Live Updates: Trump seeks to reshape US government with executive actions

President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump released meme coins just days before he took the oath of office. A splashy pre-inauguration party was held at a property his company owns. And a Saudi-backed golf tournament is headed to a Trump club this spring.

Trump’s latest money-making move is raising alarm among ethics watchdogs, who say the Republican, just days into his presidency, appears to be taking financial advantage of his final term in office in new and lucrative ways.

During his first four years in office, Trump’s team paid “lip service” to ethical roadblocks, said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the liberal group Public Citizen, which this week sued the Trump administration over a separate issue — claiming that Trump’s the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is operating in violation of a federal transparency law that regulates advisory panels.

Asked this week by a reporter if he intended to keep selling products, such as the meme coin, that benefit him personally, Trump said, “I don’t know if it did.”

The president said he didn’t realize exactly how much he had made from the new cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, despite the coin’s value rising to billions of dollars, according to CoinMarketCap.

“I don’t know much about it other than I launched it,” he said. “I heard it was very successful.”

Read more about Trump’s efforts here.