‘Crypto King’: MS NOW’s Steve Rattner Breaks Down How Trump Is Profiting Billions While in Office

Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Rattner joined the MS NOW flagship morning show on Friday for a deep dive into President Donald Trump’s exploding wealth during his second term in office.

Co-host Willie Geist introduced Rattner, noting he was coming “with charts on the relationship between cryptocurrency and the Trump administration, and more specifically the Trump family.”

“Steve, good morning. Great to see you. So let’s start with the big picture about Donald Trump, his personal wealth since he came back to office — how he’s doing?” Geist asked.

“Exactly, Willie. I was going to suggest we start with the big picture, because if you look at Trump’s net worth in the fullness of time — and Forbes, as you know, does a really great job of dissecting the wealth of many wealthy people — going all the way back to 2001, the family, and Trump particularly, was worth under $2 billion, and he gradually grew his net worth,” Rattner replied, adding:

Then you had the financial crisis. He took a hit like almost everybody else. He grew it back up. But in Trump 1.0, his net worth actually went down pretty substantially. A bit of that was COVID, but a lot was the fact that he put guardrails around the kinds of things they would do. They wouldn’t do international deals and so on and so forth. And he actually was acting like a normal president.

Then he had his four years in the wilderness and not much happened. Now, two years into term two, look what happens. His net worth goes from $2.3 billion to $6.5 billion. All of this is crypto in one form or another. He has become the crypto king, even though during 1.0 he was against crypto. He thought crypto was kind of a scam, which it kind of is, as we know.

So where did the money come from? He had $4 billion — he and his family — of profits. $3 billion of it came from crypto. And I will tell you, there are so many transactions here, so many structures, it made my head hurt even trying to understand it. But just to give you an example, he took Trump Media, which is the company he started to create Truth Social, and it raised a bunch of money from investors.

And he went out and bought a whole bunch of crypto with that. He sold meme coins — I’m going to talk more about this in a minute. But remember the dollar Trump, dollar Melania coins? All that contributed profit. So crypto, crypto, crypto. He also made some money from finance — this is Jared raising all of his money from the Middle East and the profits that are anticipated from it. And then there were also some benefits he got.

For example, he raised the admission fee at Mar-a-Lago from $100,000 to $1 million, the money he took from the law firms and the other companies as part of his lawsuit campaign, the Qatari jet. But crypto is really what dominates the $3 billion that he added to his net worth.

“So let’s talk about that meme coin, because so much of this money is coming from crypto. You’re calling it here a rip-off. Can you explain exactly what the meme coin is and why you say it’s a rip-off?” Geist followed up.

“Well, explaining exactly would probably take me most of the remaining four hours that you have this morning, because it’s really complicated. But generally speaking, what he did was he created something called the dollar Trump coin,” Rattner replied, adding:

And you’ll also remember there was a dollar Melania coin a little bit later. It is a coin that means nothing. It is like buying a pet rock, except you don’t even get a rock. It has no value, it has no trading value, it’s not used in commerce, nothing.

They sold them initially at $7 and went all the way up to $45. Not surprisingly, it crashed. This was the first dinner — the one that you mentioned was the second dinner — but the first dinner he did for his biggest buyers of the crypto, back here in the spring of 2025.

And the one he just did, which was coincidentally at Mar-a-Lago a few hours before the White House Correspondents’ dinner — and we know what happened there — actually had almost no effect on the value of crypto. So the world was kind of on to them. But look what else has happened here.

There have been found to be 45 what are called whale wallets — huge buyers of this stuff early on in the process. Then, as crypto went up, these whales — and it could include Trump, but we don’t even know who it includes; it could include a lot of foreigners, people who were tipped off — they made $1.2 billion. Trump, we know, made about $600 million in trading fees and so forth on this.

But who lost? Who lost were two million innocent Americans who bought this thing because they thought Trump was great, or whatever. They lost $4.3 billion by buying up here and now owning something that is worth less than $3. And it isn’t even something — it’s not even, as I said before, you get nothing when you buy this thing except a little digital something.

Watch the clip above via MS NOW.

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