Eye-Popping Total Trump Wants to Cash Out of White House Is Exposed
The president is dead set on a jaw-dropping amount, his longtime biographer alleged.
Umit Bektas/REUTERS
President Donald Trump has a major goal in mind to achieve before the end of his term, but it has nothing to do with policy.
Trump, 80, has always wanted to financially enrich himself above all else, his longtime biographer Michael Wolff said in the latest installment of his Substack, Howl.
But White House insiders have told him that the alleged total the president seeks is beyond any reasonable expectation.
“The number people in the White House say, with due consideration and resigned acceptance—Trump is Trump, after all—that he wants to reach is $20 billion,” Wolff wrote. “And he’d probably like to put in place deals that, when he returns to Mar-a-Lago, can generate for the Trump family $100 million.”

Trump has made 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.
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The president’s financial disclosure, released in late June, revealed that he personally earned more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from cryptocurrency ventures alone.

Trump's wife Melania also launched her own memecoin, which failed miserably.
Kraken
This included over $635 million in licensing fees from “Celebration Coins” and more than $525 million in proceeds from token sales by World Liberty Financial—the cryptocurrency firm he founded with his sons.
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A New York Times analysis gauged that Trump had “pulled in at least $2.2 billion” in 2025, while Forbes estimated in September that he had become “an estimated $2.7 billion richer than when he won the 2024 election.”
Trump’s love of money, Wolff writes, is what drives his relationship with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Late Friday, the president defied previous geopolitical strategy to waive sanctions on Russian oil, which many viewed as him cozying up to the oligarch.

Trump's infatuation with his dictator pal 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 became his main political challenge.”
He continued, “With great efficacy, he became, in effect, the chief banker and a significant equity holder in this parallel economy. Access to Putin was access to unregulated and unrestricted wealth. Putin was the regulator.”
Wolff said that since the mid-1990s, Trump, “excluded from blue-chip financial sources, made continual efforts, both successful and not, to get a piece of the Putin action.”
“Being a president is nice, but being an oligarch is forever,” he wrote.
Trump has been pursuing Putin since the mid-1990s, Wolff wrote.
Kevin Lamarque/REUTERS
“The presidency has certainly given him access to other irregular financial opportunities, but Trump is a creature of habit, and no opportunity has loomed as large in his mind as the money he might make in a partnership of equals with Vladimir Putin. And even not so 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 severe and incurable disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
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