\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>he word \u201cTruth\u201d was plastered all around the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning. At 9.30am, when the market opened, a small crowd stood on the balcony above the trading floor to ring in the day.<\/p>\n The group was celebrating the launch of five exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that are tied to Truth Social, Donald Trump\u2019s social media platform that has spun into a menagerie of products over the last few years.<\/p>\n Under a parent organization, the Trump Media and Technology Group, Truth Social has been joined by a streaming platform, a nuclear fusion energy company and a growing slate of financial services products.<\/p>\n The ETFs are just the beginning of what will probably be a whole range of new financial products, especially related to crypto, rolled out this year all as the president continues to call back back to his promise to make the US the \u201ccrypto capital of the world\u201d.<\/p>\n The Trump Media ETFs, which were officially launched on the stock exchange at the end of December, are being branded as \u201cAmerica First\u201d funds, a kind of antithesis to the \u201cwoke\u201d environmental, social and governance (ESG) movement that was popular in investment, particularly at the end of Trump\u2019s first term.<\/p>\n Each of the five ETFs has a specific theme that centers Trump-branded patriotism: American-based companies, real estate in Republican-voting states, energy production and infrastructure, security and defense, and technology, including bitcoin.<\/p>\n ETFs \u2013 which are portfolios of assets, trading as a single investment vehicle \u2013 have rapidly risen in popularity in recent years. In 2025, new investments in ETFs reached $1.4tn, with a total of $13tn invested in the industry.<\/p>\n The \u201cAmerica First\u201d ETFs are being managed by Yorkville America, a branch of Yorkville Advisors, an investment company based in New Jersey that has partnered with Trump Media in helping the company roll out its financial products. In 2024, Yorkville Advisors was involved in a $2.5bn fundraising round by Trump Media, and last year the investment company agreed to provide a $5bn line of credit to Trump Media and Crypto.com to form a new crypto treasury.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a huge bet that Trump\u2019s brand will be able to draw sustained financial interest. So far, the evidence has been mixed.<\/p>\n Truth Social, which the president still uses to fire off daily declarations and diatribes, has far fewer users than the social media giants that it was supposed to compete against. Trump Media, which is trading on Nasdaq, ballooned to over $60 per share in March 2024, during Trump\u2019s presidential campaign, but is now trading closer to $14 per share. While Trump\u2019s $Trump meme coin, which he promoted last January, soared in price to $45 a token around his inauguration, it has since dropped down to $5 a token.<\/p>\n The companies are also wading in uncharted waters around potential conflicts of interest that might arise when a sitting president is tied to such deep financial stakes.<\/p>\n Much of the company\u2019s new ventures have launched over the last year, coinciding with Trump\u2019s return to the White House, raising concerns among government ethics watchdogs about potential conflicts of interest that these new deals could create.<\/p>\n Before his inauguration, Trump put all his Trump Media shares into a revocable trust headed by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. Typically, US presidents put their financial interests into a blind trust, managed by an independent third party.<\/p>\n \u201cThe thing that\u2019s guarding the president from getting involved in conflicts of interests and propping up the presidency are ethics norms,\u201d said Kedric Payne, a former attorney at the office of congressional ethics. \u201cThat\u2019s it. So if there are no ethics norms, there is no mechanism set up where you could have officials or agencies that are in charge of making the president comply with norms.\u201d<\/p>\n In a letter sent to the US treasury on Tuesday, the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren requested that the office of the comptroller of the currency delay its review of a bank charter of World Liberty Financial, Trump Media\u2019s digital asset company, which is trying to become a regulated crypto bank.<\/p>\n If the charter is approved, \u201cfor the first time in history, the president of the United States would be in charge of overseeing his own financial company\u201d, Warren wrote.<\/p>\n Ethics watchdogs are especially concerned that people or companies looking to curry favor with Trump\u2019s can simply invest in one of his company\u2019s products. \u201cThe concern is if large investors purchase that financial product to win favor with him,\u201d said Payne, senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center.<\/p>\n Questions have already been raised about Trump\u2019s relationship with leaders in the crypto industry. Trump pardoned former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who invested $2bn in World Liberty Financial, and the SEC paused a federal investigation into Justin Sun, another crypto billionaire who bought $200m worth of Trump\u2019s crypto token. (Sun has repeatedly maintained his innocence.) And while the Biden administration was investigating Trump Media partner Crypto.com, the inquiries stopped once Trump became president.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is absolutely no connection between the decision\u201d and Crypto.com\u2019s political activities, the company has said, adding that \u201cany assertion to the contrary is entirely inaccurate\u201d.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the White House has said that \u201cneither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest\u201d.<\/p>\n Trump was not at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning, leaving the iconic bell ringing to Yorkville America.<\/p>\n He had rung the bell once before, though, after Time Magazine named him person of the year, in 2024. Standing on the balcony that day as CEOs chanted \u201cUSA! USA!\u201d from below, Trump smiled as he gave them a message. \u201cWe\u2019re with you all the way!\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The word \u201cTruth\u201d was plastered all around the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning. At 9.30am, when the market opened, a small crowd stood on the balcony above the trading floor to ring in the day. The group was celebrating the launch of five exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that are tied to Truth Social,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42036,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[574,16049,964,1790,519,434,3888,513,1226,183,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-42035","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-conflicts","10":"tag-donald","11":"tag-financial","12":"tag-interest","13":"tag-potential","14":"tag-presidential","15":"tag-products","16":"tag-questions","17":"tag-raise","18":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}