Trump crypto playbook: The family always wins, not investors

It was January 2025, crypto fever was raging, and Donald J. Trump was preparing to return to the White House. So when Fatime Elrgdawy's friend told her about an online message from the US president-elect hyping the launch of his own crypto coin – "GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW" – she thought: "Oh my God, this is brilliant."

If Trump was putting his name behind it, Elrgdawy recalls thinking, "it must be a legitimate investment."

The 29-year-old software project engineer in Santa Barbara, California, put $2,000 of her savings into the $TRUMP meme coin – a purely speculative crypto token whose value is often driven by social media hype. All that remained, she thought, was to sit back and wait for the price to climb.

Instead, the price plummeted. At the end of May, her $TRUMP holding was worth less than $120. Meanwhile, the Trump family pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars from the token sales after putting little to none of their own money into the project.

The $TRUMP meme coin is one of four Trump family crypto projects that have turned into a financial jackpot for the Trumps and a very bad bet for buyers like Elrgdawy. While they vary in size and structure, each of these ventures has followed the same playbook. The Trumps risked little up front. Trump family members – notably, the president's oldest sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. – hyped the venture. The Trumps raked in money as investors piled in. And those buyers lost big when, for various reasons, the prices of their Trump-related crypto assets later tanked.

A Reuters examination shows that the Trump family has used this template to generate at least $2.3 billion in profit from investors since Trump retook the presidency. On the other side of that cash bonanza for America's first family: the more than a million investors whose net losses totalled $2.3 billion at the end of April, according to a Reuters analysis. Those investors include retail buyers of crypto and crypto-linked equities, as well as those who invested indirectly through funds like ETFs with exposure to Trump crypto. The loss total includes paper losses on unsold investments.

The Reuters analysis of Trump crypto gains and investor losses was based on a review of blockchain records – essentially a database of crypto transactions – thousands of pages of corporate filings, online disclosures by the Trump companies, and public remarks by the Trumps and their projects' executives, as well as interviews with crypto industry executives. The findings were reviewed by more than a dozen accounting and crypto experts, all of whom found Reuters' estimates and its underlying analysis of the Trump businesses to be reasonable.

The four businesses covered in the analysis include World Liberty Financial, the Trumps' flagship crypto venture. It has brought the family more than $1.4 billion from sales of its governance tokens on a persistent promise "to build and democratise a new financial system for the benefit of millions," as it said in an early social media post. The tokens, which give holders a vote on some governance matters, have crashed in value.

The Trump brothers have also heralded two publicly listed firms, American Bitcoin and AI Financial Corp, known as ALT5 Sigma until April, as convenient ways to gain exposure to crypto tokens through their shares. The companies' stock prices have collapsed. And there's the $TRUMP token, its poor performance typical of meme coins, whose value reflects the popularity of internet trends or celebrities associated with them.

Reuters previously documented the hundreds of millions of dollars that crypto has brought to the Trump family. This report is the first to show that the Trumps have not only enriched themselves to an unprecedented extent for a sitting US president and his family, but have done so through crypto deals that carried little to no downside risk for them while resulting in big losses for retail investors.

Since the November 2024 election, the president and his family have seized an enormous amount of the market for crypto token sales. Two of the four Trump ventures examined by Reuters have together sold more crypto tokens, by value, than any other crypto project but one, according to a Reuters analysis of industry data. And since the 2024 election, the Trumps have, as a family, generated more profit from crypto than any US-listed company, according to company statements and industry data.

Methodology

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly did not comment directly on Reuters' findings and the experiences of investors who lost money on Trump crypto products. In an emailed statement, Kelly said: "All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people."

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. did not respond to requests for comment.

Regret, anger and embarrassment

All but three of the 27 individual investors interviewed for this article said they knew of Donald Trump's history of bankruptcies, unpaid contractors and failed ventures. Still, most said they believed that his position at the apex of American political power and what they perceived as his business acumen ensured lucrative returns on their investments. Many acknowledged doing little or no due diligence. Some said they still hold on to the hope that Trump will make things right. Others expressed regret, anger and embarrassment.

They range from a Minnesota software engineer who said he lost $60,000 of his savings to a hotel manager in Vietnam who lost years' worth of his income. They include the owner of an import-export business in Texas, a hospitality executive in Washington, DC, and a retiree from New York.

Elrgdawy said it has become clear that "there's no hope left" for her investment in the $TRUMP meme coin. She said she now thinks "it was just a pump and dump scheme" – when sellers of an asset talk up its price and then "dump" it for a profit before it crashes. Still, she said she considers herself lucky compared to other $TRUMP buyers who, in online chat groups, bemoan much steeper losses on a meme coin that has tumbled 97% from its January 2025 peak.

Elrgdawy was one of only seven retail buyers of Trump crypto who agreed to be identified for this story. The rest requested anonymity, the most common reasons being concerns about privacy and fears of doxxing or of retaliation, including from the president and his supporters.

Matt, a 45-year-old machinist in Indiana, said that last September, he was looking to reverse recent investment losses, so he put $40,000 – 30% of his crypto and stock portfolio at the time – in ALT5 Sigma shares. "When a stock has presidential backing in a way – at least from his sons – you would think it would go up," he said.

Matt's shares have dropped 79% in value since he bought them, for a loss of about $32,700. He keeps holding on, he said, because he thinks the stock is undervalued. "I call myself a loser, but I haven't given up yet," he said.

He does not blame the Trump family. He said he believes Democrats and anti-Trump investors are taking short positions – a bet that an asset's price will fall – in the family's crypto projects. "Here's the dark side. I know all of these globalists have TDS and they are just going to short it," he said, using the acronym for "Trump Derangement Syndrome," the term Trump supporters use to describe what they see as an irrationally negative reaction to the president. He asked that his surname not be used to avoid politically charged blowback online and from people in his community.

A 45-year-old Texas businessman who put $5,000 into American Bitcoin said he bought the stock because "I just feel like Trump knows business." He said he bought his shares at an average price of $4.19 last autumn. He sold all of them in December at about $3.50, for a total loss of about $800.

The Texan said he doesn't hold the president responsible for the losses: "All the crypto is down right now, so you can't just squarely blame it on Trump." He added that he expects crypto to bounce back and that he recently started buying American Bitcoin again, at $1.13.

Only five of the investors reported making a profit. Four of them bought World Liberty tokens for pennies during early rounds of sales and then quickly unloaded what they could when 20% of their tokens became tradeable on crypto exchanges. They are still, hypothetically, in the money on the remaining 80% of their holdings, but won't be able to cash out until World Liberty fully unlocks their tokens in 2030. The fifth investor made a profit day trading the meme coin.

John Paul Rollert, whose research focus at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business includes the history of capitalism and business leadership ethics, said retail investors should have asked themselves before committing whether the Trump family would make money even if the crypto ventures failed. If the answer was yes, "you're now getting closer to what looks like a scam," said Rollert, an adjunct associate professor of behavioural science.

World Liberty disclosed in fine print at the bottom of its website and elsewhere that the Trump family would receive the lion's share of revenue from token sales. In marketing materials, it included disclaimers that its token was not an investment and that buyers should not expect to make a profit. The website for the $TRUMP meme coin contains similar warnings.

More broadly, US financial regulators for years warned investors large and small that crypto was highly volatile and rife with scams. While such alerts have dissipated since Trump returned to the White House, financial authorities in many other countries have continued with that message.