The president is determined to secure a jaw-dropping amount, his longtime biographer said.
President Donald Trump has a major goal to accomplish before his term ends, but it has nothing to do with politics.
Trump, 80, always wanted to enrich himself financially above all else, his longtime biographer Michael Wolff said in his latest Substack article: To yell.
But people close to the White House told him that the total amount the president was seeking exceeded any reasonable expectation.
“The number people in the White House say, with all consideration and resigned acceptance – Trump is Trump, after all – that he wants to achieve is $20 billion,” Wolff wrote. “And he would probably like to make deals that, upon his return to Mar-a-Lago, could bring in $100 million for the Trump family.”
Trump earned more than $2 billion during his second presidential term.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
Wolff noted that Trump has already made, by many estimates, billions during his second administration.
The president’s financial disclosures, released in late June, revealed that he personally earned more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from cryptocurrency businesses alone.
Trump’s wife Melania also launched her own memecoin, which failed miserably.
This included more than $635 million in licensing fees from “Celebration Coins” and more than $525 million in revenue from token sales by World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company he founded with his sons.
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A New York Times analysis estimated that Trump had “raked in at least $2.2 billion” in 2025, while Forbes estimated in September that he had become “about $2.7 billion richer than when he won the 2024 election.”
Trump’s love of money, Wolff writes, is the driving force behind his relationship with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
On Friday evening, the president defied the previous geopolitical strategy of lifting sanctions on Russian oil, which many saw as a rapprochement with the oligarch.
Trump’s infatuation with his dictator friend is no secret.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
“Putin came to power in 1999,” Wolff wrote, after describing the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent “money grab” in Russia. “Controlling this new economy has become its main political challenge. »
He continued: “With great efficiency, he became, in effect, the main banker and a significant shareholder in this parallel economy. Access to Putin meant access to unregulated and unrestricted wealth. Putin was the regulator.”
Wolff said that since the mid-1990s, Trump, “excluded from prime financial sources, has made continued efforts, successfully or not, to get a piece of Putin’s action.”
“Being president is good, but being an oligarch is forever,” he wrote.
Trump has been pursuing Putin since the mid-1990s, Wolff wrote.
“The presidency has certainly given him access to other irregular financial opportunities, but Trump is a creature of habit, and no opportunity comes to mind as great as the money he could make in an equal partnership with Vladimir Putin. And not even that equal,” he concluded.
Reached for comment, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Daily Beast in a frequently recycled statement: “Michael Wolff is a professional scumbag and serial liar whose brain has been completely warped by his serious and incurable illness known as Trump Derangement Syndrome. »
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