As thousands and thousands of People face down devastating cuts to their healthcare and meals help, President Donald Trump and his household personally enriched themselves to the tune of at the very least $1.4 billion throughout his first yr again in workplace, in response to an evaluation published by the New York Times editorial board on Tuesday, the one-year anniversary of his second inauguration.
This unprecedented profiteering, which already quantities to 16,822 instances the median US family revenue in response to the Instances, is sort of definitely an undercount, as many sources of the president and his household’s wealth stay hidden from public view.
“President Trump has by no means been a person to ask what he can do for his nation. In his second time period, as in his first, he’s as a substitute testing the limits of what his nation can do for him,” the board wrote. “He has poured his vitality and creativity into the exploitation of the presidency—into discovering out simply how a lot cash individuals, firms, and different nations are prepared to place into his pockets in hopes of bending the energy of the authorities to the service of their pursuits.”
Counting on a collection of earlier analyses from different information organizations, the Instances notes a number of of Trump’s key streams of revenue.
As has been extensively documented, most comprehensively by Reuters in October, by far Trump’s largest supply of revenue has been his household’s funding in cryptocurrencies, which has generated at the very least $867 million in new wealth for the household. Different investigations counsel the true quantity could possibly be a number of billion when accounting for unreported property and features that haven’t but been realized.
“Individuals who hope to affect federal coverage, together with foreigners, can purchase his household’s cash, successfully transferring cash to the Trumps, and the offers are sometimes secret,” the Instances board wrote.
It famous one notably brazen transaction earlier this yr, when an funding firm owned by a member of the United Arab Emirates‘ (UAE) ruling household dumped $2 billion into the Trump household’s crypto startup World Liberty Monetary, simply two weeks earlier than the White House introduced that the UAE could be given entry to a whole lot of 1000’s of the world’s most superior laptop chips.
Inking real-estate offers has been one other software nations have used to purchase affect with Trump. The Instances cites a report from the watchdog group Residents for Accountability and Ethics (CREW), exhibiting that the Trump Group and its companions had been planning at the very least 22 “Trump-branded tasks round the globe” over the course of his presidency, together with by way of motels and golf programs in India, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Indonesia, and different nations desirous to be in the US authorities’s good graces.
In all, since his reelection, the Instances calculated that Trump has reaped at the very least $23 million from licensing his identify abroad, at instances culminating in the look of blatant pay-for-play. In a single occasion, “the administration agreed to decrease its threatened tariffs on Vietnam a couple of month after a Trump Group challenge broke ground on a $1.5 billion golf complicated outdoors of Hanoi. Vietnamese officers ignored their very own legal guidelines to fast-track the challenge.”
One other CREW evaluation from July found that Trump visits his personal properties roughly “each different day”—far more steadily than in his earlier time period—and that many overseas authorities officers have traveled to those websites to curry favor with the president.
Trump additionally infamously accepted a $400 million jet, described as a “flying palace,” from the Qatari authorities. He plans to make use of the airplane as Air Drive One throughout his presidency and switch it to his presidential library after leaving workplace. Shortly after receiving the jet, he pledged to “shield” Qatar and announced profitable new military and economic partnerships with the nation.
Elsewhere, Amazon spent $40 million on a documentary about First Girl Melania Trump, $28 million of which will probably be given on to the first girl, which the Instances mentioned is way over has been paid for comparable tasks. The corporate’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, has critically lobbied the administration for favorable remedy concerning antitrust and protection contracts, and has seen his own wealth soar by practically $9 billion over the previous yr.
However Trump’s revenue from media and tech firms has extra generally arrived in the kind of shakedowns. He has made an estimated $90.5 million from settlements from X (formerly Twitter), ABC News, Meta, YouTube, and Paramount since his reelection, none of which, the Instances argues, “had been justified on the deserves.”
“Mr. Trump’s starvation for wealth is brazen,” the editorial board wrote. “All through the nation’s historical past, presidents of each events have taken care to keep away from even the look of benefiting from public service. This president gleefully squeezes American firms, flaunts presents from overseas governments, and celebrates the fast development of his personal fortune.”
The report of Trump’s looting of the presidency comes as roughly 1.3 million People are anticipated to lose health insurance protection in 2026 as a result of Republican cuts to Medicaid and different help applications, whereas greater than 20 million are anticipated to pay higher insurance coverage premiums after the GOP allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to run out final yr. Roughly 1.5 million have already dropped their well being protection this yr, in response to a report final week from CNBC.
In the meantime, about 4 million low-income individuals—together with 1 million kids—are expected to see their entry to meals help both considerably diminished or completely misplaced in the coming years as a result of Republican cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Whereas “Drain the Swamp” has remained one of Trump’s signature phrases, portraying the president as a crusader towards endemic corruption in Washington, Instances columnist Nick Kristof wrote, in the wake of his paper’s new report, that underneath Trump’s watch, “the swamp has by no means been so fetid.”
