Major Blow for Trump: Most Americans Believe His Business Interests Shape His Decisions

Half of Trump’s own party now believes his business interests shape his presidential decisions — a finding buried inside a broader Reuters/Ipsos poll showing 69% of Americans overall hold that view, including two-thirds of independents and nine in ten Democrats.

The four-day survey, completed Monday with 1,166 respondents and a 3-point margin of error, also found 63% of Americans consider it inappropriate that Trump and his family have profited from cryptocurrency ventures since he returned to office, against 32% who called it appropriate. Those ventures were substantial: Trump earned more than $1.4 billion last year from World Liberty Financial and his branded meme coin combined, according to his own financial disclosures, released earlier this summer. The White House rejected any suggestion of impropriety. “There are no conflicts of interest,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “The President only acts in the best interests of the American public.”

What makes the finding notable isn’t the partisan split — Democratic skepticism of a Republican president’s ethics is unsurprising — but how much it’s eroded inside Trump’s own coalition. Richard Painter, who served as the top ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, called the scale of the current administration’s business entanglements unprecedented: “We have seen nothing like this before; even the first Trump administration did not have as many complex business interests as the second Trump administration.” Thomas Schmidt, a Wisconsin voter who backed Trump in 2024 but told Reuters he’s soured on the president this year, put the sentiment in blunter terms: “He should be more concerned with his presidency than with his business practices.”

The crypto and real estate concerns sit alongside a separate, less-noticed strand of scrutiny: Trump’s personal defense-sector holdings during a war he ordered. An analysis published last month by Responsible Statecraft, the Quincy Institute’s online magazine, found Trump’s brokers purchased between $9.7 million and $24.3 million in stock across roughly a dozen arms manufacturers and Pentagon contractors in 2025 — including Palantir, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and RTX — all accumulated before the Iran war began, according to the group’s review of his financial disclosures. Palantir in particular built the Maven Smart System, the AI targeting tool the Pentagon used to strike roughly 1,000 targets in Iran on the war’s opening day, while Lockheed’s F-35s and F-22s and RTX’s Tomahawk missiles were deployed directly in the campaign. Because Trump hasn’t placed his assets in a blind trust, ethics researchers note he can track exactly which companies he holds while setting policy — including a proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget — that stands to benefit those same holdings.

Corruption perceptions split more predictably along party lines than the business-influence question did: Democrats overwhelmingly believe graft has worsened under Trump, while Republicans are roughly split, with 56% saying it’s better or unchanged. Larry Noble, a former Federal Election Commission general counsel who now teaches law at American University, offered the sharpest assessment on record: “While Trump’s second term is less than half over, it already looks like the most openly corrupt administration in our history.”

With midterms three months away and voters already citing inflation and the unresolved Iran war as top concerns, the poll suggests ethics questions are now compounding rather than competing with Trump’s other political vulnerabilities — a dynamic that could sharpen further if Responsible Statecraft’s defense-stock findings gain more mainstream traction before November.