Trump’s foreign revenue exploded during his first year back in office
President Donald Trump raked in record-high revenue of over $117 million from overseas business interests last year, according to a CREW analysis of his recent personal financial disclosure. Money coming from a slew of new overseas developments is primarily responsible for the growth in revenue. Those developments bring with them a raft of new conflicts of interest to a degree that is unprecedented even for Trump, in addition to preexisting conflicts. In just the first year of his second term, he has come shockingly close to the at least $149 million in foreign revenue he reported during the entirety of his first term in office.
Trump’s financial disclosures listed ten entities that had never reported significant revenue before last year, in line with last year’s huge uptick in announcements of Trump Organization foreign developments. In all, Trump reported that 28 different accounts tied to foreign projects had revenue of at least $50,000. In the last year of his first term, that same number was just nine.
Last month, Trump reported a shocking total revenue of over $2 billion in his first year back in office, more than tripling the previous year’s total and eclipsing the $1.6 billion he made during all four years of his first term. With Trump bringing in hundreds of millions from an array of endeavors, ranging from crypto endeavors to his development business, his personal financial interests seem to touch every corner of his policy agenda.
Among the most concerning, given the president’s role as the primary executor of US foreign policy, is the explosion in revenue from a plethora of new entities and new and as-yet-unannounced foreign developments, where some business partners are tied to foreign governments.
Trump has now surpassed $500 million in total foreign revenue since 2014, when the first data was available—and the true total could be more than $650 million. This flood of foreign revenue continued to increase in 2025 after exploding in 2024, as he approached his second term in office. The total foreign revenue increased by more than 15 percent from 2024 to 2025, establishing the staggering 2024 totals as a new norm. That year, they surged from at least about $44 million in 2023 to over $100 million.
Now, with at least $117 million from foreign profits in 2025, Trump’s foreign moneymaking has continued worrying trends from 2024. Properties in the UK and Ireland, longtime revenue drivers among Trump’s foreign developments, got some competition from developments in the Middle East—many of which were first announced in the period after Trump became a candidate and was reelected. Revenue from developments in the United Arab Emirates, which skyrocketed in 2024, continued to increase in 2025 to over $32 million, an unimaginable sum in Trump’s first term.
Twenty-four Trump-branded real estate projects are being developed in foreign countries during Trump’s second term. Thirteen of those were first announced after Trump became a candidate for president in 2022. Ten entities on Trump’s latest filing reported significant revenue for the first time, totaling over $30 million.
Two of those appear to relate to new developments in the UAE that have yet to be announced. They list locations in Abu Dhabi, where the Trump Organization doesn’t have developments underway, according to their website. Both of these projects, whatever they are, are partnerships with a company called DAMAC, whose founder and chairman, the Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani, stood next to Trump at Mar-a-Lago two weeks before Trump took office again and announced his intention to bring $20 billion of data center developments to the US. CREW reported in March that that effort is now underway.
This is all not to mention the myriad newly listed entities that have not yet reported significant income, some of which appear to indicate further developments in the works. Trump’s latest disclosure includes four new corporate entities that appear to be related to a rumored development in the Romanian city of Cluj. The disclosure also appears to forecast a development in India where the Trump Organization is partnered with a company tied to one of the richest men in Asia, Mukesh Ambani. In 2024, that company paid Trump $10 million for an unnamed project in Mumbai. In his first year back in office, the Trump administration granted Ambani’s company a lucrative oil license in Venezuela. The new disclosure shows an additional $1.5 million payment from Ambani’s company for a development in Hyderabad.
These new developments pose conflicts beyond his already problematic existing properties. The properties Trump has opened abroad can certainly be used by foreign governments as leverage for policies and decisions they want from the administration, but new projects offer foreign companies, some of which are closely tied with the governments in those countries, an opportunity to pay Trump’s company millions of dollars, which it pockets regardless of whether the development ever materializes. These are mainly licensing deals, where the Trump Organization isn’t actually building anything, and Trump gets paid millions no matter what.
That’s what makes these licensing fees especially problematic—they can easily be used as vehicles for foreign interests to ingratiate themselves with Trump—and Trump’s making a killing off of them. Trump’s reported revenue from licensing and development fees has skyrocketed in the last two years, going from just over $5 million in 2022 and 2023 to more than ten times that–$59 million–in 2025.
The latest filing did not cover any of Trump’s 2026 revenue, but in the absence of any reporting, there’s every indication that Trump and his family continue to zealously monetize the presidency. Through crypto dinners, semiquincentennial swag and still more new foreign developments, President Trump is mixing his unquenchable thirst for personal enrichment with his responsibility to uphold and promote policies that are in the best interests of the American people. Unfortunately for us, his energetic pursuit of wealth calls into question his desire or ability to keep Americans’ best interests in mind.