Most Americans Think Trump Is Profiting From the Presidency Illegally or Unethically, Poll Finds

U.S.

President Donald Trump waves after landing at Joint Base Andrews after hosting a cryptocurrency conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, on April 25, 2026. —Roberto Schmidt—Getty Images Most Americans think that Donald Trump is profiting off the presidency either illegally or unethically, according to a new AP-NORC poll .

The findings, published Tuesday, also illustrate that the President is perceived as prioritizing his business ventures above the country.

According to the poll, which surveyed 2,140 adults from Sept.

24 to 28, 4 in 10 respondents believe he has done something illegal and another 18% see his actions as unethical but not illegal.

Read More: 3 Ways Trump’s Wealth Has Soared Since He Returned to Office A majority of respondents (56%) also said Trump has prioritized his personal business interests “a lot,” while only 23% said he has prioritized the country overall.

Just 11% say he has prioritized “people like them,” while half of respondents said Trump has not prioritized people like them at all.

Republicans were much more likely than Democrats or Independents to say that the president prioritized the country overall; however, they were not without criticism.

Only about 1 in 10 Republicans said Trump had done something illegal; most said he had done nothing wrong or that they did not know enough to judge.

“It's fairly unprecedented how much wealth increase this President has gotten in the past two years,” Raymond La Raja, a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the co-director of the UMass Poll, tells TIME.

He points to last year, when a business tied to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) invested half a billion dollars into Trump’s crypto ventures , raising conflict-of-interest questions from watchdog organizations and lawmakers .

According to his latest annual financial disclosure from June 30, Trump earned more than $1.4 billion from these ventures last year alone.

“It's really a structural conflict-of-interest that he is regulating policies that directly benefit his family—and it's also incentivizing not just Americans, but foreign entities, like the United Arab Emirates, to invest in his family's projects,” he says.

“So that's really worrisome.” A separate UMass Amherst poll , conducted in August, points to broader concerns about government corruption.