How the Presidency is Making Trump Richer

I'm Aisha Rosco, and you're listening to the Sunday story from Up First, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. After he was first elected president in 2016, Trump buck tradition and repeat To release his tax returns. Although some of his tax information has come out, Trump has continued to try to shield information relating to his personal wealth. Since Trump's реекцін твоні твої фор. There's been increasing evidence that

Trump and his family are personally profiting from his presidency. To learn more about how the Trumps may be cashing in, we're bringing you a story from our friends over at NPR's Planet Money, where hosts Mary Childs and Sarah Gonzalez. Went on a little presidential accounting adventure. We are one year into President Donald Trump's second term and

Some things are really different this time around. Going over some math to be um all up to date. That's New Yorker reporter David Kirkpatrick. Now, if we If while as we go through this I turn pages, is that a problem? No. No, I think we actually like that sound. Oh, is that right? Okay. All right. Okay. Fine. David has been doing the near impossible task of following

Every new business and business deal and financial transaction that Trump and his family have made this past year and in the first term. And he's noticed this shift.

You know, in the first term they said voluntarily, we're not gonna do any hotel or other business deals overseas because that would be bad optically. That's gone. That's out the window. This term they've done deals all over the place overseas. Uh in the first term we actually said we're not gonna do any any foreign deals. That's Donald Trump Jr. talking. And The reality is it didn't stop.

the media from constantly saying, You're profiteering anyway was like we stopped entirely. So this time around we said, Hey, we're gonna play by the rules but we're not going to go so far as to stymie our business forever Lock ourselves in a proverbial padded room because it almost doesn't matter. They're gonna hit you no matter what. So effectively they've just said since we're gonna get criticized, we might as well take the money and run.

And that's when they've started making money kind of hand over fist. And it's not just foreign hotel deals or other investments from abroad, it's crypto, merch. President Trump's social media platform that he makes official White House announcements on. In fact It's hard to find a case where they've turned down an opportunity to make money off the presidency. Okay. Before Trump's first term, David says Trump was in a tight spot financially.

He was losing income from licensing and endorsements, and at the beginning of his second term he was in an even tighter spot, David said. At the time he owed hundreds of millions in fraud and defamation lawsuits. But after just six months into his second term, Trump's financial situation started looking real good. Like real good. Just zoop. Shut up in six months. Let's just get the number out there. What is like the total?

Amount. Yeah, I'd say approaching four billion. Almost four billion dollars. That is the number according to David. That is how much Trump and his family have made by this point in his second term. Almost four billion dollars and almost all of it made this past year. And disclaimer, this isn't just money that Trump himself has made, but his sons too. And then there's some in there that his wife Melania and son in law have also made.

There's no real way to detangle Trump from his family. Because even though Trump has transferred management of the Trump organization to his sons. Trump still profits from the business deals that they make, and Trump can withdraw profits or assets whenever he wants. Now, David says He went out of his way to not include money that the family would have made if Trump were not president. So he didn't count many deals, some big ones, that he says would likely have happened anyway.

And he didn't count profit made from like regular pre-existing business. Somebody just likes to stay in a fancy hotel with lots of gilding. Okay, fine. That's legit. He owned those properties before. We'll call that fair. That's not making money off of the pres The only deals that I've focused on are the ones where it was just inconceivable.

that Trump uh or his family would have made this money, would have done this deal, sold this crypto, or agreed to manage this property for some lucrative contract.

if he weren't the president. One of the reasons presidents get a salary is supposed to be so that they don't worry about personal gain. The Founding Fathers also wanted to prevent presidents from being susceptible to corruption. But I mean, a lot of presidents, Republican and Democrat, have made money after their president, once they leave office. Like Bill Clinton's very well-paying speaking engagements, George W. Bush's book.

Barack Obama's Netflix deal. And also, while they're in office, presidents will essentially sell access to the president and even sell positions, like when they're running for reelection, raising campaign money. There's examples of like you donate and then you become the ambassador to Well, there's tons. That's ambassador is the classic example. Ambassadorships are routinely, I would say, in every presidency given to big

Donors. Uh Secretary of Commerce is one position where that often happens. Um so he's he's not the first to sell access. Uh he's not the first really to sell positions. And I don't want to defend it, but it's routine and it's familiar. It's what they it's what they all do. And uh President uh Clinton famously let donors stay in the Lincoln bedroom.

Right, that's a notorious example. That's not what we're talking about here. Right. Those are campaign donations. They are not personal profit. They don't go to the president. Trump is the first president. to make so much money explicitly off of the White House for himself and his family. Money that actually goes into his own pocket that he can use at his pleasure after it leaves off. So that's really what I tried to focus on.

So what are you counting? So I'm counting cash in hand. I'm counting money that has been paid to the Trump family that they've put into the bank. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Sarah Gonzalez, and I'm Mary Child. Today on the show, we get out the counting machine. Tally up the minimum amount of money Trump and his family have made or profited, as David puts it, off of the presidency.

Almost four billion dollars. We go line by line and stop at the most interesting ways that Trump and his family have made all that. This message comes from MIDI Health. CEO Joanna Strober shares why they started a virtual care platform for women in paramenopause and menopause. Our goal at MIDI is to make sure that all women have access to really expert care, starting around 35 and 40, making sure that they get access to all the things that can help them thrive as they're growing older.

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This message comes from Carvana. Finance and buy your next vehicle with Carvana. Shop a huge selection, customize terms to fit your budget, and buy completely online. No hassle, no pressure. Get the car you love the easy way with Carvana. We're back with a Sunday story. Today we take a ride with our colleagues over at Planet Money who've been looking into the profits flowing into the Trump family since the start of the president's second term. Here's NPR's Sarah Gonzalez and Mary Child.

David Kirkpatrick set out to not just come up with the number, the How much money Trump and his family have made, number that approaching four billion dollars number. He wanted to also show why some of their new deals probably would not have happened if Trump wasn't the president of the United States. And this was not an easy undertaking. You know, the the Trump family has left a variety of clues to their finances, but none of them are totally transparent.

So you've got to look at the court cases that have been about their uh reporting to their banks. And you've got to look at what they say in their public financial disclosures. And you've got to look at what they say publicly as well. So there's a lot of different ways to try to count up their money. None of them are perfect and you have to sort of extrapolate among them.

So how in the like scale of how you know perfect, would you say you're like seventy-five percent there, fifty percent there? I'd say I'm a hundred percent if your target is to be conservative. Right. So I ha what I have here is a kind of at least number, a minimum number. And

Just one thing before we get into the full accounting. Okay, but what happened to the emoluments clause? Like I thought the whole I thought the whole deal was that you're not supposed to profit off of the presidency. Well the emolument clause there's two emoluments clauses. There's the one that restricts the president from getting paid by the federal government or states besides his salary, and the other restricts gifts from foreign leaders.

So think of the DC Hotel. Remember the DC Hotel? That was like the first big instance in the first Trump term where people were worried about foreign leaders, but also CEOs. booking rooms there to try to curry favor with the president as an impermissible emolument. There were lawsuits, but they were never fully litigated before he left office.

It feels so quaint now. It feels so quaint. I know. We were s we were all people were so strung out about those overpriced martinis. And really that's nothing. David says chump. didn't make money off the DC hotel. It apparently repelled as many potential customers as it attracted. Some foreign leaders and lobbyists didn't want to be caught up in some emoluments scandal.

In the end, the DC Hotel, estimated gain, zero. That was from the first term. In general, from Trump's first term, he and his family did not profit all that much. Couple hundred million. But the second term is a different story. It's really the basis of David's hefty magazine article. If we were going to whittle down your list to the top three most fun or creative or unusual ways that Trump and the Trump family have gotten richer or profited off of the presidency. What are like your highlights?

You know, the most lucrative ways and the most creative ways are different. I have to say the one that surprised me the most is the merch. Me too. I love the merch one. So merch merch is the most surprising to me. Um crypto is the biggest in its many forms. And then I would say the the uh the Gulf real estate um

Is the uh is the other one that's the most striking. Those are the three we're gonna pause and go into detail on, but we're gonna tally up what the Trump family has made across a few different categories, like hospitality deals, finance, the full list.

First step, the finest category, merch. Everybody, every politician, every campaign sells merch. They all sell it for the campaign, right? But it's campaign money. You can't use it personally. The Trumps were very innovative. They actually sell a line of Trump branded merchandise that looks very much like you're supporting the Trump campaign or the MAGA movement. But in fact That money goes into their own pockets.

The Trump sneakers, Trump Bibles, Trump guitars, Trump gets some of those profits. And technically he is diverting money that would have gone to his own campaign when he does this. Yeah, it's like it's like a designer knocking himself off. That's basically what's going on here. From all the merch, Trump has made about twenty-seven point seven million dollars.

So maybe it's small change, but hats off, that's a real innovation. And another real innovation is actually around official campaign money. Trump found a loophole, a way to convert campaign money into money that he could use to pay for his legal defense in lawsuits against him. Like when Eugene Carroll sued for defamation after her sexual abuse allegation case, or when Trump was charged with trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The campaign money loophole, according to David, earned Trump$100 million worth of legal defense. So add that to the other merch money. Legal fees and Trump merch. Estimated gain 127.7 million. Next up, Truth Social. Truth Social with a very, very generous estimate of about 25 million. It's safe to say that it owes all of its success to his status as president.

David calls this the media category. It includes social media, but also media deals like a payment from Amazon to Melania to make a movie about Melania's life. And also it includes Suing the media. Yeah, this category includes all the many lawsuits Trump has brought against big media companies like ABC, CBS, Meta. The estimate for the gains from the lawsuits and deals is about$91 million.

I think especially in the case of the lawsuits, uh all of which were deemed to be frivolous by most media law experts, uh it's fair to call those payments that he would not have received were he not the sitting president. So lawsuits plus the truth social gain,$116 million and counting. Next step.

The private jet, the Qatari Royal Jet. The Qatari government technically gifted this jet to the US government. But it's later supposed to go to the Trump presidential library. And David says that there is a way for presidents to benefit from their presidential libraries, so that's why he counted it.

A hundred and fifty million. It's a used jet after all. Now we are gonna get into bigger categories, like a category that David calls hospitality. These are hotel and real estate deals and earnings both abroad and in the US. We will start domestically with Mar-a-Lago. All right, Mar-a-Lago, estimated gain,$125 million.

Obviously, this was a club that Trump owned before he ever became president. And David says he really went out of his way on this one to calculate only how much extra in profits Trump's presidencies have brought him. So for example. After the twenty sixteen election, Trump started hiking up the initiation fee for Mar-a-Lago members. It used to be about a hundred thousand dollars. In twenty seventeen, it went up to two hundred thousand dollars. Now

It's a million dollars. Okay. Hotel deals abroad. There's a Trump Hotel in Vietnam. The Trump Hotel Hanoi. Uh in Vietnam, some documents have emerged to show that the Vietnamese government uh is providing favorable expedited treatment to a truly vast hotel, golf and condominium project under the Trump name because Trump is the president. That estimated gain comes to about And listen, Trump make

hotel deals, right? This is what he was doing way before he was ever president. And there's an argument that the Trump organization should be allowed to still make these kinds of hotel and golf course deals. And this is why David is not counting every deal, right? He is only counting, he says, deals that seem

Special, striking deals or terms that he says are unlikely to have happened if Trump wasn't the president or incoming president. Like these other deals in the Middle East, for example, specifically in the Persian Gulf. The Trumps had not done much business in the Persian Gulf. Suddenly, as he's on his way to being the Republican nominee and on his way back into the White House, they get a string of enormous deals with the same Saudi company across Oman, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates.

uh and Qatar. Would those deals have happened if he weren't the president? No. Of course they wouldn't. Why of course they wouldn't. Why why? If you're gonna open a big resort in the Persian Gulf. And you could go to the four seasons, you could go to Marriott, you could go to the Reds. You go to a lot of these giant companies that can lower costs because of their size. Why would you go to the Trump organization, which has so little track record in the Gulf?

The Trump Organization is a very small management firm. Usually if you're going to hire somebody to run your hotel uh and license a name for your hotel, if it's Marriott or one of the behemoths, They'll hold out for a thirty year contract. But if it's, you know, David Kirkpatrick hotel management, you're lucky if you can get a ten year contract.

But reportedly, according to the New York Times, the deal he got in Oman for a giant hotel, condo, golf course uh operation there was a thirty year deal. So that's another clue that this is an extraordinary kind of a thing. That's not those are not the kinds of deals that the Trump organization has gotten it ever. Uh certainly not abroad.

I come up with an estimated gain of 105.8 million. So David finds between the Persian Gulf Hotels, Vietnam and Mar-a-Lago, the Trump family has made about$271 million.

Next category, finance deals. Uh so Jared Kushner. Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner, after he was senior advisor to President Donald Trump in Trump's first term, he gets into private equity after basically being a real estate guy all his life. He opens a private equity firm. But he reaches out to the Saudi Arabia, the rulers of Saudi Arabia, uh who he'd been very good to in office, um, and he asks them for a two billion dollar investment.

Now, I was able to obtain years ago uh the minutes of a meeting of their advisory board evaluating that event. And it was unanimously negative. Everybody said this guy has no experience in private equity. Uh we have no reason to believe that he is gonna be successful. No US investors have gone in, and he's asking us to be the first with two billion dollars. We shouldn't do this. The government of Saudi Arabia did it anyway.

Now, would they have done that if he if his father was not the former and possible future president? No. No, I think we can say they wouldn't have. Jared's cut of that investment, three hundred and twenty million dollars. And if you think that Jared Kushner's gain here shouldn't count towards the whole family gain, David says, fine, subtract it. He made this list as a sort of Choose your own adventure.

The same goes for this other finance deal that Don Jr. got as partner of an investment fund. Uh 1789 Capital. David says, here also, it is unlikely Don Jr. would have gotten this job based just on his work experience. had his dad not been president. Estimated gain nineteen point six.

Million. All right, we're just gonna do a little running total check here from the finance deals, the hotel deals, the lawsuits, all the way down to the merch deals. We are at about a billion dollars in gains for Trump and his family. But there is one final category with a bunch of things in it.

So now we're getting to the big stuff. Like now now we get into much bigger uh profits here, right? We're on our way to bigger stuff. So crypto. Now the crypto category has to be broken down into a into a variety of uh smaller categories. The first form of crypto that the Trump family got into were non-fungible tokens.

Which are basically kind of digital cartoons of of President Trump and and later his wife. This is like where Trump looks like super muscular and he's like a superhero, right? That those are the NFTs. Right, or biker Trump with an electric guitar. Uh I put their estimated gain from the sale of those non fungible tokens at fourteen point four million. Then do we get we get to what I call token investment.

Token investments are another crypto category. The Trump family profited from the sale of digital tokens from a crypto company called World Liberty Financial, with an estimated gain of$974.5 million. So almost a billion dollars there. Then there's a form of crypto known as a stablecoin, which they gave a Pretty fun name too. USD one. USD one like

The US dollar. Aaron Powell Uh and their first customer, uh and really their main, possibly only customer so far has been the government of the United Arab Emirates. Uh the United Arab Emirates agreed to buy two billion dollars in stablecoin. I put the profits From that At about two hundred and forty-three million. Uh just I'm curious what you think of the the the like the US D one.

crypto thing. It seems very intentional. Well in um in in crypto and broad strokes, the Trump play, the Trump family play is to use the credibility and informator of the sitting president. to build trust in what otherwise strikes people as a pretty sketchy asset, that is crypto. So calling it USD one

and reminding everybody that's associated with the President of the United States is a good way to build faith and credibility as this digital currency as the equivalent of a dollar. So that makes sense to me. That's really what they're up to. Then there is American Bitcoin. American Bitcoin is a Bitcoin mining company that the Trump brothers

have founded uh with a friend. David says the Trump sons contributed mainly their name. Their share uh at twenty percent would be worth about a hundred and fifteen million. Okay, next up.

Trump Media, the parent company of Trude Social, has reinvented itself as a kind of Bitcoin holding company. This is the big ticket item. This is the biggest of the bunch. Trump media has been selling shares of its own company, which David and analysts say trades at a wildly inflated value because of its association with President Trump. And then they've used some of that cash to buy Bitcoin.

President Trump uh owns a stake of about forty one percent uh in that company. If you just look at the Bitcoin and cash on its book. A forty-one percent stake of that was worth$1.3 billion at the time that the magazine went to press. Uh Bitcoin has gone down a bit in price since that time. I did another little back of the envelope calculation last night. that number would come out to 1.08 billion uh if I did the math now.

Okay, so a little down. A little down, but still a lot of money. Anything over one billion is, you know. That's right. Yeah. Okay. All right. And we've got we've s are we on the last one? We're on the last one, which is dollar sign Trump. Uh that is the Trump meme coin, right? That is the Trump meme coin. Uh now a meme coin uh does not purport to hold value. It's just a novelty. In fact

It's not even something you can show anyone. It's really just a mark on a digital ledger that says, I own one Trump meme coin. I I put the estimated gain from Trump and Melania meme coins at 385 million. And that makes 3.8 billion dollars. So that's how David got to that almost four billion dollar numbers.

We did reach out to the White House. Press Secretary Caroline Levitt has said many times that President Donald Trump does not profit off of the presidency, and that actually Trump has sacrificed money that he could have made had he just been working on his businesses.

But the White House doesn't seem to disagree that Trump is making money. So we asked them, how can the president be making money? And yet you still say he's not profiting. Their response was to refer us back to Caroline's earlier comments. Surely. Is not the only president. Money, not just after their term, but while they are president. That's after the break. This message comes from Lisa. From night one, you'll feel the difference.

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All right, we wanted to know how common it is for a US president to make money like Trump has while they are the sitting president. And we called up someone, who would know? My name is Fred Wertheimer. Your name sounds so familiar, Fred. Well at least the last Fred's wife, Linda Wertheimer, is considered one of the founding mothers of NPR, recently retired. And Fred is the president of Democracy 21.

It's a nonprofit that works to reduce the influence of big money in politics. Nonpartisan. I've worked with Republicans and Democrats for decades. Fred is a big government ethics and campaign finance reform guy, and he says the US has never seen a president make so much money. It doesn't exist at the level of which President Trump. is making money. I mean, okay, like this in terms of scale, but like famously, infamously, Hunter Biden Hunter Biden made money.

Hunter Biden was not a president. You asked me about president. No, yes. of a close relative of a president using the president's name To make money. Yeah, when you look at the relatives of presidents profiting or even benefiting, yeah, there are plenty examples of that in our history, Fred says. But still all those examples very different in terms of the amount of money, even Hunter Biden. He did not make anywhere near the amount of money. that president Trump's sons are makers.

Fred says there are examples of presidents having conflicts of interest though, and profiting, you know, some from the president's. There are a couple. There aren't a lot. There is President Lyndon Johnson. Okay, we're going a little back. His wife owned a r a small radio station and then bought a television station in Austin, Texas. And reportedly he got favorable rulings from the FCC. So he had a conflict of interest, and I don't know how much

you could quantify the value he got from that. But I can tell conflict of interest but also profit, right? But It couldn't have been that much. It was nothing. And we can go back farther to the nineteen twenties with President Warren G. Harding. Remember him? President Harding owned early on a small newspaper and when he became president, he and his wife owned it. He turned it over to his wife. And again, he would have profited So I guess you could make the argument that maybe certain

companies were placing ads in that paper in that newspaper to maybe try to curry favor with Warren G. Harding. Yeah. Like that that could have been sure. Was that a a concern that people were throwing around in the nineteen twenties? I'm old, but I wasn't there. That's not what I meant. Tell us about that time, Fred. No, I'm just kidding. I I have no idea. You have no idea. They were conflicts of interest.

Uh certainly when Johnson became vice president it was reported that his aides urged him to sell the T V station, but the family did not. Um I mean so I guess you could make the argument that, well, this is a guy who owned a T V station and radio station, or with Harding, this is a guy who owned a newspaper. And then they became president And it's not their fault that they used to own a business.

They didn't sell the business during the presidency. That's kind of like what's happening with Trump, except it's not like what's happening in Trump. Let me give you an example. There's more money on the line. Has made billions, he and his family, in cryptocurrency at the same time He is controlling the policy of the United States on cryptocurrency. Yeah. And his policies are. totally favorable to cryptocurrency.

Yeah, you could kind of make this argument for Trump's first presidency. Like he was a businessman before. What is he supposed to do? Sell all of his businesses? He'd probably get criticism for that too. Like maybe somebody pays generously to buy a Trump business to get in good with the incoming president.

But for the second term, Fred says Trump is currently setting policies that benefit his and his family's businesses and grow their profits. And that is different. Fred says it is not something that a US president has done before.

What about okay, what about other countries? What other president is he like in another country? Mr. Putin. Oh. I think that might strike people a certain way. Uh no, no. You asked me about foreign countries. And Putin is probably the leading head official of a country. In terms of wealth? in terms of potential wealth. People can't figure out how much He has put away while being president, but estimates range from twenty billion dollars to hundreds of billions of dollars.

So there's Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, and a few others. You have dictatorships all over the world where the leaders make sure that they become very wealthy in their job. It just has never existed like this in our country until now.

David Kirkpatrick, who has done all the accounting on just how much Trump and his family have profited, he's not done. He's still keeping track and will keep updating the number. When we spoke to him four months after his magazine article came out, that number had already gone up. about half a billion dollars.

That was hosts Sarah Gonzalez and Mary Childs of NPR's Planet Money. This episode of the Sunday story was produced by Andrew Mambo. The original Planet Money episode was produced by James Snead. It was edited by Jess Jang and fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Robert Rodriguez engineered it. The executive producer of Planet Money is Alex Goldmark. The Sunday Story team also includes Justine Yan, Ginny Schmidt, and Liana Simstrom. Our executive producer is Irene Nagucci.

I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend. That's the problem. Phone phone is ringing. Oh, your phone went off. Okay, okay. I'm doing an interview at NPR. Call you back. Was that Linda? Yes. It was? You should have put her on the phone real fast. Uh well, I'll send her your regards even though she doesn't know you. Hmm.

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