As Trumps monetize presidency, profits outstrip protests
(News Analysis)
When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review.
Thirty-one years later, after dinner at President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about first lady Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket -- 280 times the Clinton lucre and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband's government. Scandal? Furor? Washington moved on while barely taking notice.
The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and is opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.
Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Trump's use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued the plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined.
And Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency that he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in -- not to a campaign account but to a business that benefits Trump personally.
By conventional Washington standards, according to students of official graft, the still-young Trump administration is a candidate for the most brazen use of government office in American history, perhaps eclipsing even Teapot Dome, Watergate and other famous scandals.
'I've been watching and writing about corruption for 50 years, and my head is still spinning,' said Michael Johnston, a professor emeritus at Colgate University and author of multiple books on corruption in the United States.
Yet a mark of how much Trump has transformed Washington since his return to power is the normalization of moneymaking schemes that once would have generated endless political blowback, televised hearings, official investigations and damage control. The death of outrage in the Trump era, or at least the dearth of outrage, exemplifies how far the president has moved the lines of accepted behavior in Washington.
Trump, the first convicted felon elected president, has erased ethical boundaries and dismantled the instruments of accountability that constrained his predecessors. There will be no official investigations because Trump has made sure of it. He has fired government inspectors general and ethics watchdogs, installed partisan loyalists to run the Justice Department, FBI and regulatory agencies and dominated a Republican-controlled Congress unwilling to hold hearings.
As a result, while Democrats and other critics of Trump are increasingly trying to focus attention on the president's activities, they have had a hard time gaining any traction without the usual mechanisms of official review. And at a time when Trump provokes a major news story every day or even every hour -- more tariffs on allies, more retribution against enemies, more defiance of court orders -- rarely does a single action stay in the headlines long enough to shape the national conversation.
Paul Rosenzweig, who was a senior counsel to Ken Starr's investigation of President Bill Clinton and later served in the George W. Bush administration, said the lack of uproar over Trump's ethical norm-busting has made him wonder whether longstanding assumptions about public desire for honest government were wrong all along.
'Either the general public never cared about this,' he said, or 'the public did care about it but no longer does.' He concluded that the answer is that '80%, the public never cared' and '20%, we are overwhelmed and exhausted.'
'Outrage hasn't died,' Rosenzweig added. 'It was always just a figment of elite imagination.'
The White House has defended Trump's actions, brushing off questions about ethical considerations by saying that he was so rich that he did not need more money.
'The president is abiding by all conflict of interest laws that are applicable to the president,' said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. 'The American public believes it is absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency. This president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly.'
But saying that he is abiding by all conflict of interest laws that are applicable to the president is meaningless since, as Trump himself has long noted, conflict of interest laws are not applicable to the president.
Moreover, he has not given it all up; in fact, he is still making money from his private business interests run by his sons, and independent estimates indicate that he has hardly sacrificed financially by entering politics. Forbes estimated Trump's net worth at $5.1 billion in March, a full $1.2 billion higher than the year before and the highest it has ever been in the magazine's rankings.
The president's sons scoff at the idea that they should limit their business activities, which directly benefit their father. Donald Trump Jr. has said that the family restrained itself during his father's first term only to be criticized anyway, so it made no sense to hold back anymore. 'They're going to hit you no matter what,' he said last week at a business forum in Qatar. 'So we're just going to play the game.'
There have been some burgeoning signs of public pushback in recent days. The gift of the Qatar plane seemed to break through to the general audience in a way that other episodes have not. A Harvard/CAPS Harris poll released last week found that 62% of Americans thought the gift 'raises ethical concerns about corruption,' and even some prominent right-wing Trump supporters like Ben Shapiro and Laura Loomer voiced objections.
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who campaigned with Trump last year, expressed misgivings this week during a podcast with Shawn Ryan, a right-wing influencer, who mentioned all of the Trump family business deals that seemed to coincide with the president's recent trip to the Middle East.
'That stuff kind of worries me,' Ryan said.
'Well, it seems like corruption, yeah,' Carlson agreed.
But while several dozen demonstrators protested outside Trump's golf club the other night, Democrats are split about how much to focus on Trump's profitmaking, with some preferring to concentrate on economic issues. Sen. Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., has been leading the charge the other direction, making floor speeches and leading news conference denouncing what he calls 'brazen corruption.'
'It is unlikely he is going to be held accountable through traditional means,' Murphy said in an interview. 'There are going to be no special counsels; there's going to be no DOJ action. And so it's really just about public mobilization and politics. If Republicans keep paying a price for the corruption by losing special elections throughout the next year, maybe that causes them to rethink their complicity.'
Trump had long promised to 'drain the swamp' in Washington after years of corruption by other politicians. When he first ran for president in 2016, he excoriated the Clintons for taking money from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East monarchies with an obvious interest in currying favor in case Hillary Clinton won the presidency. But that money went to the Clinton Foundation for philanthropic purposes. The money Trump's family is now bringing in from the Middle East is going into their personal accounts through a variety of ventures that The New York Times has documented.
Johnston said the Trumps represent 'an absolute outlier case, not just in monetary terms' but also 'in terms of their brazen disregard' for past standards. 'While we might disagree as to the merits of policy, the president and figures in the executive branch are expected to serve the public good, not themselves,' he said.
Trump made a nod at those standards in his first term by saying he would restrict his family business from doing deals overseas. But since then, he has been convicted of 34 felony counts for falsifying business records and held liable in civil court for fraud while the Supreme Court has conferred immunity on him for official acts. In his second term, Trump has dispensed with self-imposed ethical limits.
'He's not trying to give the appearance that he's doing the right thing anymore,' said Fred Wertheimer, founder of Democracy 21 and a longtime advocate for government ethics. 'There's nothing in the history of America that approaches the use of the presidency for massive personal gain. Nothing.'
Congressional Republicans spent years investigating Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, for trading on his family name to make millions of dollars, even labeling the clan the 'Biden Crime Family.' But while Hunter Biden's cash flow was a tiny fraction of that of Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Jared Kushner, Republicans have shown no appetite for looking into the current presidential family's finances.
'The American public has had to inure itself to the corruption of Donald Trump and his presidency because the president and his Republican Party have given the American public no choice in the matter,' said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former appeals court judge who has become a critic of Trump.
Trump evinces no concern that people funneling money into his family coffers have interests in government policies. Some of the crypto investors who attended his dinner Thursday night acknowledged that they were using the opportunity to press him on regulation of the industry. According to a video obtained by the Times, he reciprocated by promising guests that he would not be as hard on them as the Biden administration was.
One guest at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, that night was Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who became one of the largest holders of the $TRUMP memecoin after buying more than $40 million, earning him a spot in an even more exclusive private VIP reception with the president before the dinner. The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 accused Sun of fraud, but after Trump took over the agency put its lawsuit on hold even as it dropped other crypto investigations.
As for Bezos and Qatar, each has reason to get on Trump's good side. In his first term, Trump, peeved at coverage in The Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos, repeatedly pushed aides to punish Bezos' main company, Amazon, by drastically increasing its U.S. Postal Service shipping rates and denying it a multibillion-dollar Pentagon contract. Trump also had denounced Qatar as a 'funder of terrorism' and isolated it diplomatically. He has not targeted either Bezos or Qatar in his second term.
The president has not hesitated either to install allies with conflict issues in positions of power. He tapped a close associate of Elon Musk as the administrator of NASA, which provides Musk's SpaceX with billions of dollars in contracts. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who previously worked as a lobbyist for Qatar, signed off on the legality of Qatar's airplane gift.
Zach Witkoff, a founder of the Trump family crypto firm World Liberty Financial, and son of Steve Witkoff, the president's special envoy, announced a $2 billion deal in the United Arab Emirates, just a couple of weeks before his father and Trump traveled there for a presidential visit.
Wertheimer said the accumulation of so many conflicts puts Trump on the all-time list of presidential graft. 'He's got the first 10 places on that,' he said. 'He's in the hall of fame of ripping off the presidency for personal gain.' But he said the public would eventually grow upset. 'I think that's going to catch up with him. It's going to take some time, but it's going to catch up with him.'
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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When Andy Beshear won his first race for governor of Kentucky in 2019, he not only mobilized Democrats in urban areas; he also flipped many rural counties and cut the Republicans' margins in others. Typical was Carter County in eastern Kentucky. The county went for Beshear even though it had backed his GOP opponent and then-incumbent Republican Governor Matt Bevin four years earlier and gave Trump 73.8 percent of its ballots in 2016. Breathitt County in Appalachia also flipped, having gone for Bevin and voted 69.6 percent for Trump. Fred Cowan, a former Kentucky attorney general and a shrewd student of his state's politics, told me then that these voters understood where their interests lay. 'In a lot of these counties, the school systems or the hospitals—or both—are the biggest employers,' he said 'The Medicaid expansion helped a lot of people over there.' Sure, it's easier for Democrats like Beshear with strong local profiles to make their case. But the national party needs to learn from these politicians that giving up on whole swaths of voters is both an electoral and moral mistake. The emptiness of Republican populism speaks to the larger problem of mistaking Trump's ability to create a somewhat new electoral coalition with intellectual and policy innovation. Some conservative commentators are honest enough to admit how the BBB demonstrates that the 'old Republican Party is still powerful, the old ideas are still dominant,' as Ross Douthat observed in The New York Times. But even Douthat wants to cast the bill as an exception to a bolder transformation the president has engineered, particularly around immigration and a 'Trumpian culture war.' The problem here is that none of this is new, either. The GOP was moving right on immigration well before Trump—when, for example, it killed George W. Bush's immigration bill in 2007 as right-wing media cheered it on. The culture war and the battle against universities are old hat too. The real innovator here was the late Irving Kristol, whose columns in the 1970s introduced Wall Street Journal readers to the dangers posed to business interests by 'the new class' of Hollywood, media, and university types, along with activist lawyers. True, Trump is taking this fight to extreme places Kristol would never have gone. But, again, there's no new thinking here. And the attack on trans rights is just the latest front in the LGBTQ+ debates, now that the right has had to abandon its opposition to same-sex marriage because Americans have come to support it overwhelmingly. Even the contradictions aren't new. Since the Reagan years, Republicans have always talked about the dangers of deficits when Democrats were in power but cast those worries aside when they had the power to cut taxes. 'Reagan proved deficits don't matter' is the canonical Dick Cheney quote from 2002 when he was pushing for more tax cuts in W.'s administration. The exception proves the rule: George H.W. Bush made a deal with Democrats in 1991 that included tax increases because he really did care about deficits—and conservatives never forgave him for it. In an odd way, you have to admire Cheney's candor: At least he admitted what he was doing. The Freedom Caucus members have the gall to yell at the top of their lungs about how they care so very much about the debt—and then vote in overwhelming numbers to pile on billions more. As the debate over the BBB moves to the Senate, the immediate imperative is to expose the damage the bill does to millions of Trump's voters to benefit his Mar-a-Lago and crypto-wealthy friends. But it's also an occasion to shatter the illusion that Trump is some sort of brilliant policy innovator. Extremism and authoritarianism are not new ideas, and his legislative program would be familiar to Calvin Coolidge.
