Some of President Trump’s most devoted financial backers have watched their savings collapse even as a new federal lawsuit claims his family’s crypto empire generated billions through allegedly improper foreign arrangements.
Trump Media & Technology Group (NASDAQ: DJT) shares have shed roughly 61% of their value over the past year, while the $TRUMP meme coin has fallen 72% across the same period.
Supporters who poured money into those ventures as an act of political loyalty are now estimated to be down a combined $7 billion, according to reporting by Forbes.
Among the hardest hit is Nick Pinto, who put $7,000 into the $TRUMP meme coin when it launched in January 2025 and later expanded his position to $480,000 partly to secure a seat at a dinner held at Trump’s Virginia club.
A fellow Trump investor eventually persuaded Pinto to exit most of his position, but he still walked away with losses totaling $250,000.
“This is something that the Trump family kind of came up with out of the blue,” Pinto told Forbes. “And there’s not really a way for us to predict the future of the coin or what their plans for it are.”
Vadim Fistikan, a three-time Trump voter, committed $205,000 of his family’s savings to Trump Media in the period after the company went public, money he and his family had set aside to purchase a waterfront property in Florida.
That investment is now worth approximately $30,000, and when Fistikan vented his frustration on Truth Social he was attacked by other Trump supporters on the platform.
“I’m like, ‘Hey, this is a scam,'” he posted, according to Forbes. “And a lot of people were like, ‘No, you’re just a Trump hater.’ I’m like, ‘No. I was on board since day one. … I’m now broke. Pretty much my whole life savings [was] in this one stock. This is the greatest theft, con job he has ever done.”
Chad Nedohin, once described as the unofficial captain of Trump Media’s shareholder base, has become one of the most vocal critics among disenchanted investors, saying bluntly: “We’re just poor cattle to them. He doesn’t care about anyone.”
The personal financial wreckage sits alongside a broader legal challenge filed October 22 by J. Benjamin Greenberg, a shareholder and former employee of Circle Internet Group, a publicly traded American crypto firm that competes directly with Trump’s World Liberty Financial.
Greenberg’s complaint alleges that Trump and his family’s cryptocurrency operation has collected more than $2 billion through deals that violate constitutional prohibitions on presidents accepting payments from foreign governments.
Central to the lawsuit are two transactions involving Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates’ national security advisor, whose associated entities are accused of funneling enormous sums into World Liberty Financial.
Shortly before Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, an entity connected to Tahnoon reportedly acquired a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial for $500 million, with Trump’s own financial disclosures later showing he received millions of dollars from that purchase after taking office.
A separate Abu Dhabi investment fund chaired by Tahnoon then made a $2 billion purchase of USD1, a stablecoin launched by World Liberty Financial in 2025, a transaction the lawsuit alleges was designed to artificially inflate Trump’s crypto holdings.
The complaint states that “no president in American history has profited from his office so brazenly,” a charge the White House flatly rejected.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told CNBC: “This is yet another frivolous lawsuit that echoes the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family and his administration for a decade. There are no conflicts of interest.”
Trump and his family reportedly pulled in at least $2.2 billion in income last year, a figure nearly four times larger than what the president disclosed for 2024, with a substantial portion traced back to supporters who invested in his various commercial ventures.
The divergence between the president’s financial gains and the losses absorbed by his most loyal retail investors has sharpened criticism from within his own base, adding a volatile political dimension to what is already a complex legal and financial controversy.
