Trump's Crypto Ventures Caused $4.7B in Investor Losses, Report Says
Public Citizen report details $4.7B in losses across TRUMP meme coin, WLFI token, NFTs, and Trump Media treasury, while Trump earned $1.4B+ from the same products. Senate vote on crypto bill Sept 15.
A report from the watchdog group Public Citizen estimates that investors have lost $4.7 billion across five cryptocurrency products tied to President Donald Trump. The losses stem from the TRUMP meme coin, the WLFI governance token issued by World Liberty Financial, Trump-branded NFT trading cards, the USD1 stablecoin, and the digital-asset treasury built by Trump Media and Technology Group.
The TRUMP token alone accounts for $3.2 billion of that total. It was trading at $2.54 at the time of the report, down from a 24-hour high of $2.90 and a low of $2.24.
Set against those losses is what Trump earned from the same five products. His financial disclosure filed with the Office of Government Ethics on July 1 put his 2025 crypto income at $1.4 billion or more, mostly from token sales and licensing fees, the report said.
WLFI's governance token has lost 87% of its value since peaking last September, leaving investors roughly $1 billion underwater. Trump collected an estimated $557 million from that product, according to Public Citizen. The USD1 stablecoin is the exception; it is designed to hold a steady $1 value, and the analysis found no investor losses tied to it, even as it generated $199.2 million for Trump.
Trump's NFT trading cards produced the smallest numbers: at least $9.3 million in investor losses against roughly $7.2 million in earnings for Trump. Trump Media's treasury is a different kind of exposure. Public Citizen estimates $450 million in losses there, but because that money sits in a public company's balance sheet rather than a direct token sale, there is no separate personal-earnings figure to compare. Any hit to the treasury's value affects Trump's own stake in the company rather than showing up as reported income.
Public Citizen draws a comparison to Argentina's LIBRA meme coin, which President Javier Milei promoted last year. That coin collapsed within days, triggering a criminal probe and impeachment proceedings. Trump's crypto earnings and investor losses now dwarf what LIBRA produced, but the response so far has been limited to oversight letters from Senate Democrats, not a comparable investigation.
Public Citizen said the difference is that Trump's crypto income arrived spread across five separate products over 19 months instead of one coin crashing in a single week. A governance token losing value slowly reads as ordinary market risk. A stablecoin paying him licensing fees while producing zero investor losses reads as a clean business line.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said he does not see an appearance problem in Trump's crypto earnings. The White House has said there are no conflicts of interest. Neither addressed Public Citizen's $4.7 billion figure directly.
The crypto industry is pushing Congress to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a market-structure bill that faces a Senate cloture vote on September 15. Public Citizen is using the report to push for ethics provisions in that bill. The group wants the legislation to include rules that would prevent the president from benefiting personally from the market it regulates.
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