Trump Rakes in Billions in Office

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1:01Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melber. Our top story tonight is a number. And the number is the price of self-dealing, self-enrichment, and what many reports say is normalized corruption in the Trump White House. That number is$2.2 billion, a staggering amount of money that only because of disclosure rules are we now learning, The reason it's news tonight that Donald Trump made that not from four years of the presidency or a 10 year estimate that is just in the year 2025 alone, the first year of his second term. And the money is not coming in from, say, passive investments or just what it means to have a pseudo billionaire president.

1:43It is coming in at a far faster clip than anything he did in the first term because of how much time and energy he's spending off the job, not doing the people's business, not doing what he promised to do, not doing the job of the presidency because he has side jobs and plans and what the kids call a side hustle. he has been moonlighting on a lot of other projects and they are making a lot of money. And they're not projects that, to be clear, he was making money on before he was in the White House. The crypto schemes, some of the stock trades, and certainly some of the mining deals that we reported on just this week are a product of him being president.

2:22So this isn't about, say, if a rich person like Michael Bloomberg became president and continued to make interest on his investments. this is very specifically a crisis for the Trump presidency because it breaks his past vows, it shows the conflicts of interest, and puts a number on the self-dealing and self-enrichment, some of which I can tell you might be legal, and then the question is, should it be? And some of which raises questions of bribery quid pro quo, constitutional emoluments. All of this is in the new disclosures. And this morning we saw an illustration of how these conflicts of interest work.

2:55For example, no other president has taken large foreign contributions or gifts. No other president. And yet, today of all days, we see the maiden flight for Donald Trump on this Air Force One, which was a gift from the government of Qatar. And he is expected to try to find a way to keep the plane you're looking at because it's a foreign gift and use it for his institutions, organizations, library, or personal use after leaving office. This costs you, the taxpayer. No other president's even tried it. Today, Democrats, experts, and even over on Fox News, we heard the reaction to this number. And it comes, of course, politically at a bad time for the president when they are struggling in the midterm matchups, when prices are high, when the war that Donald Trump started has not gone the way he wanted and has hurt the American consumer.

3:46So other people are paying high prices and feeling the affordability crisis in America, which creates a sour mood to hear that the president is spending his free time self-dealing, self-enriching, selling meme coins, selling crypto. The headlines are hurting him. Two billion dollars. Most of that money comes from the crypto industry that Trump regulates. 1.4 billion dollars in those revenues. And again, it is only by being president that his meme coin and other crypto ventures seem to be so profitable. Otherwise, why didn't he do them a couple of years ago? There's 300, I should say 635 million in royalties from the meme coin alone, which is a type of sort of crypto memorabilia that may not have any value for the Trump fans who bought it.

4:32Half a billion from sales of the larger entity, what they call a flagship crypto venture. That's in the Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch-owned newspaper. If you want to check your sources, they're not exactly looking for ways to take cheap shots at Trump, but they are pointing out the obvious problems in this level of grift, graft, whatever you want to call it, of a president focused on making this kind of money while in office. As The Time puts it, Trump is creating new business ventures profiting from actions he's taken since returning to the White House. And these are major activities. For example, they cite the pardon to the Binance founder, who's the richest man in crypto, a critical business partner to Trump's own family crypto venture.

5:14That is a blatant conflict. It raises the question of whether he abused the pardon power for personal enrichment. That would be an impeachable offense, possibly a bribe. Again, that's the kind of thing you have to investigate, but you have a pardon and then you have the money going in. There's also the legislation that Trump signed, the Times reports, to promote a form of cryptocurrency, stablecoins, four months after his family-backed firm introduced its stablecoin. Nothing about this is subtle or hidden. The headline tonight, though, is just the massive amount of money, because there are people in America or on the right who are sympathetic to Trump that might say a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there.

5:53OK. But two billion dollars in the first year alone, which dwarfs everything Trump made in the four years of the first term, the self-dealing, the abuse of government power. And this, in the crypto dimension, comes from an area where Donald Trump himself said the criticism that applies to his own dealings right now, which he's selling largely to either people who want access to him or people who are Trump fans. He said the thing that he's doing is basically a scam.

6:30Bitcoin just seems like a scam. Make America the crypto capital of the world. I'm a big fan of the dollar. I'm a big fan of our currency, and I don't want to have other currencies coming out and hurting or demeaning the dollar. We've been pushing the market in crypto and Bitcoin and all of it, everything. I think it's a very dangerous thing. I launched it. I heard it was very successful. I haven't checked it. Where is it today? You made a lot of money, sir.

7:00And that's what it's about. No one's saying that in this great capitalist country, you can't just go make a lot of money for yourself and do self-enrichment. That's what Wall Street and fortunes are made and lost that way. That's what business is all about. But the public service in office demands something different. And so what we just showed you, Trump contradicting himself, owning himself, if you will. The guy who once said this is a scam then realized he could make money off it, off his fans, and now he's into it. And that kind of looting or profiteering is not generally acceptable in the American government.

7:34Indeed, I will just tell you some of what he's doing is legal because, as I mentioned, we have these kind of exemptions for the president that are different than other jobs. But if you took the exact same facts I just told you about and applied them to other types of government officials, a judge, a member of Congress, you could literally wind up in jail for doing what is actually publicly reported tonight that Trump is doing. And whether there are others around him who should be investigated is an open question if we had a working DOJ or aggressive subpoena-powered Congress, which we might get after November.

8:09We don't know. Some of Trump's crypto profits come from the half a billion dollars linked to a foreign government. In fact, just before the inauguration in that investment firm, Tide to the UAE government bought basically half of the Trump crypto firm, making it look like an inauguration related effort to get to the president, meaning they weren't interested in giving that money away to him unless and until he was about to become president again. Months later, the UAE struck a deal. The Times reports with the Trump administration over national security objections to export valuable computer chips that power AI.

8:44So Trump gets rich. Other people, though, are on the losing end. We can show you a chart. Trump org reaping two billion dollars while investors lost over two billion dollars because the things they're selling don't have a lot of value in the real market. Trump also reported over 20 ,000 stock trades in a whole bunch of investment accounts. That's 24 times the number of transactions previously disclosed. And the question is why, again, as I told you, someone who is supposed to be busy being president, who supposedly has enough money, why are they so actively trading, whether it's through a third party or not?

9:19Well, the details don't help Donald Trump's denials that this has nothing to do with being president and that he's not abusing power. Dell got a$10 billion Pentagon contract that became public after Trump bought stock in the company. And Dell has been making a lot of money because of the AI and government relationships they have. But whether someone traded on inside information, like I told you, something that would be illegal and land you in jail if you weren't the president, is the big question. Trump has used his platform to praise companies that he invested in, NVIDIA, Apple, and Microsoft.

9:54And then there's$80 million tonight because of these disclosures that we see Trump got by shaking down these major companies that, of course, have to do business with and be regulated by the United States government. Meta, YouTube, news organizations. We've heard about that over time. But in the disclosure, you see that all in, he reaped$80 million from that alone. another 200M in profits from his properties. The comparison there would be he's clearly making far more from abusing presidential powers, shaking down companies and suing them, and selling crypto than from the thing that he claims his business empire was built on, being a real estate mogul.

10:36I want to show you how we got here, because part of what's happened in the second term is a kind of degradation of even the most basic baseline rules and principles. And in any modern society, there will be things that are done because we agree to do them together, what you might call the social contract. I don't mean to sound naive, and not all of them have to be enforced at the point of a gun or the threat of prosecution. And so when we talk about clean, good government, not holding a second job, not abusing your government powers to just enrich yourself or your family. Apart from the laws, that is something that, believe it or not, most presidents have refrained from.

11:20And all presidents have refrained from at the scale of Donald Trump. And we can go one better. The first presidency of Donald Trump also refrained from it. So maybe you need a psychologist or a historian to figure out why he is behaving so much worse now, having captured the Republican Party and degraded the Justice department and all the things that as a news viewer, you probably know. But I want to remind you tonight in 2017, during the period where Trump had won the election, was getting ready to take office. And there were all these unprecedented questions and he had all his business interests.

11:53He did claim then something that he's not doing now and not claiming now. He at that point felt the need to say and he had lawyers backing him up that they were going to avoid the kind of conflicts we're living through today and that he would step away from and not operate his business interests. My two sons, who are right here, Don and Eric, are going to be running the company. They are going to be running it in a very professional manner. They're not going to discuss it with me. He is completely isolating himself from his business interests. He is not exploiting the office of the presidency for his personal benefit.

12:33No new foreign deals will be made whatsoever during the duration of President Trump's presidency. I could actually run my business and run government at the same time. Again, I don't have to do this. Trump was claiming that he could be worse, but he wasn't going to be that bad. In other words, even 2017 Donald Trump knew that it would be bad to try to run your business and the government at the same time to be actively involved to hold those two jobs, that there would be conflicts. And I want you to just take a moment and remember what he said there. He and his lawyer said there won't be new foreign deals.

13:10Because to even do a deal, a back and forth business deal with other countries while you're also running foreign policy is a huge conflict of interest. And the American taxpayer or the American soldier could lose out. So you don't want that kind of conflict. We went from Donald Trump claiming no foreign new deals to Donald Trump taking$400 million in a free gift from a foreign government that, of course, expects something in return. That's how fast we've gone downhill. The$2 billion he raked in last year is more than the previous year when he was a candidate. Trump's White House denies any wrongdoing, and they don't have really logical answers for why all of a sudden he's making so much as president, which seems to be related to the powers of the presidency and not just, say, his general private citizen revenue rate.

13:57And we're seeing, even in conservative circles, this is too much. it's so grifty i'm not gonna lie it's grifty you know the trump family is grifty there's been like story after story about all the money that his sons are making off of the government these government contracts they're getting all that i can't stand that stuff there's this story this week too about his sons making money up off a deal in kazaq sound what's the white house's position on all these questions that's what americans wanted they wanted a businessman in an office if they think that this issue is not permeating across the country with people going, huh, wait, what?

14:36Your children are involved in this. And if you remember, we spent a lot of time talking about Hunter Biden. I didn't like it when Hunter Biden was doing it. I don't like it when the Trumps are doing it. That's the sound of the criticism on the right. You don't need to be a political expert to see why this is terribly unpopular. And this is bad news for the president, a bad night for the president, a bad disclosure report for President Trump, because corruption is unpopular and it is unpopular in a long-term nonpartisan way. It's something that they were concerned about at the founding of this nation.

15:07And this is a fitting week to think about that as we approach the 250th, July 4th. Corruption is bad. Corruption undercuts the very theory of having a government by the people for the people because the corruption undercuts that and you end up getting worse and worse people in charge who are enriching themselves and not thinking about you. There's a reason why he ran on Drain the Swamp. And if you're listening and saying, well, Ari, I knew that was BS the whole time. You knew it back in 2016. Well, you were right, because he is the swamp. But something else is happening on this issue, just like Epstein, just like the war, just like the high prices.

15:49A bunch more people may be joining where you are. Or if you weren't following politics then, or you didn't have that view, you might be one of those people looking up and saying, even if you like other things about some of what the Republican Party offers, and elections show that people have that view in America, there is nothing that anybody who is informed would like about having a profiteering corrupt government, which ultimately is stealing from you. That's the big story tonight. We have two special guests on it next.

16:48New episode Monday at 8, only on History. Next day on the app. Ever since I was young, I've watched people working hard, chasing opportunity, making sacrifices, doing everything they can to build a better life. And now we're shining a light on what matters most. Our economy, our national identity, our democracy, our future. The stakes have never been higher. It's all On The Line. On The Line with Alicia Menendez. Weekdays at 12 p.m. Eastern on MSNOW.

17:26We're joined now by Jay Comandori, a veteran of three presidential campaigns, including Obama's and Sarah Matthews, who served in Donald Trump's first term as White House Deputy Press Secretary and ultimately broke with the Trump administration over January 6th. Welcome to both of you, Sarah. They're not draining the swamp. They are the swamp. And as I showed, even first term, Donald Trump felt the need to say they weren't going to do, he claimed, all the things they're now doing. Why do you think this issue breaks through and we're already seeing criticism on the right? Yeah, I mean, he said that he was going to be the guy to drain the swamp.

18:01But as you've laid out, he's the biggest swamp creature of them all. And I do think that there is a difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. And it's that he feels emboldened. And I think he feels like he's owed something now because he was put through so much with the legal troubles. And so he thinks, I'm going to do what I want in this term. And I think that that comes through in the corruption that we're seeing and in the policy choices that he's made. He's not acting on any sort of competency or wise advice from people. He's just going on his own instinct. And then when it comes to the corruption of it all, I mean, come on, for the Republicans, this is just embarrassing for them when they spent years calling out Hunter Biden for corruption.

18:43And that just pales in comparison to what we're seeing happen in plain sight when it comes to Trump and his family. And look, I called it out when it came to Hunter Biden. I didn't like him profiting off of his last name. But the thing is, is that what Trump is doing is 10 times worse. I mean, you look at the crypto industry, for example, the Trump administration is actively shaping policy related to crypto. Well, it's now reported that he made$1.4 billion in his business ventures connected to the crypto industry. Or say for another example, another thing that Republicans have been highly critical of, Nancy Pelosi's stock trades.

19:20Well, as you pointed out at the top, Trump reported that he made 21 ,000 individual stock trades in 2025 alone. You look at Nancy Pelosi, she has averaged about 15 stock trades per year since 2012. So I would just love for more Republicans to speak up about this. And I do think that it's resonating with voters across the country. And people are upset because Americans are struggling right now. And they look at how they're struggling to afford rent, groceries, gas, you name it. And then they look at the Trump family, and they seem to be doing pretty well profiting off of this presidency. Yeah. Che?

19:59Yeah, I think one thing with Donald Trump is that I feel that corruption for him is not a side hustle. It's his main gig. I think corruption is his philosophy. I think it is his worldview, as The Atlantic put it a few years ago. I think that Donald Trump believes this is a dog-eat-dog world, and he will be the big dog. I think he genuinely believes everybody does it. Everybody is as corrupt as he is, but he is honest about it. And that makes him more virtuous and better than a lot of other people, including previous inhabitants of the Oval Office. I also do think that this corruption issue has connected him in some ways to elements of his MAGA base.

20:43You know, Theo Vons told Mark Cuban the reason he supported Trump was it's a mobster's world and Trump would be his mobster. But I do think that there's a real flaw here because I think a wider electorate, you know, corruption is a terrible issue because it's not ideological. You know, good people. Right. It's not an issue that good people can disagree about. And I think that's like the danger it really poses for Republicans going into the midterm. Yeah. And it's ripping people off. It's abusing the government. And if anything, I think, you know, it's hard to make huge generalizations. But if you look at traditional conservative thought, it is it is especially skeptical of centralized and aggrandized government power.

21:27And so on that basis, honest conservatives tend to say, well, yeah, we we worry about the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about for the same reasons that we worry about a bunch of people in Washington who are disconnected from everybody else and end up enriching themselves in whatever way. Sometimes it's, as I've pointed out, sometimes it's legal, but it doesn't make it good. You also called in a Simpsons reference, Che. We tried to deliver on the program when we can. This was Mayor Quimby's corruption. We will now hear suggestions for the disbursement of the$2 million. Don't you mean$3 million?

22:07Of course. How silly of me. Che? Yeah, I mean, Mayor Quimby is very instructive when you think about Trump, because Mayor Quimby's corruption was open. It was, you know, he was openly taking bribes and it seemed to have no real impact on his support in Springfield because voters were either too apathetic or they were too cynical. And I do think that Trump is kind of relying on that dynamic. He's relying on an electorate that is going to be cynical, that is going to be apathetic, that is going to basically believe as he believes that everybody does it. You know, and I think looking forward, if you look at like, you know, the speeches that John Ossoff has done in Georgia, you know, he's made corruption his signature issue.

22:53And I think that's that's important because, you know, to win in Georgia, to get 50 plus one in Georgia, you have to win Republicans. You actually have to win people who voted for Trump. And understanding that corruption is a non-ideological issue that can work, I think, is a really good insight. You know, Jay, I've been at this a minute. I don't know that we've ever discussed the political profile of the fictional town of Springfield and the Simpsons before, but you've brought us to that place. If Mayor Quimby is Trump, then I guess Monty Burns is Peter Thiel. Yeah, and I think like Peter Thiel, Monty Burns has a quest to live forever.

23:35So I don't know. That's a whole other subject, you know, people can Google. But that is also an obsession of Monty Burns, that he wants to use his money to buy not only politicians and power, but also that he should be freed from the sufferings of mortality as well. That's something that happens, you know, corruption, money corrupts. I mean, Sarah, I would turn to you and say, what the hell happened to this segment? Now we're just talking about The Simpsons. But it's, you know, it's that kind of show. It's freewheeling. I'll turn it back, Sarah, to what we discussed on the right. You have Donald Trump's enrichment and you have a lot of other people who are actually losing out, as I mentioned.

24:20And so given that you work there and you've seen this this pattern before, what happens to those people who bought the meme coin thinking, oh, great, Trump's good at business and they lost money or the people who we've got that there? You see, a lot of money was lost by by regular folks who said, oh, Trump told me to buy this. And folks who are watching sort of a high gas price summer and a lot of problems as the backdrop to Trump and his family getting richer. Do you see that as Trump's approval crashes? Do you see that meaning that some of the Republican faithful are changing their mind? Yeah, I think that it's really telling of Trump as a person that when you look at that meme coin of how him and his family profited so much and others lost so much.

25:08But they don't care because all that matters to Trump is lining his own pockets. And at the expense of hardworking Americans, too, it's all a grift for him. and that's why he wanted to be in office again. It's why he ran for president again. I think he wanted to make money and then profit off the presidency while keeping himself out of jail. So it was a twofold there. But I do think that this is going to backfire on him and voters because I think that people are really upset because it flies in the face of everything that he campaigned on. We were already facing an affordability crisis in this country and Trump has exacerbated it with his disastrous policies, whether you look at his asinine tariffs or his war of choice in Iran.

25:48And then on top of that is enriching himself and his family. I mean, there's really nothing more out of touch than that. And he even said today, well, everyone's profiting. Look at your 401k. I don't think that that speaks to people because, one, he overinflated the number of how much 401ks have gone up. And not everyone in this country has a 401k. And so I think that him, he's just completely out of touch. And, you know, he's a billionaire, so obviously. but he also just lacks empathy. So he doesn't care that people are struggling right now and that people can't pay their rent or afford groceries or fill up their gas tank because he's never had to worry about any of those things himself.

26:28Yeah. Sarah and Che, thanks to both of you. Coming up, we will look at what has become a brutal summer for Republicans, Red State polling crashing, the infighting, and we'll show you the state fair that wasn't. Also, Trump did get a couple losses at the Supreme Court in a mixed sort of end of the term. And there has been quite a set of reactions from Trump officials to their losses. But next, we turn to an expert who can really cut through everything here. The Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman. We're going to get into what's happening in the markets and what you need to know next.