President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump released meme coins just days before he took the oath of office. A splashy pre-inaugural party was held at a property his company owns. And a Saudi-backed golf tournament is headed to a Trump club this spring.
Trump’s latest money-making moves are raising alarms among ethics watchdogs who say that, just days into his presidency, the Republican appears poised to benefit financially from his final term in office in new and lucrative ways.
During his first four years in office, Trump’s team paid “lip service” to ethics guardrails, said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the liberal group Public Citizen, which this week sued the Trump administration over a separate issue – claiming that Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is operating in violation of a federal transparency law that governs advisory panels.
Asked this week by a reporter whether he intended to keep selling products, such as the meme coin, that benefit him personally, Trump said: “I don’t know if it benefited.”
The president said he wasn’t aware of exactly how much he had made from the new cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, despite the coin’s value soaring to billions of dollars, according to CoinMarketCap.
“I don’t know much about it, other than I launched it,” he said. “I heard it was very successful.”
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