Five ways Trump profits from the presidency

Trump profits from the presidency at a scale that, until now, would've been unimaginable. That doesn't mean we should tolerate it.

Lately, I’ve been reading about the Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s. Albert B. Fall, Warren G. Harding’s Interior Secretary, got caught giving sweetheart deals to oil companies leasing land in central Wyoming.

At the time, newspapers would say—without a touch of irony—that it was “the greatest scandal in the nation’s history.”¹ Even today, historians look back on it as “the greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American politics” prior to Watergate.

If Teapot Dome happened today, I’m not convinced anyone would even notice.

A few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal wrote an exposé about an Emirati sheikh who secretly bought 49% of a Trump family cryptocurrency venture for $500 million.

What happened next? Two months after that deal, “the [Trump] administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters.”

In a different era, this would’ve been an administration-defining scandal and Pulitzer Prize-worthy investigative reporting. But in this one, it was out of the news almost immediately.

There are countless stories like this, where Donald Trump and his family abuse their positions of power for personal gain. The scale of the Trump administration’s consistent corruption, self-dealing, and bad-faith governance is so vast that we’ve gotten used to it.

That doesn’t mean we should tolerate it.

Article summary:

• The breadth of Trump’s corruption is so vast that it’s impossible to remember everything.

• In his second term, crypto has opened up a whole new channel to self-deal and grift. But Trump is running back a lot of the classics from his first term: old-school conflicts of interest, letting his family take advantage of his role, etc.

Let’s set aside all of the other scandals

Donald Trump is a bad, unqualified president for lots of reasons. His policy is terrible; he inspired an insurrection against the country; he’s been accused of rape and sexual assault by at least 28 women.

Hard though it may be, let’s set all of that aside for the moment.

Here’s what is relevant to this article:

• 73% of Americans see government corruption as a critical threat to the United States,² and only 17% of Americans say that they trust the federal government.

• 80% of Americans say corruption among members of Congress is a problem, and 72% say corruption among U.S. presidents is a problem.

• “Corruption” is consistently a top-10 issue for American voters.

There’s a reason that insurgent campaigns—including Donald Trump’s, I’ll note—work. People don’t trust politicians.

But Trump has been the face of one of America’s two political parties for more than a decade. He’s the quintessence of a political insider. And yet, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, brazen corruption scandal after brazen corruption scandal doesn’t move the needle.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t chronicle it or call it out. His corruption—in its breadth, scale, consistency, and shamelessness—is breathtaking.

As I see it, his corruption falls into five main categories:

1. Old-school shakedowns, backed by the might of the presidency

2. Domestic conflicts of interest and pay-to-play schemes

3. Taking money from foreign governments, Constitutional restrictions be damned

4. Crypto, a new frontier of Trumpian grift

5. Corruption and self-dealing from the rest of his family

This list is hardly exhaustive, both because I don’t have the space and because lots of stuff surely isn’t being reported. But each of these stories is as bad as, or worse than, Teapot Dome. In a different era, any one of these might be disqualifying.³

Old-school shakedowns, backed by the might of the presidency

• Nine days into Trump’s second term, Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) paid Trump $25 million to settle a free speech lawsuit in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

• Elon Musk did something very similar, directing Twitter to pay Trump $10 million to settle a lawsuit a few weeks into the second term.

• Alphabet, the parent company of YouTube, paid Trump $24.5 million to settle the same basic lawsuit.

• Paramount paid Donald Trump $16 million (sound familiar?) to settle a lawsuit against 60 Minutes coverage that he didn’t like.

All of these lawsuits were frivolous. Each of these companies paid Trump directly to curry favor, or at least to avoid his ire.

Since then, white-shoe law firms across the country—Paul Weiss, Kirkland & Ellis, Simpson Thacher, Skadden, and others—paid tens of millions in settlements and pro bono legal work for Trump-aligned causes after the president issued executive orders designed to hamstring those firms.

And these shakedowns don’t even include the extortion of Harvard, Columbia, Brown, and other schools—as insane as those demands are, at least the money isn’t going to Trump directly.

Domestic conflicts of interest and pay-to-play schemes

• Trump uses the presidency to sell Trump-branded merchandise that lines his pockets: everything from shoes to guitars to hats to Bibles.

• Both during his campaign and since his second inauguration, Republican-aligned groups are hosting events at Trump-owned properties that move campaign cash to Trump and his family businesses.

• Matthew Moroun, the owner of the Ambassador Bridge that connects Detroit and Canada, gave $1 million to MAGA Inc.⁴ in January. Very shortly thereafter, Trump threatened to shut down development of a competitive bridge that would damage Moroun’s business interests.

• The president charges $5 million for a one-on-one meeting, with no documentation for where that money is going. This isn’t a one-off thing.

• The presidential pardon process is often a shady business.⁵ But Trump takes the quid pro quo of pardons to a new level, handing out pardons to donors and turning million-dollar lobbying for pardons into a cottage industry.

Taking money from foreign governments, Constitutional restrictions be damned

Here’s your reminder that the Emoluments Clause is part of the U.S. Constitution:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

This was long understood to mean that officers of the U.S.—including, obviously, the president—could not accept payment from foreign nations.

I guess we’ve entirely given up enforcing that, but Trump takes this to new lows:

• Trump accepted a $400 million jet from the Qataris, which will serve as Air Force One during his presidency and become part of Trump’s presidential library afterward—which would allow him to use it for personal, post-presidency travel.

• Trump’s business is opening a $1.5 billion golf club and is building a $1 billion tower in Vietnam while Vietnam negotiated tariffs with the U.S. These projects got fast-tracked through all sorts of Vietnamese regulatory reviews, and sure enough, the U.S. lowered its tariffs against Vietnam not long thereafter.

• LIV Golf, the rival golf league to the PGA, is owned by the Saudi government and continues to host events at Trump golf courses around the U.S.⁶ Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and ally of Mohammed bin Salman, funds LIV. And given that his job is to advance Saudi interests, he knows exactly what he’s doing when he wears MAGA hats to LIV tournaments.⁷

There’s a lot more that could be included here, but I’m covering that in the “Crypto” and “Family” sections below.

Crypto, a new frontier of Trumpian grift

As I suspect you can tell, and as I’ve written before, I’m a crypto skeptic. But if you’re a believer in Bitcoin or Ethereum and its underlying economic value, that’s fine.

But you know what doesn’t even pretend to have any value? $TRUMP and $MELANIA, which are explicitly meme coins! It’s basically just gambling where the Trump family gets to take a cut, and it’s no surprise the two coins have lost almost all of their value.

Another term I’d use to describe meme coins? A pump and dump.

He’s fleecing the American people who go in on his so-called investments. It’s netted Trump—at least—$100 million. But it’s not the only crypto grift he has going:

• The news at the top of this article: an Emirati royal bought a major stake in Trump’s crypto company and got a sweetheart deal on high-end chips for AI processing.

• The crypto industry—to its credit, I guess—was savvy in how they approached Trump: namely, they knew that giving him a bunch of money would buy his loyalty. The crypto industry has become a reliable pool of donors, and sure enough, he has gone from saying that crypto was a “scam” to going all-in on it.

• Justin Sun, a crypto investor, put $75 million into Trump-owned businesses. Almost immediately thereafter, the administration dropped its civil fraud case against him.

• After Binance worked closely to support Trump-owned World Liberty Financial, Binance founder and convicted criminal Changpeng Zhao got a pardon.

• Crypto.com put about $1 billion into Trump’s social media company, a company whose revenues are all of $3.7 million. (As in, $0.0037 billion.) A terrible business decision; a great way to curry favor from a president for sale.

Corruption and self-dealing from the rest of his family

You could almost have a section on every kid and every son-in-law.

• Most famously: Amazon paid $40 million for Melania, a shocking amount of money for a documentary. It went on to lose tens of millions, but that’s not why Jeff Bezos spent all of that money.

• 19-year-old Barron Trump has been mentioned as a possible board member for TikTok. Set aside that he’s entirely unqualified, there’s no one even close to that young who’s an S&P 500 board member.⁸

• Jared Kushner is up to something so bad that he’s the subject of a whistleblower complaint. The details have been withheld, but what we do know is that he’s taking billions from different Gulf states, including the Qatari sovereign wealth fund.

• Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, America’s princelings, trade on their family name and power extensively: they’re capitalizing on their dad’s crypto grift, they’re getting involved in public companies in what basically amounts to pump and dumps, they’re using their golf club companies to take stakes in defense technology companies⁹ that work with the government, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

• Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic advisor for Kalshi and an investor in Polymarket. Those two are rival prediction markets and that’s a crazy conflict of interest in and of itself. But Kalshi and Polymarket keep him around because they’re completely unregulated sports gambling platforms, and now that he’s involved, the federal government has shockingly little interest in regulating them.

• Even Tiffany Trump’s husband, Michael Boulos, is getting in on the action, forging ties with different Saudi businessmen since marrying into the family.

To get ahead of any whataboutism: yes, Hunter Biden traded on his dad’s name too. He’s not a good dude. But there’s no parallel here; this is all so much more extensive than anything Hunter Biden even did.

Trump won’t ever face consequences

There are people in my orbit who think—or hope, maybe—that one day, Trump will face consequences for the brazen corruption.

He won’t. Weaseling his way out of legal trouble appears to be a superpower. But that doesn’t mean we should stop calling out the corruption as we see it.¹⁰

One of my all-time favorite articles is a 1999 New York Times piece by Paul Simon about Joe DiMaggio, who had died the day before. The two were bound by the famous lyrics of “Mrs. Robinson.”¹¹

Simon, in his telling, meant DiMaggio’s reference in “Mrs. Robinson” as a metaphor: “I thought of him as an American hero and that genuine heroes were in short supply.” Writing the article in the throes of the Clinton impeachment trial, he longs for DiMaggio’s kind of heroism:

In these days of Presidential transgressions and apologies and prime-time interviews about private sexual matters, we grieve for Joe DiMaggio and mourn the loss of his grace and dignity, his fierce sense of privacy, his fidelity to the memory of his wife and the power of his silence.

Think about how far we’ve sunk since then—if only the scandals were run-of-the-mill Oval Office affairs. But the sentiment is right: we should aspire to a greater dignity and respect, now more than ever.

We have a tendency to look back through history with rose-colored glasses; our leaders have never been perfect. But we’ve come to tolerate what should be intolerable.

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1. I link to just one newspaper here, the Mooresville Enterprise of Mooresville, North Carolina, because a) it’s a clean quote, and b) it’s been digitized, which isn’t the case for a lot of newspapers of that era. But quotes like “the greatest scandal in American history” or “greatest scandal since [some other long-forgotten scandal]” come up all the time in contemporaneous coverage.

2. In a different poll, 85% of Americans say that corruption is a problem in the U.S. The issue with this specific poll question is that “corruption” in this context is a bit of a Rorschach test: corruption could mean anything from politicians taking bribes to the media being in someone’s pocket to fraud within government programs. So I don’t think it’s the most helpful way of looking at this.

3. In a different era, they might also become scandals that get their own -gate name: Metagate, Binancegate, LIVgate, etc. But alas, not in the moment we’re living in.

4. Could be obvious from its name, but MAGA Inc. is a Trump-aligned super PAC.

5. Examples: Roger Clinton was pardoned by his half-brother, and Hunter Biden was pardoned by his dad. Both Democratic presidents, both very bad looks. Not for nothing, neither Roger nor Hunter seems like an especially good dude.

6. This season, LIV is hosting events at Trump courses in Virginia and New Jersey. Last year and the year before, they hosted events at his course in Miami.

7. I have zero hard evidence to back this up, but I have a longstanding theory (call it a conspiracy theory if you must) that the Saudi government funds LIV for the sole purpose of currying favor with Donald Trump. They’ve paid out hundreds of millions in guaranteed contracts to golfers on top of another couple hundred million in purses every season without a prayer of ever seeing a return on that investment.

The league’s TV ratings are abysmal, and they’ve got almost no cultural cachet. LIV just lost one of their stars and, because its players get few Official World Golf Ranking points, it’s tough to qualify for majors and so they’re losing relevance. (They only started getting points last month.)

So why keep spending all of this money? Well, it’s a very easy way for the Saudis to buy loyalty from Trump—see the Yasir Al-Rumayyan photo I mention above—without making it a straight-up bribe. (Emoluments Clause be damned.) That’s clearly worth well more than a few measly hundred million for the Kingdom.

I can’t think of a good business (or golf) reason why it makes sense to keep LIV alive otherwise.

8. Yes, the new TikTok won’t be on the S&P 500. (I don’t think.) But no director is even close to that young. Best I can tell, the youngest directors of S&P 500 companies are either the co-founders of DoorDash or Olivia Tyson, on the board of Tyson Foods, her family business.

Only 5% of S&P 500 directors are under 50 years old. That’s maybe a bad thing, but it shows that Barron Trump would be an incredibly crazy outlier.

9. Think about that sentence for a moment. Here are the first two paragraphs from a Reuters article:

Aureus Greenway, a golf club company backed by the sons of U.S. President Donald Trump, said on Monday it would merge with Powerus in a deal designed to take the drone technology company public.

The transaction is the latest in Eric and Donald Trump Jr.’s growing investments in the drone sector, following last month’s $1.5 billion tie-up between Israeli drone maker XTEND and Florida-based JFB Construction.

10. Corruption is, of course, nothing new. A fun, local, low-stakes version of that: the St. Louis city treasurer is in some hot water for giving his girlfriend a hangtag that gets her out of parking tickets. Not good. But also, why can’t this be the corruption we’re facing as a country?

11. The full lyrics, which I’m sure most of you know:

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you
Woo, woo, woo
What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away