AP-NORC Poll: About 6 in 10 Americans Say Trump Is Illegally or Unethically Profiting From the Presidency; Only About 2 in 10 See No Wrongdoing
NEW YORK — About 6 in 10 U.S. adults believe President Donald Trump is profiting off the presidency in ways that are either illegal or unethical but not illegal, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released October 13. Roughly 4 in 10 respondents said they believe he is profiting illegally. Only about 2 in 10 said the Republican president is doing nothing wrong, while a similar share said they did not know enough to say.
The poll also found that just over half of Americans say Trump has prioritized his personal financial interests "a lot" since returning to the White House, while only about one-quarter say he puts the same emphasis on the country as a whole, and only about 1 in 10 say he is focused "a lot" on people like them. Views split sharply by party: Republicans were far likelier to say Trump puts the country first and is doing nothing wrong, while independents and Democrats largely disagreed. Barbara Thaxton, an 87-year-old independent retiree from Summerfield, Florida, told interviewers that Trump's wealth keeps increasing while people in the country are just barely getting by.
The AP reported the findings as Trump's family business pulls in record money from new ventures helped by his policies. Unlike in his first term, Trump has lifted a self-imposed ban on his family striking private-sector deals overseas and has started several new crypto businesses; the AP reported earnings of more than $1 billion in a mandatory financial disclosure, and said some of his ventures received large investments from foreign sources after the election. At the start of his second term, Trump brushed off the conflicts-of-interest issue, telling The New York Times that he had found out nobody cared.
Methodology: The AP-NORC poll of 2,140 adults was conducted September 24–28, 2026, using a sample drawn from NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.
Source: Associated Press report of October 13 (by Bernard Condon and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux) and the AP-NORC poll's published findings.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：特朗普在白宫椭圆形办公室展示已签署的行政命令。白宫官方照片（摄影：Abe McNatt），公有领域，取自 Wikimedia Commons
