protections shielding Federal Trade Commission members from removal without cause, giving Trump substantially more control over independent regulatory agencies whose rulings can shape the fortunes of major corporations — many of which simultaneously hold financial ties to Trump-linked ventures. Congress, meanwhile, mounted no investigation comparable to the congressional inquiries that once exposed Teapot Dome or Watergate; House Speaker Mike Johnson remained one of Trump’s most consistent defenders, and the chamber showed little appetite for examining the president’s business dealings.
How It Measures Against Past Scandals
Previous presidencies had corruption scandals, but rarely of this shape. The Teapot Dome affair a century ago sent Interior Secretary Albert Fall to prison for taking bribes — money Harding himself never touched. Ulysses Grant and Harry Truman were both damaged by corruption within their administrations without evidence that either personally profited. Spiro Agnew came closer, taking cash from contractors while serving as vice president, and resigned in 1973. Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal involved no personal enrichment at all; it was the use of presidential power for political survival. Trump’s second term combines elements of both patterns — personal financial benefit and the expanded use of executive authority — at a scale and on a global stage no earlier presidency approached.