How the Presidency is Making Trump Richer

0:01I'm Aisha Roscoe 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, Donald Trump bucked tradition and refused 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 re-election in 2024, 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.

0:50We 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 all up to date. That's New Yorker reporter David Kirkpatrick. Now, 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 going to do any hotel or other business deals overseas because that would be bad optically.

1:32That's gone. That's out the window. This term, they've done deals all over the place overseas. In the first term, we actually said we're not going to do 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. It was like we stopped entirely. So this time around, we said, hey, we're going to 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 going to hit you no matter what. So effectively, they've just said, since we're going to get criticized, we might as well take the money and run.

2:13And 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 says. At the time, he owed hundreds of millions in fraud and defamation lawsuits.

2:49But after just six months into his second term, Trump's financial situation started looking real good. Like, real good. Just, zoop, shot up in six months. Let's just get the number out there. What is, like, the total amount? Yeah, I'd say approaching$4 billion. Almost$4 billion. 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$4 billion. 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.

3:29There'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 businesses. Somebody just likes to stay in a fancy hotel with lots of gilding.

4:09OK, fine. That's legit. He owned those properties before. Or we'll call that fair. That's not making money off of the presidency. The only deals that I've focused on are the ones where it was just inconceivable that Trump 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.

4:56Like 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 re-election, raising campaign money. There's examples of like you donate and then you become the ambassador to something. Well, there's tons. Ambassador is the classic example. Ambassadorships are routinely, I would say, in every presidency given to big donors. Secretary of Commerce is one position where that often happens. So he's not the first to sell access.

5:33He's not the first really to sell position. And I don't want to defend it. But it's routine and it's familiar. It's what they all do. President 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 he leaves office. So that's really what I tried to focus on.

6:15So 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 Childs. Today on the show, we get out the counting machine and tally up the minimum amount of money Trump and his family have made or profited, as David puts it, off of the presidency. That almost$4 billion. We go line by line and stop at the most interesting ways that Trump and his family have made all that.

6:56and American quest has shaped the world. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Now, 250 years in, what is that pursuit really about? Join us each Tuesday for an essential new series, America in Pursuit, from ThruLine, on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. 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 Childs. 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$4 billion number.

7:43He 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 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 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.

8:20So how in the like scale of how, you know, perfect, would you say you're like 75 percent there, 50 percent there? I'd say I'm 100 percent if your target is to be conservative. So 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. OK, but what happened to the emoluments clause? Like I thought the whole deal was that you're not supposed to profit off of the presidency. Well, the emoluments 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.

8:58So think of the D.C. Hotel. Remember the D.C. 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. People were so strung out about those overpriced martinis. And really, that's nothing. David says Trump didn't make money off the D.C. hotel. It apparently repelled as many potential customers as it attracted.

9:33Some foreign leaders and lobbyists didn't want to be caught up in some emoluments scandal. In the end... The D.C. 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. A 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.

10:16I have to say the one that surprised me the most is the merch. Me too. I love the merch one. So merch is the most surprising to me. Crypto is the biggest in its many forms. And then I would say the Gulf real estate is the other one that's the most striking. Those are the three we're going to pause and go into detail on. But we're going to tally up what the Trump family has made across a few different categories, like hospitality deals, finance, the full list. First up, the funnest category, merch. Everybody, every politician, every campaign sells merch. They all sell it for the campaign, right?

10:59But 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 a designer knocking himself off. That's basically what's going on here. From all the merch, Trump has made about$27.7 million.

11:34So 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 E. Jean 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.

12:12Estimated 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, all of which were deemed to be frivolous by most media law experts, it's fair to call those payments that he would not have received were he not the sitting president.

13:08So, lawsuits plus the truth social gain,$116 million and counting. Next up, the private jet, the Qatari Royal Jet. The Qatari government technically gifted this jet to the U.S. 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. The Qatari Royal Jet, I give that a value of about$150 million. It's a used jet, after all. Now we are going to 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 U.S.

13:51We 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 2016 election, Trump started hiking up the initiation fee for Mar-a-Lago members. It used to be about$100 ,000. In 2017, it went up to$200 ,000. Now, it's a million dollars. Okay. Hotel deals abroad. Odd, there's a Trump Hotel in Vietnam. The Trump Hotel Hanoi.

14:33In Vietnam, some documents have emerged to show that the Vietnamese government 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$40 million. And there, I think I'm being quite conservative. And listen, Trump makes 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?

15:16He 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, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Would those deals have happened if he weren't the president?

15:54No. Of course they wouldn't have. Why? Of course they wouldn't. Why? If you're going to 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 Ritz, you could 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 and license a name for your hotel, if it's Marriott or one of the behemoths, they'll hold out for a 30-year contract.

16:31But if it's, you know, David Kirkpatrick Hotel Management, you're lucky if you can get a 10-year contract. But reportedly, according to the New York Times, the deal he got in Oman for a giant hotel, condo, golf course operation there was a 30-year deal. So that's another clue that this is an extraordinary kind of a thing. Those are not the kinds of deals that the Trump Organization has gotten ever. Certainly not abroad. In these Persian Gulf Hotel deals, 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.

17:13Next category, finance deals. All right. 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 Saudi Arabia, the rulers of Saudi Arabia, who he'd been very good to in office. And he asked them for a$2 billion investment. Now, I was able to obtain years ago the minutes of the meeting of their advisory board evaluating that investment, and it was unanimously negative. Everybody said, this guy has no experience in private equity.

17:58We have no reason to believe that he is going to be successful. No U.S. investors have gone in, and he's asking us to be the first with$2 billion. We shouldn't do this. The government of Saudi Arabia did it anyway. Now, would they have done that 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? $320 million. 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.

18:37got as partner of an investment fund. 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$19.6 million. All right, we're just going to 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 we get into much bigger profits here, right?

19:16We're on our way to bigger stuff. So crypto. Now the crypto category has to be broken down into a variety of 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 President Trump and later his wife. This is like where Trump looks like super muscular and he's like a superhero, right? Those are the NFTs. Right. Or biker Trump with an electric guitar. I put their estimated gain from the sale of those non-fungible tokens at$14.4 million. Then we get to what I call token investments. Token investments are another crypto category.

19:57The 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 to. USD1. USD1, like the U.S. dollar. And their first customer, and really their main, possibly only customer so far, has been the government of the United Arab Emirates. the United Arab Emirates agreed to buy$2 billion in stablecoin. I put the profits from that at about$243 million. Just I'm curious what you think of the USD1 crypto thing.

20:52It seems very intentional. Well, in crypto, in broad strokes, the Trump play, the Trump family play, is to use the credibility and imprimatur of the sitting president to build trust in what otherwise strikes people as a pretty sketchy asset, that is crypto. So calling it USD1 and reminding everybody that it'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 with a friend.

21:34David says the Trump sons contributed mainly their name. Their share at 20 percent would be worth about$115 million. OK. OK. Next up, Trump Media, the parent company of Truth 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. So President Trump owns a stake of about 41 percent in that company. If you just look at the Bitcoin and cash on its books, a 41 % stake of that was worth$1.3 billion at the time that the magazine went to press.

22:38Bitcoin 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 if I did the math now. Okay, so a little down. A little down, but still a lot of money. Anything over$1 billion is, you know. That's right. Yeah, okay. All right. And are we on the last one? We're on the last one, which is dollar sign Trump. It's Trump meme coin, right? That is the Trump meme coin. Now, a meme coin 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.

23:26I put the estimated gain from Trump and Melania meme coins at 385 million. And that makes$3.8 billion. So that's how David got to that almost$4 billion number. We did reach out to the White House. Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt 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.

24:09But I mean, surely Trump is not the only president to make money, not just after their term, but while they are president. That's after the break.

24:28All right. We wanted to know how common it is for a U.S. 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 name. 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.

25:10And he says the U.S. 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, OK, 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. Hunter Biden is an example 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.

26:04He did not make anywhere near the amount of money that President Trump's sons are making. Fred says there are examples of presidents having conflicts of interest, though, and profiting, you know, some from the presidency. There are a couple. There aren't a lot. There is President Lyndon Johnson. OK, we're going a little back. His wife owned 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 you— So conflict of interest, but also profit, right?

26:59But it couldn't have been that much. It was nothing. And we can go back farther to the 1920s 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, right? That could have been, was that a concern that people were throwing around in the 1920s? I'm old, but I wasn't there.

27:54but they had conflicts of interest tell us about that time Fred no I'm just kidding I have no idea you have no idea they they were conflicts of interest uh certainly when Johnson became vice president it was reported that his aides urged him to sell the TV station, but the family did not. I mean, so I guess you could make the argument that, well, this is a guy who owned a TV 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.