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Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and billionaire mogul who died in 2023, is often considered to have set the mold for President Trump with his mastery of the news media, gilded taste and, above all, legislative maneuvers that drew accusations of conflicts of interest.

Mr. Berlusconi passed laws that appeared tailor-made to protect and benefit his family’s vast business empire. And his annual earning disclosures showed he had been paid tens of millions of dollars while serving as prime minister.

This week, new financial disclosures suggested that Mr. Trump has broken that mold by making at least $2.2 billion in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses.

Mr. Trump’s profits are a haul once unimaginable for any leader of a liberal democracy, particularly a sitting American president. No modern Western leader has ever publicly disclosed such big windfalls while in office.

The Trump family’s earnings, experts said, have moved him into an echelon of enrichment more associated with strongmen in Russia and Turkey.

His gains were all the more striking because the United States has long positioned itself as a standard-bearer for financial regulation, anti-graft measures and the rule of law. Yet his cryptocurrency earnings highlight an unusually glaring conflict: As president, Mr. Trump oversees the regulation of an industry that, as a businessman, he also greatly profits from.

The White House has denied that Mr. Trump or his family had engaged in conflicts of interest and he has personally brushed aside such concerns, saying this week: “I never speak to any of the people that run the money.”

That reluctance to acknowledge any conflict now makes it harder, experts said, for anti-corruption investigators in countries big and small to combat behavior that the United States, until Mr. Trump’s presidency, once condemned.

“How the U.S. behaved was quite influential in shaping international norms,” said Professor Liz David-Barrett, director of the Center for the Study of Corruption at the University of Sussex.

Now, Mr. Trump’s windfall has undermined the idea “that there is a standard to which we should all be aspiring,” she said. It was now easier for other global leaders to ask “‘why should I regulate my behavior?’ when the greatest power in the world” is not regulating its president, she added.

Mr. Trump is of course hardly alone when it comes to accusations of exploiting public office for private profit.