Estimates of U.S. President Donald Trump's net worth vary, though Forbes placed it at $6.5 billion as of March. Trump first crossed from millionaire to billionaire status in the late 1980s through high-end real estate, and his wealth has continued to grow during his second presidency, according to Forbes.

In a lengthy analysis published on Friday, New York Times correspondent Charles Homans examines Trump's efforts to monetize the presidency, arguing that self-enrichment has reached historic levels.

The issue sits at the intersection of presidential ethics, business ownership and public trust. Federal conflict-of-interest rules that apply to many executive-branch officials do not apply in the same way to the president, making disclosure, divestment practices, congressional oversight and constitutional limits on gifts or benefits from governments central to debates over presidential self-dealing.

"How much is the American presidency worth?" Homans writes. "You could start the bidding at $2.2 billion: the minimum amount that President Trump is thought to have earned during his first year back in office. That figure is three and a half times what his family businesses earned in 2024, the last full year before he resumed the presidency. Most of it comes from cryptocurrency ventures…. From there, you could add another $1.6 billion, the amount of federal financing the administration recently approved for an obscure company subsequently hired to develop a mineral concern in Kazakhstan, in a deal negotiated personally with the Kazakh government by Trump and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. Surely by coincidence, Trump's sons are now investors."

Homans continues: "Plus $400 million, the market value of the jet that the Qatari government gave Trump last year, now grounded over security concerns. And there is the $1.776 billion 'anti-weaponization fund' that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche unveiled in May to settle a $10 billion lawsuit brought by Trump's personal lawyers over the leak of his tax returns during his first term."

The Times' headline for the piece reads, "Voters Think All Politicians Are a Little Corrupt, but Trump Might Be Pushing It," with a sub-headline highlighting the "difference between ordinary influence peddling" and the Trump family's "outright self-enrichment." The full analysis is available at nytimes.com.

Homans attributes Trump's openness about leveraging the presidency to significantly increase his net worth to voter cynicism.

"No American politician, arguably, has understood and exploited this ambient cynicism more successfully than Trump, who has campaigned three times against 'corrupt' enemies and a 'rigged' system and twice led the most flagrantly self-enriching presidencies this country has seen," Homans writes. "There's a difference, though, between a dozen or so million in government payments to Trump-owned resort properties — the most attention-grabbing form that Trump's conflicts took in his first presidency — and the multibillion-dollar spoils that have been made public in recent months…. For decades, Americans have lamented the comparatively subtle corruption of campaign finance in the language of the 19th-Century outrages. That has made the unexpected return of actual 19th-century-style self-dealing — at previously unheard-of scale and dare-you-to-stop-me openness — harder to confront on its own terms."