Emoluments & foreign money
Foreign government money received while in office, by president
Documented money from foreign governments or state-linked entities flowing to the sitting president personally, his businesses, or entities he holds a stake in. Excludes government-to-government deals (policy outcomes, not personal money) and purely private foreign customers. Figures are conservative documented floors, not estimates of the true total.
Composition of the two non-zero bars
| Item | Amount | Nature |
|---|---|---|
| Trump I, payments from ≥20 foreign governments (China $5.5M via ICBC rent at Trump Tower, hotel stays by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and others) documented by House Oversight from Mazars ledgers covering only two years and four of 500+ businesses; CREW's broader tracking reaches ~$13.6M | $7.8–13.6M | Rent & hospitality revenue; court-blocked undercount |
| Trump II, upfront payment wired to World Liberty Financial from Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed's firm for a ~49% stake (struck days before inauguration, flowing into the term; made an Emirati national-security official the company's largest shareholder; $31M more to the family of Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff) | $187M | Received cash |
| Qatari royal family's Boeing 747-8, accepted by the U.S. government in 2025 and delivered as a presidential aircraft on June 19, 2026 after a taxpayer-funded retrofit; his May 2025 promise that it would go to his presidential library after the term was reported in Aug 2026 as undecided; believed the most valuable foreign gift ever given to the U.S. government | ~$400M | In-kind; contested classification |
| Trump Organization fees from state-linked Gulf projects (Saudi developments announced after hosting the crown prince; Qatar golf resort partnered with a state-owned firm; Oman project on state land; UAE, Saudi, and Qatar dominate the $59.5M in 2025 foreign licensing income) | ~$50M+ (2025) | Licensing/management fees |
Why four bars are exactly zero
Structural factors, blind trusts, divestiture, the Foreign Gifts Act, account for the zero totals in these terms. Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden had no channel through which foreign-state money could reach them, and under the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act, gifts above minimal value from foreign governments pass to the National Archives, not the president. The nearest off-chart asterisks: foreign governments donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, and Hunter Biden's foreign income flowed to Hunter, both genuine controversies, neither money to a sitting president, which is what this chart measures.
What the floor excludes
CREW's broader accounting puts Trump Organization foreign revenue above $117M in 2025 alone (including purely private customers, excluded here), and House Oversight Democrats estimate at least $436M reached the family from foreign interests via crypto by Jan 2026, within $2.25B in realized in-office profits overall. Also excluded: the harder-to-attribute foreign share of ~$2B in World Liberty token sales (a “significant portion” from overseas per congressional review, including $75M from foreign national Justin Sun, excluded here as non-state); foreign purchases of the $TRUMP memecoin; and the family orbit entirely: Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners held ~$6.16B by 2026, 99% from the sovereign funds of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, while he served as a chief U.S. negotiator in the region. Counting family-adjacent sovereign money puts the true figure in the billions. Also excluded: interest World Liberty earns by investing the reserves behind its USD1 stablecoin in U.S. Treasury debt. About $4.0B of USD1 was in circulation by Aug 2026, seeded by a state-backed Emirati fund that used $2B of it for a Binance investment, but the interest is paid by the U.S. Treasury, not a foreign government; a Trump-affiliated company is entitled to about 38% of it (New Yorker, Jan 2026), and no source found measures how much of the reserves still comes from foreign states. An Aug 2026 OCC preliminary conditional approval of a national trust bank charter, the first for a sitting president’s family company, would let it hold the reserves itself once final approval is granted.
Contested points, stated fairly
The Trump II bar sums received cash, in-kind use, and fees, defensible but lumpy. The $187M deal was signed days before inauguration. The jet's defenders note it was given to the Air Force, not the man; critics point to his May 2025 promise that it would go to his presidential library after the term, a commitment reported in Aug 2026 as walked back, with no decision announced. The Trump Organization states it has done no deals directly with governments, distinguishing state-owned and “private” Gulf partners. Trump I's figure is an undercount whose completion was blocked, so the true term-one/term-two ratio is unknowable. The White House denies the president profits from office. No court has adjudicated any of these as emoluments violations; the first-term cases were dismissed as moot.
Analysisthe site's reading · optional
Summary
This is the cleanest metric in the accountability family, because its baseline is exactly zero by design: for half a century, divestiture norms and the foreign-gifts law walled sitting presidents off from foreign-state money entirely. There is no attribution debate, no counting-methodology dispute, no partisan-judges counterargument available, the wall either holds or it doesn't.
Trump's first term breached it at retail scale: millions in rent and hotel bills, constitutionally prohibited without congressional consent, with the full accounting sealed. His second term replaced retail with infrastructure: purpose-built financial instruments, a crypto company selling stakes and floating a stablecoin, through which state-linked money moves at a scale roughly eighty times beyond the first term's documented floor, alongside the largest foreign gift in American history, accepted by the government for the president's use. Whether any of it is illegal remains unadjudicated, in part because the constitutional remedy assumes a Congress willing to enforce it. What the chart records is narrower and not in dispute: the total was zero for four of the six terms, and non-zero for two.