Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.
A hypothetical $1,000 invested in various stock and crypto assets on Jan. 19 — the day before Trump took office — would have produced sharply different outcomes by year's end.On the stock side, a $1,000 investment in the Nasdaq would be worth about $1,184, while the same investment in the SOCL ETF would be worth $1,272 and in Trump Media shares would be worth $331. On the crypto side, a $1,000 investment in the global cryptocurrency market cap would be worth $842, while the same investment in dogecoin would be worth $327 and in Official TRUMP would be worth $114.
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The intrigue: The retail investing public may not have done well with Trump assets in 2025, but the president and his family, by all accounts, did just fine.Forbes estimates the billionaire president's net worth has more than doubled, fueled by gains in his various crypto investments.
The magazine reports Donald Trump Jr.'s net worth rose sixfold in 2025, based also on crypto gains. In fact, just Wednesday morning, as the year closed, TMTG said it would launch a new crypto token for its shareholders.
Dave Michaels, Sadie Gurman and Aruna Viswanatha at WSJ:
President Trump’s first year back in office turned the world of white-collar enforcement upside down.
The Justice Department, focused on White House priorities such as immigration enforcement and violent crime, has stepped back from the kinds of complicated investigations into foreign bribery, money laundering and public corruption that former department leaders often cited among their greatest successes.
Along with that shift, administration officials have undone a number of notable Biden-era white-collar prosecutions. In some, the department dropped charges against executives that were pending. In others, Trump has used the pardon power to forgive a string of top company officials charged with or convicted of crimes related to their businesses.
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One of the most notable shifts has been in foreign bribery cases. Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act fell off a cliff this year.
The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which share authority to investigate violations, brought about 33 cases a year against companies or individuals between 2015 and 2024, according to data maintained by law firm Gibson Dunn. This year, the Justice Department brought six new FCPA cases. The SEC brought none.
Trump said the law hurt U.S. companies operating abroad and ordered a six-month freeze on new cases. Justice Department officials responded by closing nearly half of open foreign-bribery investigations and saying future cases should be connected to U.S. strategic interests, including the fight against transnational drug cartels.
The Justice Department also has backed away from the Biden administration’s enforcement of anti-money-laundering laws against big cryptocurrency exchanges that were accused of allowing users in sanctioned countries such as Iran to trade with Americans.