Thomas L. Friedman
Trump Is Fleecing Us
July 7, 2026
Opinion
Columnist
When the sun came shining,
and I was strolling
And the wheat fields waving, and the
dust clouds rolling
As the fog was lifting a voice was
chanting:
This land was made for you and me.
— Woody Guthrie, “This Land Is Your
Land”
Our country is built on
written documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the
Bill of Rights, to name the most important. So to celebrate America’s 250th
birthday, my wife, Ann, hosted a special event at Planet Word, the immersive
language museum she founded in Washington to promote literacy. The singer-composer Nolan Williams Jr.
led a singalong featuring classic American songs, including, of course, Woody
Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”
Despite 100-degree heat,
a remarkably diverse crowd of 300 people packed the museum’s main hall, and
young and old sang together with gusto. There was so much joy and camaraderie
in the room — and so many leaving attendees saying to one another how much they
wished the entire country could reflect that same harmony every day. So many
people asked afterward, “Why aren’t we singing these songs together on the
National Mall?”
Which leads — I am sorry
to say — to a quite different variation on “This Land Is Your Land” heard on
the National Mall later that evening. In my mind, it was the Trump variation,
with lyrics that went, “This land is my land, this land is my land / From California
to the New York island / From my cryptocurrency to the Qatari 747 / This land
belongs to me and mine.”
One thing about President Trump: He is
consistent. He never surprises you on the upside. He has never been remotely
interested in being the president of all the people, only his base. He never
tries to win by addition, only by division — only by us versus them.
As my newsroom colleague
Shawn McCreesh reported from the mall: “Mr. Trump used the
nation’s birthday to scaremonger about Democrats four months before the
midterms (he talked a lot again about ‘communism’) and demand that Congress
pass an act that would make it harder to vote.” Shawn
continued, “What was meant to be the centerpiece of the nation’s 250th
anniversary celebration was in some ways just another Trump rally.”
This very same Fourth of
July, two other newsroom colleagues of mine, Eric Lipton and David
Yaffe-Bellany, reported that nearly “1 million people who bought
President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according
to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total
$3.81 billion.” My colleagues pointed out that the calculation came after
Trump signed a financial disclosure revealing that the
same crypto bet dealt him a $636 million payout. In all, his business ventures
brought him at least $2.2 billion in 2025.
This is a big story, and
my gut tells me that Trump also smells that this could be a big story: of how
badly he fleeced his own supporters!
Since the start of
Trump’s second term, it’s been widely reported that he has been exploiting the
presidency for financial gain, but the story needed a real number and real
victims. Now it has both — $2.2 billion in total gains for Trump and at least
$3.81 billion in losses for his investors. That’s a bumper sticker. Trump
famously boasted that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and
his supporters would still be with him. Will they also stick with him when he
fleeces them?
And, have no doubt, he was targeting
them, as The Times also reported: “Three days before his inauguration, Mr.
Trump unveiled a second Trump-branded investment — the $Trump memecoin, a type
of novelty currency with little practical value. ‘It’s time to celebrate
everything we stand for: WINNING!’ Mr. Trump wrote on social media. ‘Join my very special Trump
community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW!’ But that turned out to be bad advice.”
Trump is surely
terrified that the Democrats will win the House or the Senate or both and
launch investigations into how much he has used his office, and exploited his
own supporters, for grotesque personal gain.
Therefore, to my mind,
the right themes for Democrats going into the midterms are two: If they win,
they will expose how much Trump has been ripping off his own supporters; and if
they win they will make bringing the country together a priority.
I believe the quest for
national unity is the most underestimated political force in the country today.
It is not an accident that CNN reported last
month that “nearly half of Americans say they don’t consider themselves a part
of either major political party, the highest level of partisan independence
measured by CNN polling in more than a decade.”
I am sure that is true
because I heard the best political analyst I know make the same point. His name
is Barack Obama. Which brings me to a third variation of “This Land Is Your
Land.” It was Obama’s speech at the
opening ceremony of his presidential center in Chicago, which I attended. My
favorite passage from Obama was this:
As algorithms keep feeding us a steady
stream of distraction and outrage, as only the loudest, most extreme voices get
attention, fanning our prejudices, appealing to our basest, most tribal
instincts, it’s tempting to give in to cynicism and even despair, to stop
trying. We start thinking that appeals to democracy and civic participation are
corny and old-fashioned and boring and naïve, that the very idea of working on
behalf of the common good is a sucker’s bet, and that in order for us to win,
somebody else has got to lose. I get it. I am not immune to anger or doubt, but
I do know this: When we lose faith in each other, when we stop believing that
voting matters, that citizenship matters, that our collective voices matter,
that how we treat each other no longer matters, and we give away our power to
decide our own futures, we open the door to the most ruthless, or the most
careless, or the most fearful among us, who see some groups and some people as
more equal than others, and see government as nothing more than a way to divvy
up the spoils and punish enemies and keep those who are different in their
place.
The fact is, though,
Obama continued, “I do not believe that is the story of America that prevails
in the end. … I remain convinced that the overwhelming majority of Americans …
aren’t looking for perpetual anger and division. They are looking for fairness
and common sense and mutual respect, that deep in our gut we want to find a way
to turn toward each other again, not further away.”
So, Democrats, you have
your assignment. It’s to not let Trump bait you into blind rage and extreme
ideas. He feeds off that. Just focus on how much he has been fleecing all of us
while tearing us apart. And how much Democrats intend to pull the whole country
together.
’Cause this land was
made for you and me.
