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

“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. It showed that 75% of respondents noted a “great” amount of corruption in the federal government. Another 53% ranked the presidency as the “most corrupt institution in government”—above the Supreme Court, Congress, and the federal bureaucracy as a whole.