Donald Trump’s Dirty Self-Dealing:
The Audacity of His Rapacity
The
first term was historically corrupt. But this time Trump has grabbed billions
already—and by the time he’s done, he may make off with tens of billions.
Joe Conason/June 11,
2025
With
painstaking planning and tenacious execution, Donald Trump’s return to the
White House hit with an almost immobilizing impact, as he issued over a hundred
executive orders, cut funds to vital
agencies, laid off thousands of federal workers, rescinded long-standing
policy, and directed the gross violations of liberty and law now contested in
federal courts. The “dictator for a day” was plainly determined to establish
himself for much longer as a strongman ruler, perhaps for even more than two
terms in office.
But
even before Trump had launched what his minions hailed gleefully as
“shock and awe,” the restored chief executive sent an unmistakable signal of
his second term’s highest priority. Like every modern autocrat, Trump is
preoccupied with asserting authoritarian power to advance his illicit
accumulation of wealth. He, too, will abuse state power to enrich his backers
and cronies, even when that may mean impoverishing everyone else. Indeed, a
central message of his new regime is that such grasping must be valorized and
protected—never questioned, impeded, investigated, or prosecuted.
Late
on the evening of January 17, when most presidents-elect are wholly focused on
the immense task before them, Trump found the time to post a jolly
advertisement on his Truth Social website:
“My
NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand
for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.”
Festooned
with an image of him brandishing his fist and the words FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT,
which adorn the $TRUMP memecoin, the post directed supporters to a website
where they could buy their very own—as hundreds of thousands promptly
did. Within hours, the virtual token had gained a market capitalization of more
than $7 billion; by early the following day, its sales price had soared by more
than 500 percent, with a face price of $30 and a market value, on paper, of roughly
$30 billion.
With
the Trump Organization and its affiliates holding about 80 percent of the Trump
memecoins (including a second token dubbed $MELANIA that
also enjoyed a stratospheric launch over inaugural weekend), it seemed there
would be no more scoffing about the billionaire status of the once (or twice,
or six times) bankrupted real estate mogul. Suddenly Trump was inching closer toward
the kind of incomprehensible wealth of a Buffett, a Gates … or a Musk.
The
Trump coin quickly diminished in value,
only to briefly rocket back up in late April when its website promised an “intimate
private dinner” with the president for the top 220 coin buyers, and a “Special
VIP” White House tour for the top 25 customers.
Yet
the promotional materials and the astonishing early numbers posted by $TRUMP
obscured the basic fact that this new memecoin, like most forms of
cryptocurrency, has no inherent worth at all. It isn’t an actual coin, of
course, and its virtual existence is nothing more than an opportunity for
speculation. Nobody knew this better than Trump, who told Fox News years ago that
he suspected cryptocurrencies “may be fake” and Bitcoin was “a scam” used by drug gangs,
as well as a potential threat to the dollar and U.S. national security. But
that was before his sons Eric and Donald Jr., both crypto enthusiasts,
persuaded him that instead of being a crypto mark, he could become a digital
pirate himself.
Trump
learned what his elder boys meant in late 2022, when he made an initial foray
into the blockchain economy online, shilling his own
assortment of “nonfungible tokens,” or NFTs—a set of digital doodads that
featured heroic images of him in comic-book style as an athlete, a soldier, and
a superhero. So conspicuously trashy were these items (and Trump’s manic
hawking of them) that even Steve Bannon protested. But Trump
pocketed over a million dollars from their sale, even as their price eventually
crashed and left other buyers at a loss.
On
the eve of his ceremonial oath-taking, Trump’s crass display of greed appalled
the nation’s leading crypto investors. Speaking off the record, some feared its
impact on an industry that already wears a reputation for fraud, opacity, and
criminality. “It’s absolutely preposterous that he would do this,” Nic Carter,
a partner at a major crypto investment firm (and strong Trump supporter) told Politico. “They’re
plumbing new depths of idiocy with the memecoin launch.”
Trump proves again a truism of authoritarian regimes. Yes,
they curtail civil liberties and target supposed enemies of the state. But they
share one more endemic characteristic: Their leaders enrich their already rich
friends—and most of all, themselves and their families.
But
that embarrassed crypto financier had entirely missed the point. As Americans
would soon learn, the audacity of Trump’s rapacity—and his encouragement of the
same shamelessness in Musk and the other billionaires surrounding him—simply
underlined the “new abnormal” of the second Trump presidency. With all ethical
and legal constraints swept away by a supine Congress and a corrupted Justice
Department, Trump now acts as if he enjoys absolute impunity, like his admired friend Vladimir
Putin. For the foreseeable future, he almost certainly does.
And
he proves again an old truism that applies to authoritarian regimes throughout
history. When we think of such tyrannies, we remember first how they curtailed
civil liberties, targeted supposed enemies of the state, and repressed
disfavored groups. But they share another characteristic that is every bit as
endemic as those toxic traits: Their leaders enrich their already rich
friends—and most of all, they enrich themselves and their families.
The Scammer in Chief, in Training
From
early in his career, Donald Trump has always presented himself as
astronomically wealthy, a feat of imagination he has tried to impose on the
world for decades, even via litigation. That personal fantasy is only now
approaching reality as he exploits his second presidency. Today he is certainly
a billionaire—and having pushed away nearly all of the strictures, agencies,
and traditional norms that constrained previous presidents, there will be few,
if any, limits on his agglomeration of illegitimate riches.
“Donald
measures himself by the size of his financial net worth, or his imagined
wealth, since he once testified under oath that the size of his fortune is
influenced by his emotions,” said Trump biographer David Cay
Johnston. “Having that third comma, indicating he’s a billionaire, is central
to Trump’s identity and always has been. He told me one day in 1990 he was
worth $3 billion.… Later that day he told another reporter he was worth $5
billion, two-thirds increase in his net worth in a matter of hours.”
Trump
inherited a huge fortune, estimated at
more than $400 million, from his father, Fred, whose political connections also
laid the financial groundwork for Donald’s real estate career. Less than two
decades later, his real estate and casino companies faced bankruptcy, as did
the various airline, football, and hotel enterprises on which he had squandered
so much of his inheritance.
Only
the success of The Apprentice—the reality TV show that mythologized
his persona for a mass audience—saved Trump from complete financial ruin. In
the alternate video universe, Trump became the titanic hero of The Art
of the Deal, the bestselling and highly fictionalized 1987 memoir
penned by ghostwriter Tony Schwartz. Although the nation’s business
publications had reported thoroughly on his financial failures, millions of
viewers remained sold on the myth of Trump spoon-fed to them in prime time for
over a decade.
Running
for 15 seasons, this TV
flimflam rebuilt Trump’s personal fortune while transforming him into a
cultural icon (and ultimately a viable presidential candidate). He swiftly took
full advantage of the trust inspired among his audience of
celebrity-worshipping rubes. The Apprentice constantly
promoted Trump enterprises of all kinds, from hotels and golf clubs to casinos
and branded items like Trump Ice bottled water, while collecting big
promotional fees from other brands mentioned on the show. To its deluded
viewers, the “Trump” brand meant wealth and luxury—everything tacky and
gold-plated that he had loudly proclaimed “the best.”
Just a few of the items available for purchase at the Trump
Store, like the needlepoint flask ($68), the 45–47 American flag tie ($120),
and the bling clutch ($550)
Shunned
by banks, however, Trump could no longer function as an actual real estate
developer. Even so, his renown was an exploitable commodity not only in the
United States but around the world, allowing him to license his surname on
luxury properties as a symbol of success and opulence. In the United States and
abroad, the Trump Organization could attract prosperous chumps who were
susceptible to its hyperbolic sales pitch. Later investigations by
ProPublica and others revealed that those
projects often failed—sometimes due to fraud—but not before the Trumps walked
away with their share of profits up front. In at least one instance, they
barely escaped prosecution. Monetizing the public that trusted in “Trump”—who
was desperate for money in that era—became his updated business model.
His
most notorious rip-off was
“Trump University,” the dodgy real estate seminar that touted an opportunity to
“learn from the master.” Its advertising featured Trump himself claiming that
he had personally overseen the Trump U. staffing. “My hand-picked instructors will
share my techniques, which took my entire career to develop,” promised a
direct-mail solicitation bearing his oversize, angular signature.
Thousands
signed up, only to be hustled and then insulted. “At one seminar, attendees
were told they’d get to have their picture taken with Trump,” according to
reporter Matt Labash. “Instead, they ended up getting snapped with his
cardboard cutout.” The cardboard Trump’s face flashed a characteristic smirk.
With
so many swindled victims, the inevitable litigation arrived. Channeling his
inner Roy Cohn, Trump attempted to bluster and bully his way out of it. He
publicly vowed never to settle the complaints and even pursued countersuits
against the plaintiffs, claiming they had “defamed” him. Only months after he
entered the 2016 presidential primaries, the overwhelming evidence of chicanery
provoked National Review to publish an investigative report
with a bluntly damning headline: “Yes,
Trump University Was a Massive Scam.” One of its most persistent critics was
Senator Marco Rubio, now secretary of state, who said the episode proved Trump
should never become his party’s nominee, let alone president.
Trump
didn’t entirely escape the legal consequences of the scam rampage that had
preceded his presidential campaign. In the wake of his historically narrow
victory—achieved via the
Electoral College despite a stinging loss in the popular vote to Hillary
Clinton—Trump settled the lawsuits brought against Trump University. Dropping
his repeated vows to fight the charges in court until the very end, he agreed
to pay $25 million in restitution to the plaintiffs.
Presidential Grifting 1.0
Early
in Trump’s first presidency, the telltale evidence of grift was as obvious as
lipstick on a collar. Before he was even sworn in, roughly $40 million of the
money raised from high-rolling inaugural committee donors simply went missing.
Then the president himself adamantly declined to divest his private business
holdings, as all his modern predecessors had done. His promise to “[leave]
my great business” in the hands of his adult children proved hollow, as it
quickly became clear that he would persistently use his authority to promote
and enrich the Trump Organization—much as the Founders had feared a tyrant
might someday do, which was why they had written a specific ban against the
acceptance by the president and other federal officials of anything of value
(what they called “emoluments”) from foreign or domestic interests, unless
specifically approved by Congress.
He
utterly ignored that constitutional prohibition, along with most other ethical
rules and norms. During the first term, he spent nearly one
out of every three days on visits to his luxury resorts, hotels, or
golf courses, at a cost of millions to taxpayers. He and his staff used public
resources to promote those establishments on scores of occasions. And he
accepted millions of dollars poured into his hotels and resorts by foreign
governments and other foreign entities as they sought favors from his
administration.
Although
Trump complained constantly of the fortune he had supposedly forfeited by
serving as president (and made an annual display of donating his federal salary
to the Treasury), analysts calculated that giving back $400,000 a year
represented less than 0.1 percent of the approximately $1.6 billion he
had glommed as revenue
and income during those first four years. (Prominent among those critical
analysts were the watchdogs at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington, a nonprofit that had released detailed reports on Trump’s White
House self-dealing. Within weeks of resuming the presidency this year, Trump
ordered that the IRS seek to cancel CREW’s tax exemption.)
After
Trump and his family departed the White House in 2021, their grifting
nevertheless continued to expand by orders of magnitude. His obsession with the
“Big Lie” that he had actually won the 2020 presidential election reflected not
only egomania but greed. The Wall Street Journal complained when Trump
continued “conning his supporters” as he did on January 6. But the con had a
powerful pecuniary motive, too.
Shortly
after Election Day 2020, son-in-law Jared Kushner—who had supervised the
campaign’s digital strategy—told the staffers who had overseen online
fundraising that he wanted a new daily financial tracker for the Trump Make
America Great Again Committee. Known internally as TMAGAC
and pronounced “T-Magic,” this joint committee had directed fundraising
proceeds to both the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.
When
Kushner sent that message, the campaign had just seen three of its best
fundraising days, on November 4, 5, and 6, with over $100 million arriving in
response to shrill appeals warning that
Democrats were “trying to STEAL the election.” Yet that fund never existed, and
the money donated to Save America PAC could not be used to contest the 2020
election as advertised. Instead, it could be used for almost anything Trump
wished—including payment of his huge legal and criminal defense bills. From the
election to the insurrection, Trump and his Republican partners banked a total
of $255.4 million, a record-setting haul drawn by online ads and dozens of
daily email appeals to fight the nonexistent fraud.
A New Grift Nearly Every Day
The
Trump family’s return to power turbocharged their drive for profit with the
immense influence wielded by the president, who stood to benefit directly
despite the nominal control of the Trump Organization and related entities by
Eric and Don Jr. To describe their flurry of real estate deals, corporate
startups, cryptocurrency ventures, and media shakedowns as
“frantic” would grossly understate the pace and scale of Trump family
dealmaking in the initial months of his second term. It’s hard to think of
anything even remotely resembling their grab for cash in the history of U.S.
government, not even when they first came to power.
Tracking
the conflicts of interest and coercive profiteering that have erupted in
Trump’s orbit over the past several months is a massive challenge for media
organizations and public interest groups. Nearly every day, a new and
preposterous grift seems to materialize, especially since he and his family
have inserted themselves so forcefully into the crypto industry. Many of these
schemes emit a strong stench
of bribery, extortion, or blatantly violate the emoluments clause, or both.
In
addition to Musk, whose hundreds of millions in campaign donations were rewarded with
unprecedented authority to reshape government agencies that regulate his
businesses (and that might award contracts to them), several of the world’s
biggest corporate entities have delivered payoffs to Trump and his family since
last November.
Amazon
boss Jeff Bezos, for instance, has been eager to cultivate the Trumps after
clashing with the vengeful president during his first administration. Melania
Trump made him an offer he evidently couldn’t refuse, pitching a documentary
about her inspirational life. While other studios made offers ranging from
zero to $14 million, Amazon coughed up $40 million, most of which she will
pocket. Not satisfied with that big payday, however, Melania’s agent has been
peddling “sponsorships” that begin at the bargain price of $10 million to other
billionaires seeking Trump’s favor. A Bezos associate told the Financial
Times last March that the mogul was “doing a deal, offering money to
buy the Trump family’s affection and flattering the president. If you think
about it in terms of costs versus benefit, it is pretty low. It’s a smart
investment.”
Don Jr. and several partners opened a private club in
Washington, D.C., where high rollers can socialize with Trump Cabinet members
and other administration officials. To join “Executive Branch” will set you
back $500,000.
Don
Jr. and several partners—including Zach and Alex Witkoff, the sons of Middle
East envoy Steve Witkoff—opened a private club in Washington, D.C., where
high-rolling political donors, lobbyists, and business executives can expect to
socialize with Trump Cabinet members and other administration officials. The
new hangout is reminiscent of the exorbitant Mar-a-Lago club memberships, whose
price went up to $200,000
in 2017, and the former Trump International Hotel down Pennsylvania Avenue from
the White House, where foreign governments spent millions on rooms and events.
To join the exclusive
“Executive Branch” (as the new club is known) will set you back $500,000, but
you might run into Pam Bondi, the attorney general of the United States, who
showed up for the launch party.
The
Trump Organization has announced several business partnerships with overseas
corporations, including some with ties to foreign governments in the Middle
East. A new venture to build a golf course and luxury tower in
Qatar, announced just prior to an official visit there by Trump, also includes
a Saudi-linked company as the principal construction contractor.
That
is merely one of what CREW estimates will be 19 such deals in the works in
coming months. In an agreement inked in November 2022, the Trump Organization
is also building a Trump resort on the coast
of Oman, working directly with that country’s government and Dar Global, a
builder tied to the Saudi government. Similarly, Trump is also partnered with
the Saudi Public Investment Fund in the LIV Golf Tour and tournament, which
brings considerable revenue
to his Doral resort in South Florida. And a new Trump Tower is under
construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with yet another just announced for Dubai
in the United Arab Emirates.
More
troubling than any of Trump’s media and real estate enterprises, however, is
his family’s rapidly expanding cryptocurrency business—which seems almost
designed to foster bribery, money laundering, and criminality. World Liberty
Financial, the company set up by Eric and Don Jr. in partnership with Witkoff’s
sons and others, has in fact already received a suspicious-looking investment
from a Chinese crypto entrepreneur named Justin Sun, who advises the firm.
He plowed $75 million
into the project, a move that was followed in due course by the Securities and
Exchange Commission’s suspension of an investigation into his business
practices.
Meanwhile,
other crypto companies have flocked to do deals with World Liberty, presumably
in recognition of Trump’s power over their industry and in appreciation of his
promise to make the United States into the “crypto capital.” Most recently,
World Liberty announced that it would issue its own
“stablecoin,” a category of crypto pegged to the value of a fiat currency, in
this case the U.S. dollar—and promptly saw an Emirati firm, controlled by the
UAE’s royal family, buy up billions of those coins to finance an investment in
the Binance crypto exchange, which has been employed in the past by terror
groups, drug cartels, and sanctions busters.
Trump
has rewarded the crypto industry by dismantling much of the federal oversight,
regulation, and prosecution that its advocates find burdensome and by promoting
legislation to advance its interests. Among those bills is a plan to create a
“Crypto Strategic Reserve,” meaning a stockpile of various cryptocurrencies,
notably including Bitcoin, Ether, and various denominations held by World
Liberty Financial and other Trump-allied firms. Unlike a strategic oil reserve,
which has obvious utility, the crypto reserve has no public purpose that
mainstream economists can detect. But it would pump Treasury revenue into
supporting crypto currencies, thus raising their price—as it already did as
soon as the Trump administration indicated its backing.
The Crypto Jungle
In a
forthcoming paper examining the appeal and dangers of cryptocurrency—and
Trump’s proposed reserve—former Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jared
Bernstein and former CEA member Ryan Cummings show why crypto’s blockchain
technology is cumbersome and mostly useless. Yet while inefficient as a method
of exchange and “extremely volatile” as an investment, they write, “there
absolutely is a use-case for crypto, wherein the benefits of
anonymity and the lack of a centralized authority are well worth the
inefficiencies. And that is if you want to transfer money to commit crimes.”
Bernstein
and Cummings, who are familiar with Justice Department and National Security
Agency reports on crypto, note that the blockchain, despite its cumbersome
features, is “an increasingly popular way of moving funds by drug cartels” in
Central and South America. They point to an estimate by
Chainalysis, a data firm that surveys crypto trades, that since 2022 criminals
have used “roughly $140 billion” for illegal activity.
Bernstein
foresees a potential danger in the first family’s gung ho promotion of crypto
currencies that goes beyond the risk for small investors and the squandering of
federal funds. At present, they don’t pose an obvious systemic risk
because they’re not yet integrated with the global financial system, as
mortgage debt was before the 2008 crash. That could change, however. “Could
Trump’s legitimizing them lead to systemic risk? Of course,” the former White
House economist told me. “If banks and nonbank lenders started to hold
significant amounts on their ledgers, it’s easy to imagine, given their
volatility, their value tanking—and all of a sudden the institutions that hold
them have liabilities that exceed their assets. But we’re not there yet.”
The
volatility of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies—all of which are subject to
manipulation on social media by Trump—is exacerbated by the blockchain’s
stunningly inequitable distribution of its swelling wealth. Glaring inequality
may prove to be the most significant characteristic of the blockchain
phenomenon, in a country where income has been distributed unfairly upward for
decades.
A major study released
in 2022 by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that a microscopic
fraction of investors—0.01 percent—controlled 27 percent of the Bitcoin then in
circulation. Bad as U.S. income distribution may be, with the top one percent
of Americans possessing about a third of the nation’s dollar-denominated
wealth, the crypto pie chart looks far more lopsided. There is no reason to
believe that problem has lessened over the past few years—and many anecdotal
examples suggest it may have grown even more extreme.
Consider
what happened when Melania Trump released her own memecoin, dubbed $MELANIA, a
couple of days after her husband’s announcement of $TRUMP last January.
According to an investigation by
the Financial Times, a handful of traders raked in a windfall
of nearly $100 million by snapping up her memecoin less than three minutes
before she announced the token in a Truth Social post on January 19 (an event
that, suspiciously enough, those traders somehow anticipated). They took their
profits when her post sent the price skyward—and then dumped most of their
tranche rapidly, sending the price down and leaving small investors with an
almost worthless token.
So
much for the crypto industry’s utopian claims of a decentralized and democratic
new currency—unless your notion of the perfect society is a wilderness
dominated by the superrich and ruthless.
With Authoritarians, It Is Ever Thus
Trump’s
second-term dispensation of unbounded corruption, blatant conflicts of
interest, and shameless money grabbing starkly illustrates an axiom long known
in other countries: Autocracy enables the extraction and upward redistribution
of a nation’s wealth.
It
is a fact of political life that I first saw illustrated up close in the regime
of Ferdinand Marcos, the late dictator of the Philippines whose secret New York
real estate holdings I helped to expose with William Bastone more than four
decades ago in The Village Voice. Marcos and his wife, Imelda
(who, incidentally, maintains a mutually
admiring friendship with Trump), had broken their country’s democracy,
established a martial law regime, and then proceeded to loot its gold,
minerals, agricultural monopolies, and aid dollars for the benefit of
themselves and their cronies. What would now be hundreds of millions of dollars
were stashed in major New York City buildings as well as other investment
properties. Among their Manhattan holdings was 40 Wall Street, a landmark that
is currently owned in part by
Trump. The Washington lobbyists who fattened their foreign aid appropriations
and protected them from scrutiny were none other than Trump political guru
Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s 2016 campaign manager for three
months and later received a presidential pardon for keeping his mouth shut
about the Kremlin’s campaign interventions.
Just
as Trump is doing now by firing inspectors general and abolishing federal
watchdog agencies, Marcos dismantled and crippled all the institutions that
represented democratic authority and might have stopped or punished his
depredations. The Philippine dictator threatened and brutally repressed his
critics, as Trump seems equally keen to do.
What
eventually brought down Marcos was a determined electorate and a peaceful
movement known as “People
Power,” motivated by popular fury at his abuses and specifically by anger over
his larcenous misrule. Filipinos endured more than a decade of despotism,
economic collapse, and a sense of hopelessness much deeper than any we have
experienced before they seized control of their country’s fate against what
appeared to be impossible odds. Americans still have the power to ensure that a
similar wave of activism finally drops Trump and his enablers into history’s
dustbin—the only way to curtail their unbridled looting.
Joe
Conason is editor in chief of The National Memo and author of The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds
Hijacked American Conservatism.
