Receipts: Trump Profiting Off WH

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0:49Take the next step toward a data-driven career. Learn more at geeseonline.illinois.edu backslash analytics. Welcome to The Beat, everyone. Happy Monday. I'm Ari Melber. And we are tracking several big stories as we start the week. People coming back from the holidays. Of major one is Democratic Senate candidate Graham Plattner, who is facing new allegations of sexual assault tonight, detailed by Politico with an accuser on the record. The future of his campaign is in doubt. This is a story that matters, obviously, for the substance, as well as the potential reaction within the Democratic campaign community and what the Democrats want to do.

1:28So it's an unfolding story. It matters in more than one way. And we have that story in our show tonight that's coming up. We begin with our top story, and that is the backlash to the Trump profiteering, the billions coming in for Donald Trump. He makes more as president, where allegedly he's doing his work part-time making money. He makes more now than he did as a citizen or a businessman, as he likes to say. And that alone, before you go into any more detail, raises really troubling questions, like why someone who has a full-time government job, who says they're only doing occasional private business stuff as a side job, which no other president has tried to do, why they're making more now?

2:12And whether that is because of abusing access, abusing insider information, or the kind of corruption that would be illegal if done by any other person in government. New details as well on the losses that Trump's own supporters and investors have been hit with when they lined up to try to join in. And this is a very familiar thing. If you follow Donald Trump's career, you know about the many bankruptcies and the many scams and the many littered projects that failed, leaving other people holding the bag. There are those who call Donald Trump a con man, a confidence man. But as anyone who knows anything about con mans could tell you, you have to find new people.

2:53And apparently he did. New people interested in technology or crypto, new younger people who thought maybe this was a way to join Donald Trump as if he would share in his largesse. But he didn't. Look at this Times reporting that a million investors lost not, you know, a couple bucks here or there, but a whopping total of over$3 billion on Trump's crypto coin. You could simplify this as a kind of transfer of wealth from those people who included his investors, people who believed in him, some MAGA fans, a transfer of wealth from them to him and his family. The financial disclosures that we have now reveal Trump got over$2 billion in one year alone.

3:31Half that, roughly, from the crypto ventures that we know about, over$600 million from the crypto coin. A million investors, in total, lost billions. And the story here tells you a lot about where we are in the kind of unbridled, unapologetic, shameless Trump second term. There are some people who are critical of Trump, and they tell you he's always been the worst thing ever, as if he had nowhere else to go or change. On this show, if you ever watch it, you know we try to follow the evidence, the facts, the numbers. You can add the adjectives, the opinions yourself. And so I will tell you as a factual matter, the scale, the number of projects and self-enrichment efforts by Donald Trump in the first term were much smaller than this.

4:15And so who's paying for it? Well, to some degree, all of us, the American taxpayer. But some people are paying more than others. And they are the Trump believers. One invested half a million dollars into that coin I just mentioned and has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's kind of incredible. It's almost a legal scam, they said, in discussing their Trump losses to the New York Times. Now, one of the other problems in our current era is how so many things get put immediately into a kind of partisan polarization machine. So if you talk about something that's just a fact, a sitting president is abusing their power and reach and influence to take money from people who have a lot less.

4:57That's just a general fact I just described. I mentioned the reporting. Some people would say, oh, is that an anti-Trump thing or an anti-Republican thing? No, it might sound bad for Trump, but it's just an old, classic, almost pathetically familiar example of why you need strict rules governing the people in power. That's government. And generally, if you look over history, there's been a belief that you want to find people who also have good ethics so that they won't constantly be testing what they can get away with. And I can name you people in both parties, John McCain, Barack Obama, who had those kind of ethics and voters tended to respond positively to that.

5:35But this isn't a partisan thing. Take Chris Christie, longtime Republican, also a former prosecutor. So he has a record of, he would say, caring about the law. And he says this isn't just bad. This isn't just petty. This isn't just unfortunate for America. He says it's something deeper left unchecked, that it is a kind of Putin, Kremlin-style Trump corruption. He and his family believe they are entitled to this. This is an entitlement to them. They believe when they came back and won this election the second time that that gave them license. Quite frankly, you know, when you look at the scale of this, here's another thing apparently that Donald Trump learned from Vladimir Putin during his first term.

6:21This is Putin-esque type of corruption and self-enrichment. Putin-esque corruption and self-enrichment. That's a Republican, Chris Christie. Over at Fox, where they often try to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, they also have clearly some level of information about what conservatives and a lot of their viewers think, because they're calling it the biggest grift of all time. You can see that headline, scrutiny over Trump business dealings with him and his sons who've been enriched by this. There's also scrutiny on the pardon of this Binance founder. That's one of these firms where he's the richest man in crypto and is a critical business partner to the Trump family's crypto venture.

7:04I want to just slow down and tell you what that headline means. Think about this. The person they chose to work with, that firm and some of those tentacles, has previously been found guilty. So of all the people you could choose to work with, this isn't someone who just has allegations or smoke and fire, etc. No, this is someone who's already run into those kind of problems. That's who they chose. And the pardon hanging over there raises the very real question, a potentially impeachable issue, of whether there was an exchange, whether this was a kind of federal government bribe. Now, it's often been said that the Supreme Court gave Trump extra leeway.

7:39They did. And that the president, if he chooses to, can get away with more of these things than other members of government. And they can't. But we are watching a midterm election coming that might have a whole shift of power in Congress. Donald Trump could, and we know it would bother him if it happened, become the only president to be impeached three times because there are real questions about potential impeachable offenses. when you talk about the use or abuse of government powers, the huge pardon power, billions of dollars coming into the family, and all of it wrapped together. And that's just in what we know before an impeachment committee or a Jan 6 committee or subpoenas and witnesses and testimony.

8:19This is just what we know from the dogged work of the New York Times and other journalists and MSNOW. We've got reporters looking into this as well. This is what we know just from that, without subpoenas. We don't have subpoena power here in the news media. Sometimes we wish we did. Trump, however, seems to be bragging about helping those people in crypto, even amidst the headlines that his own fans are losing money. Every time I see a crypto guy where they dropped an investigation, I said, you're lucky I'm president. That might be true. Those people who in any other independent government system would be under investigation or worse are lucky.

8:59But remember, what are they under investigation for? Sometimes abusing and defrauding everybody else. This is the 1 % story, the Epstein class story. It's the same thing we've been reporting on and telling you about, except now we have a president who's just so blatant about it. The people who should be investigated are lucky, and everyone else, in Trump's telling, are unlucky, losing money. It goes beyond crypto, which I know can sound like a little bit of a newfangled, kind of confusing virtual place, even though the money some people have lost is real. There's also new revelations about this ring that Belgian diamond sellers gave to Donald Trump as a suspicious, unusual gift after he waived tariffs for Belgian diamond imports.

9:41Remember, bribery is an impeachable offense. It's one of the enumerated impeachable offenses in our Constitution. And again, we're talking about real money here, not symbolism. The ring has reportedly over 300 diamonds, over 50 sapphires, over a dozen emeralds and six rubies. You might say it looks a little gaudy or gauche. That's a matter of taste. As a matter of value, it is well above the gift limit that binds all members of Congress, for example. most public traded company CEOs would be fired on the spot for trying to pocket something like this related to their business. That's payola. What I'm telling you is Donald Trump is falling behind even the lax business standards of American Wall Street.

10:24There's also a plaque with a solid gold base from Apple that probably is worth quite a bit less. A Rolex desk clock, I should say, and a gold bar from Swiss business leaders. I'll remind you there is a senator in prison right now for taking gold bars, Senator Menendez. He happened to be a Democrat. Again, if you care about these issues as an American or as someone who thinks we should have non-partisan ethical government, you'd be against gold bars when they go to a Democrat or a Republican. Only one of them, though, Donald Trump, is getting away with it right now. And there's the jet. Trump took the gifted plane on his first international voyage to a NATO summit, and he's promised those on board a luxury that nobody's ever seen before.

11:03That might be his typical hyperbole. Politico reports, but there's a wood-paneled interior, tan leather seats, carpets, big screen TVs. Trump's White House says this is all fine, no problem. And I can just tell you here in the real world of news and facts and journalism, almost nobody believes that. I showed you Fox News trying to hedge their bets a little, saying, well, this might be too far. I've shown you Megyn Kelly, Joe Rogan, and other conservatives who aren't bound up in the partisan Republican machine, who, whatever you think of them, have talked about this as a grift, as elitism, as unfair.

11:39And the bill may be coming due. There's also the focus on Donald Trump's stock trades, where, as I mentioned, the crypto stuff can seem kind of vague. Here you have the very direct question of whether he is timing his personal enrichment towards things that only he can do and he knows about, like his unilateral trade war. And again, if he is doing that in a manner that abuses government power or is a quid pro quo, that could be impeachable. Notice I didn't say jailable. He's got a lot of immunity for anything that goes near his official duties. Tariffs probably do. But it certainly is the kind of thing people have been removed over.

12:17People have been removed for less, quite frankly. There's a disclosure form that shows Trump bought hundreds of stocks, including in tech giants, the day before he then pulled back his tariffs, which he and anyone in Wall Street knew would help juice those stocks. On April 8th last year, Trump bought over 300 stocks in the millions of dollars, including companies directly affected by this international trade war, NVIDIA, Amazon, Apple. The next morning, he said, it's a great time to buy and halted his tariffs. The stock market went on another wild ride today. Stocks were mostly sideways until midday when President Trump posted on Truth Social that he was authorizing a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs.

12:59With amazing moves in some tech names, NVIDIA up 18%, Amazon up 12%, Apple rallying as well. Those rallies were huge, some of the largest jumps in recent history. The overall top 500 stocks went up about 10%. I'll remind you, that's considered a good return for an entire year, let alone a day. and there were larger spikes in the stocks Trump bought, which, as I reminded you, are the kind of international trade-related stocks that would benefit from the tariff pause. Now, let me tell you exactly what the question is. Did Donald Trump abuse inside information to enrich himself? If the answer is yes, again, it's up to Congress to decide whether they view that as an abuse of power, an abuse of office, or whether they view that as one among several abuses of power that enriched himself.

13:52Do they view any of this as the quid pro quo of government favors? Were there other people, non-presidents, for example, his family, other staff, lobbyists, lawyers, ex-aids who were involved in this who could actually be prosecuted? Again, if there is bribery, those are the questions. Now, some people, they dislike Trump so much, they say, I'm sure he knew. Well, you could be sure, but you would sound pretty presumptuous. Because in law, you'd have to have the elements of the crime, and one of them is the mental state. And I will report for you, the White House says that Trump was not personally involved in the timing of those stock purchases.

14:31So if that defense is true, someone else had good timing but didn't benefit from government information, then that would be what we call a defense to that. that the timing is so suspicious and the other activities that Donald Trump is taking have been so blatantly self-enriching. And his public statements talk about helping people in crypto in order to get benefits from crypto for his family that any investigator would have to look at all of this in totality. A few months later, Donald Trump discussed corrupt trading in pretty specific detail. So he was thinking about that kind of stuff and yet projecting or accusing a Democrat, Pelosi, of it.

15:11It happened by she knows exactly what's going to happen, what's going to be announced. She buys stock, and then the stock goes up after the announcement's made, and she ought to be investigated.

15:23You know what's going to be announced. You buy the stock. It goes up. Was he talking about her? Was he talking about a process that he'd already participated in or encouraged others to do so? Those are questions to be investigated. There is, of course, a reason he was discussing it. There's a provision that apparently Trump didn't like that was trying to address some of this. He attacked a Republican who introduced it. Hawley had to go on Fox and basically assure Donald Trump by way of his preferred medium, Fox TV, that any Trump trading would be unaffected. A number of people who are opposed to banning stock trading had said to the president that he would be covered by the bill.

16:02He'd have to sell Mar-a-Lago and sell assets. Not the case at all. The president and the vice president, all their assets are totally exempted. Ah, so this is an important way to fight corruption, but the president is exempted. Holly wanted everyone to know. The bill that ultimately moved forward had that carve out for Trump. I can tell you, we're reminding you all this because so much goes on that it would be easy to lose track. But this would go into any impeachment investigation about why there was already such an active discussion of exempting them for a law that ultimately did not pass. And why is it bad if everyone else does it, but okay if Trump does it?

16:39So Trump's account was buying those stocks, timed towards things that he knew he was about to do. And he fought against a potential law that would ban that very type of activity. I want to bring this all into our orbit tonight, because while they want you to think nothing matters, and they'll get away with it all, there's a heck of a lot of evidence that the winds are changing, that conservatives are mad about this, and that even Trump was worried that the Congress might then, under Republican control, do something that it would certainly want to do without him exerting influence, which is stop this kind of self-dealing while gas prices and everything else is up and people are struggling.

17:18That's our special report. We've got special guests when we're back in 90 seconds.

17:28We're back with politics professor at Borges State University, Jason Johnson, MSNOW analyst. Jason, we tried to show what's new and there's blowback, along with the history that's easy to forget. They want to distract people with wrestling and Trump's feuds and fights. But the history is instructive and a serious Congress could look into this. Right. Not only a serious Congress, but a committed Congress of both Republicans and Democrats. It's a shame when you have some members of the party who are so disgusted with Trump's behavior that they're willing to quit a la Marjorie Taylor Greene. And then you have people like Josh Hawley who claims that he is vigorously against this sort of double dealing and insider trading, but has to go on groveling on Fox saying, no, no, no, Donald Trump, it doesn't count you.

18:11All of the gifts, Ari, all of the behavior, not just of him, but his entire family, is not only a corrosion of how our government is supposed to work. It is a national security issue. It is an ethics issue. And it's the kind of thing that if and when Donald Trump ever leaves office, if he ever leaves office, the level and the tentacles of this corruption will now run so deep that whoever follows him, if they care, will have to fire and eliminate dozens of people, hire so many new inspectors, generals in order to get rid of all the other people who help facilitate this corruption. Yeah. And he's very clear about seeing himself as a booster.

18:51if he didn't have all these stocks and all these deals and all these conflicts, he might just be a very pro-business president, which is fine. People can decide that. Bernie would be seeking more oversight of Wall Street. He might, Trump might, boost Wall Street. Fine. The problem is the more we learn, and we're just scratching the surface, the more it looks like conflicts. Here he was with Dell. Take a look. Go out and buy a Dell computer. He's not doing it for that. But I'll bet his business, Brad, has gotten even bigger. I have a son that loves their laptop. I have to tell you, no, I want a doll.

19:29We're going to get him that money back one way or the other. Jason? I mean, if this were a mob movie, this would be the time that all of the federal agents are like, did he just say that and they're taking their headphones off, right? The way in which Republican members of Congress and even his own supporters, look, I understand Donald Trump's branding for 20 to 25 years that he is an excellent business person. But the problem is, more often than not, he's putting money into the pockets of people who paid him. They're not really getting a good return on their investment. The people who do things for Trump, whether it's, you know, the head of UFC, it's like, hey, we lost money doing this Trump thing.

20:07the crypto people, you know, the people paying his son$500 ,000 a year to be a member of a club in hopes of possibly getting access to the president. There's not even a return on the investment in the graft and the grift. And that's part of what makes this so disgusting. He's not a good business person. He's not giving people anything that they want, but he has turned the United States and all of his agencies into not only his personal piggy bank, but his ATM to the rest of the planet. On the politics, why do you think this has drawn more backlash. It would seem that we have this triumvirate. I've mentioned people who dislike Trump have a hundred reasons, but a lot of conservatives or former Trump voters, they only have like three or four.

20:48And lately it's been Epstein, Iran, and now this. Well, the reason, Ari, is because you can't have people paying$7 for gas. You can't have massive unemployment. You can't have people dealing with tariffs and then go on television bragging about the diamonds on your wrist, which is essentially what the president's doing all the time, right? He can't talk about his wealth and not look like he is deeply insensitive about how the people who supported him are continuing to suffer. That's where the issue falls in. But for me, my concern is not necessarily with the voters in the fall. It's the lack of sort of oversight by members of Congress.

21:27It's the lack of anything being said by government agencies. It's the idea that Kash Patel's girlfriend can be paid to sing songs to Belgium while Will they give him, you know, rings with 300 diamonds in the shape of Superman while at the same time he's cutting deals to get U.S. players to play Belch? I mean, like, it is a conspiracy theorist and corruption investigator's dream come true. And yet we don't hear enough about it from members of Congress trying to reel him in. Yeah, and it may be, look, he remembers the blue wave. He remembers the second two years of his first term. He remembers losing badly and leaving the way he left.

22:03He remembers it all. No one can accuse Donald Trump of not having detailed memories of his shame, humiliation, and anyone who dared criticize him. It may be that we're watching someone who is grab, grab, grabbing, knowing that if they do lose the midterms, particularly the Senate, that the next two years might look very different on all of these issues. I'm running out of time because we have this other breaking story. Jason, great to see you. Thanks, Ari. Anytime. Appreciate it. A big story also rocking Washington. Democratic Senate nominee Graham Plattner is facing a new reported sexual assault allegation.

22:35This is from an incident that allegedly occurred in 2021. Politico reporting that 41-year-old Maine resident Jenny Rassikot stated that during the course of what was an on and off relationship, Plattner entered her home uninvited and deeply intoxicated. And that he forced himself on her and that she repeatedly told him to stop. Politico also interviewed another individual who corroborated the story, and the reporters say they reviewed documents and notes from the accuser's therapist. That can be important in piecing together a timeline because Politico reports that this allegation predates Plattner's rise now as the nominee.

23:15Rascott was one of several women who previously spoke to the New York Times in a different article and at the time used the word unsettling to refer to some of Plattner's behavior. We should note that he has denied these new allegations and released a video statement, which you can see an excerpt of here. Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false. So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality it will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward. Platinum referencing the best path forward there. As I mentioned at the top of the broadcast, this is a big, important story.

23:55First, obviously, for the alleged conduct and the impact on that individual. And second, as a Senate candidate, there is a deadline looming over whether Democrats would stick with him if he drops out, what would happen, his name on the ballot in a race against Susan Collins that's been seen as one of the keys to Democrats winning back the Senate. For all of those reasons, this is clearly a major story. I want to bring in New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, an MSNOW analyst. Welcome, Michelle. Your view first on, thank you, your view first on where the allegations and the substance of this is with the Politico story, not only advancing what was in the Times story, but including what are legally very serious, a very serious allegation against him.

24:42Well, the Politico story is utterly devastating. Her story is credible. It's multibly corroborated. And I think that Graham Plattner needs to drop out. There's no, you know, there's kind of nothing ambiguous here. His campaign is completely non-viable. There is one week left in which Democrats can legally swap out their Senate candidate. And this whole debacle is so shameful for all of the people that Graham Plattner encouraged to put their faith in. You know, all the people that Grant Plattner asked told that they should believe in him because, you know, I was in Maine. I've interviewed Plattner.

25:29He really did tap into this hunger among voters for a new kind of candidate. And people were willing to overlook some, you know, sort of some skeletons in the closet because they thought that there was something fundamentally good and decent and righteous here. And they climbed out on a limb for him all over the state. And he had every reason to know that that limb was going to be sawn off. Yeah. The Democrats now, as I mentioned, have this deadline. Politically, Maine is a place where a lot of the Senate Democratic leaders viewed it as finally a potential flip with everything that people know about Susan Collins, someone who has claimed to be an independent, but on key issues to time and again helped the MAGA agenda and the Supreme Court agenda.