Who’s benefiting from Trump’s presidency?

0:00Alex Rogers: Investing with Schwab is like spending a Saturday at a great farmer's market. You can fill your reusable tote with a bit of everything. Maybe you go for some free-range, self-directed investing. Or perhaps you pick up a few farm-fresh trades while you peruse. You can even get help from a dedicated advisor. That's full-service wealth management. Mix, match, and change your mind whenever you want. Because at Schwab, you can invest your way. No matter your goals or appetite for investing, Schwab has everything you need, all in one place. Visit Schwab.com to learn more.

0:36Alex Rogers: During his first term, U.S. President Donald Trump once tweeted out that he didn't like Bitcoin. He said cryptocurrencies are, quote, based on thin air. But this time around, the president has changed. The United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world. And we'll get it done. Trump now has a lot of friends since his most recent election, and sectors like crypto have been very good to the president's family since he changed his tune. But a new FT investigation sheds some light on just how much the president's family and his donors have benefited from their friendship.

1:19Alex Rogers: This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times, where we talk about all the things happening in U.S. politics, finance, and the economy. I'm Mark Filippino, and this week we're asking who's profited from Trump's presidency. Here with me to discuss is Joe Miller, who's the FT's Washington correspondent. Hi, Joe. Hi, Mark. And we've also got Alex Rogers, the FT's U.S. politics and business correspondent. Hi, Alex. Hey, Mark. Now, both of you worked on this massive investigation at the FT that ran last week about the money that friends and family of the president have made from his return to office.

1:52Alex Rogers: And there are two parts to this investigation. The first is about the Trump family and crypto. Is there a dollar figure that we could point to? How much money are we talking about? So the figure that we hear and a large team in London that spent many months looking into the Trump family's crypto ventures landed on was at least a billion dollars in pre-tax profits from the Trump family crypto ventures. And we can go into what all of those are in a moment. And to put that in perspective, as far as we could tell, most modern presidents, at least in the last sort of, you know, 50 to 100 years, made modest financial sacrifices to hold the office, never mind making gains while in the Oval.

2:37Alex Rogers: And here we have a president who has not only enriched himself, but enriched himself or his family to the tune of roughly a billion dollars. Before we get going further, can we talk about some of the things that former presidents have relinquished when entering office? Because I think that's important for framing. Well, the famous example is that Jimmy Carter had to give up his peanut farm. Right, yeah. And George W. Bush also gave up a stake in a sports team. It was the Texas Rangers, the baseball team, right? It was, yeah. And generally speaking, in recent history, most presidents have put their assets into what's called a blind trust when they went into office.

3:17Alex Rogers: Obama actually was an exception because he didn't really have any assets to speak of. But most presidents in recent history have done that. And Donald Trump has actually not. Alex, when did you notice the Trump family start to ramp up these ventures that Joe alluded to?

3:34Joe Miller: About 50 days before Election Day, there was this Twitter X Spaces event where President Trump and his sons spoke about a new venture called World Liberty Financial. And so the billion dollar figure that Joe alluded to, part of that chunk of money comes from this new venture called World Liberty Financial, which has only been around for a year. But at the time, you didn't even know, based off that announcement, really what they were going to sell. You knew that there was a huge political change among the right. Trump used to think that Bitcoin was a scam. And then he goes to that Bitcoin conference that I attended in Nashville.

4:11Joe Miller: He started getting a lot of crypto donors who were really frustrated with Gary Gensler at the SEC at that Bitcoin conference event. He said, I will fire Gary Gensler on day one. He heard the massive roar from the crowd. But you didn't know that there was going to be a Trump family crypto business. There weren't going to be this proliferation of crypto businesses really until this event on Twitter where the Suns start talking about world liberty financial. And maybe there's going to be a token. Maybe there's going to be a stable coin. But it really wasn't clear. And then after that, after the election, after Trump won, before the inauguration day, he unveiled this meme coin, dollar sign Trump, Trump, which was another part of this$1 billion that we calculated, was how much money Trump made from selling these meme coins.

5:01Alex Rogers: Can we break down exactly what we're talking about here? Because I know Trump has a coin. Melania has a coin. What are some of the other digital assets, at least, that we're talking about in this conversation? So we actually did a very conservative calculation here because, as we can discuss, Trump is actually involved in a vast array of cryptocurrency projects. but we focused on the ones where we could calculate a concrete, realized profit. And that basically falls into four categories. There's World Liberty Financial, that company that Alex mentioned, which was co-founded by Trump and his sons.

5:36Alex Rogers: They have a token which we estimated has made so far roughly$550 million. Then we have the meme coins that Alex mentioned there, the Trump coin, the dollar Trump sign coin, and Melania had her own dollar sign Melania. And then we have a stable coin that's issued by World Liberty Financial. It's slightly complicated, but they make money from if people buy the stable coin, they then have to hold dollar reserves, and they invest those dollar reserves in the treasury market and make some money off that. And so we figured that they'd made roughly, and this is a very conservative estimate, about$42 million to date this year on that stablecoin.

6:23Alex Rogers: And when you put all of those together, we're looking at more than a billion dollars. And these are just the four that you mentioned, not including other ones, as you said. So that figure could be, in theory, above a billion dollars.

6:36Joe Miller: You know, our colleagues interviewed Eric Trump in September and asked him, you know, is this about a billion dollars in profits over the past year? And he said, that's probably more.

6:46Alex Rogers: Tell me a little bit more about what Eric Trump had to say when you and the London team spoke to them, because I think it's I think it's really interesting how candid he was about these operations. Yeah.

6:58Joe Miller: So I interviewed Eric Trump in June in Trump Tower in his office and talked to him about not only his own belief that he or another family member could continue the family political dynasty in the U.S., but also about the crypto businesses, which he views to be a good complement to the traditional real estate businesses at the Trump organization. And he, Eric Trump, believes that decentralized finance is the way of the future. At the Bitcoin conference in Nashville, firing Gary Gensler on day one was such a huge applause line was because the Biden administration, the SEC, went after the crypto industry, saying that these were not regulated securities and that under the law, they were committing securities violations.

7:41Joe Miller: There are massive lawsuits against Coinbase and Gemini and all of these exchanges, which is why you saw so many of the founders of these crypto companies and the venture capitalists that supported them go donate towards Trump and also why you see them continue to donate to Trump. There's a super PAC called MAGA Inc, which amassed$200 million in the first half of this year. And a lot of that money, I think close to a fifth, is from the crypto industry.

8:09Alex Rogers: I want to take this opportunity to get into the next part of this investigation, which is all about the president's donors and how those donors in turn benefited after those donations. Joe, when did those donations start pouring in? Who were these donors? How much was there? Give me the basics here. So again, together with our team in London, we looked into this because, as Alex has mentioned, that there's been an enormous amount of money flowing in to super PACs tied to Donald Trump, which is very unusual given that he can't constitutionally run again. And we found that at least 30 individuals or companies that donated together$116 million to Trump's causes have since received various benefits and advantages.

8:58Alex Rogers: And this includes things like getting cases by the SEC, dropped against their companies, pardons of individuals in some cases, and more general sort of policy changes, sometimes very niche policy changes that directly benefited their companies. And what's really unique is that these donations are concentrated, especially in the crypto industry, but also that they continue to flow in to the president, who, as far as we know, is not gearing up for another campaign in 2028, as far as we know. I want to talk about some examples for a moment. You know, earlier this week, Trump pardoned Xinping Zhao, the co-founder of the crypto exchange Binance.

9:43Alex Rogers: He had pled guilty to failing to protect against money laundering in 2024. Earlier this year, Binance received a$2 billion investment that was paid entirely with the stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial. But another example is the Winklevoss twins, Tyler and Cameron. You reported they donated$3 million to Trump political action committees. What happened to them?

10:08Joe Miller: One of the donations of$3 million was$1 million to MAGA Inc., the main super PAC for Donald Trump. And then you see weeks later, the SEC closed a long-running investigation into their crypto exchange, Gemini. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have also since invested in American Bitcoin, the crypto mining company, co-founded by Eric Trump and Don Jr. And Gemini has enlisted now on the Nasdaq as a market cap of 2.5 billion. They still have an immense amount of not only access to President Trump, they were just at the White House earlier this month celebrating a new ballroom that is being built on the White House grounds.

10:44Joe Miller: But they're also involved in who Trump is picking to lead the industry that is regulating their business. And so the Winklevoss twins have fought the White House's initial pick for the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, who has since been withdrawn. And now the Trump administration is trying to figure out a new person to pick for the CFTC.

11:06Alex Rogers: What does the White House say about these Trump allies? They reject any claim of these being essentially quid pro quo payments or donations. And they say more broadly that what the administration is doing is simply making decisions that it thinks are in the best interests of the American people. For example, believing in the fact that letting the crypto industry loose is good for the economy, et cetera, et cetera, or various regulations that have benefited healthcare companies, et cetera, et cetera.

11:39Joe Miller: In addition to that, from the perspective of the Trump family businesses, Eric Trump denies any claims that the family has been profiting from the presidency. On the one hand, he'll say that the crypto businesses are extremely lucrative. He's also saying that there'd be many more zeros higher in terms of their net worth if Trump had not gone into politics and then been sued by a variety of different prosecutors.

12:03Alex Rogers: Two things are important to point out. One is that what we've uncovered is a pattern. We have not uncovered evidence of a donor saying, I will give you money if you drop X case. We've just discovered a pattern of money going in to Trump causes and then cases being dropped, etc. And the other thing to point out is that it's not unknown in previous administrations for donors to political parties to have then benefited from that party's platform in office. We think the pattern is stronger this time around and the number of incidents that are highlighted is larger, but it's certainly not a new phenomenon.

12:42Alex Rogers: That's a good segue into the final question that I have for you is, you know, why do we care about this? And I guess, do voters care about this? Yeah, so we commissioned some polling actually, and were astonished to find that a large number, more than half of Trump voters, when asked how much Trump has made since in office, thought the number was less than 100 million. Oh, wow. So less than a tenth of what we actually found. And almost a third believed he hadn't profited from presidency at all. And something like 40 % hadn't even heard of the meme coin. So we in the sort of in the bubble here in DC, you know, hear a lot about these things.

13:21Alex Rogers: And a lot of campaign groups talk about this every day and keep hammering home the fact that this is a president making an awful lot of money from his office. but it doesn't seem to be getting through to voters. Lots of people aren't even aware of the meme coins and things like that. So it remains to be seen how much of an electoral liability this is for, I suppose we should say, the MAGA movement. I also have to assume that even if they do know about it, crypto has become incredibly popular and they may not see this as a problem. It's very possible. Yeah, the polling didn't really ask about that, but it certainly doesn't seem to be among the most salient issues out there.

13:58Alex Rogers: The donations, that's a different thing. I mean, I think that they are, the business community is fairly quiet about this stuff because they don't want to basically incur the wrath of this administration. But I think there is, in the sort of half dozen people I've spoken to since the piece was published, people in business, leaders of industry, there is concern that essentially if you don't show that you are close enough to this White House and you don't sort of donate to the Trump causes, that maybe your competitors who do do that will receive more favorable treatment. There's definitely concern about that.

14:34Alex Rogers: How much of a liability that is electorally, again, I don't know. I want to thank our guests. Joe Miller is the FT's Washington correspondent. Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Mark. And Alex Rogers, he's our U.S. politics and business correspondent. Thank you, Alex. Thanks for having me. You can read the stories they and several other FT journalists reported at the link in our bio. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to do Exit Poll, where we're going to try and predict the future.

15:30Alex Rogers: Thank you.

15:37Alex Rogers: We are back with Exit Poll, where we ask an FT journalist one of your questions. This week, we have Miles McCormick, the FT U.S. economics correspondent. Hey, Miles. Hey, Mark. All right. So, Miles, you're going to help us answer a question from Filippo. He's really curious about how expectations shape U.S. markets. So how do markets gauge the health of the economy in a time like now, when the U.S. government is shut down and there is an absence of economic data? So regular economic reports are a fundamental part of how markets gauge the health of the economy. Reports that come out on economic growth, on jobs numbers, on inflation are all used by market watchers, be they investors or policymakers, to gauge how the economy is doing and make decisions on investments or on things like interest rates.

16:34Alex Rogers: And with a lack of official data like we have at the moment because of this shutdown, that becomes a lot more complicated. And it means that investors and policymakers have to turn to some extent to private alternatives. So be that forms of data put out by private data providers, but be that credit card records to try and make sense of the extent to which people are spending or the extent to which people are employed or the extent to which prices are rising or falling. And to a certain extent, Miles, they're also looking at corporate data. We're in the middle of corporate earnings season, so I'm sure a lot of people are looking at earnings reports really closely.

17:23Alex Rogers: A hundred percent. Like all of these elements kind of factor into a mosaic that tells a wider story about the health of the economy. And analysts, market watchers will kind of take whatever data they can and try and digest that to tell the story of what's going on. Thanks, Miles. Really appreciate it. Thanks a lot, Mark. And Filippo, I hope that answers your question. If you listening right now have a question about U.S. politics and the economy, make sure to send me a message at the email in the show notes. Make sure to include your name and where you are from. And if you send us a voice memo, we love that.

18:01Alex Rogers: We may even play it on the show.

18:09Alex Rogers: This was Swamp Notes, the U.S. politics show from the FT. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we've got a link to that in the show notes. Our show was produced by Henry Larson. This week's show was mixed by Sam Giovinco. We had help from Lauren Fedor. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. I'm your host, Mark Filippino. Our acting co-head of audio is Topher Forges. Original music by Hannes Brown. Check back next week for more U.S. political analysis from the Financial Times.

19:12Thank you.

19:15Alex Rogers: Alternatives matter. Listen to Strategic Alternatives, available wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Josh Noble, sports editor at the Financial Times. With the World Cup underway, I wanted to understand whether technology is fundamentally transforming sport as we know it. It's like going from the Stone Age, you know, like to modern times, the way we used to cut weight, the way we used to train. This is a huge step forward for us. I'll be asking whether advances in technology are leaving athletes, fans and the world of sport itself better off. Listen to Tectonic Rewiring Sports wherever you get your podcasts.