It's not exactly new information that he bankrupted several casinos, lost money on several big real estate ventures, and started up numerous businesses (Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, Trump University, Trump Magazine...) that failed.
He's infamous for refusing to pay contractors what they were owed on many of these catastrophes. In fact, despite running what should have been successful businesses into the ground, he always managed to make sure he got paid. Without getting overly technical, Trump did this by hiring accountants who knew the tax code inside and out. It was extremely rare that Trump was investing his own money in these endeavors. Set up an LLC, take out a loan, list himself as a consultant or advisor with a guaranteed fee, and even if the business goes under, he still received his check. The loss and loan default is against the LLC, not Trump personally, and as a bonus, the loss flows through to its owners, including Trump, reducing his tax liability. None of this is illegal. I saw similar shenanigans on a smaller scale when I worked in Tax Incentives, but it illustrates that Trump wasn't a good businessman, i.e. someone who grows a business, providing jobs for a community while providing a return on investment to shareholders, but someone who was extremely adept at self dealing.
Why would we believe that this basic fact of his personality would somehow disappear when he became president?
Trump's financial disclosure report for 2025, his first year back as president, was made public recently. It showed income of over $2 billion, triple what he reported for the previous year. (Who knows how accurate his reporting even is?) About half of that was from cryptocurrency. Here is a quote from an NPR interview with Eric Lipton of the New York Times:
"The two biggest chunks come from his meme coin, which he
launched three days before his inauguration. It was a kind of a collectible
that surged in value initially, and the people who quickly invested made a
boatload of money, but then it crashed, and hundreds of thousands of people
then lost money.
Trump made hundreds of millions of dollars from that gamble
that he asked people to follow on him on. And many of his followers ended up as
losers. The second big chunk of revenue comes from World Liberty Financial, a
company that he and his sons started in October of 2024.
That company is now one of the biggest issuers of what's called stablecoins in the world, and it was bought secretly and — half of it — by the United Arab Emirates in January of 2025, just as he was being sworn in to be president.
And the UAE separately has invested $2 billion into its
stablecoin, making it one of the biggest stablecoin issuers in the world. So, I
mean, the it is really intensely tied up with a foreign government. And the
president is profiting from that foreign government's investment in his own
business at the same time as he is acting as commander in chief and working
with that foreign government to negotiate a war in the Middle East."
I admit that there's a lot about cryptocurrency, starting with Bitcoin and including every scam by some guy with a laptop, that I don't understand. But this sounds a lot like a pump and dump — like was portrayed in the movie Boiler Room — convince people that worthless stock is a great investment. Trump made a ridiculous amount of money selling...nothing. The meme coin, if it ever had any value, certainly doesn't now. All it accomplished was providing a cash pipeline to Trump from credulous investors. Or maybe they weren't all that credulous. Doesn't it seem like a stable coin without any real value would be the perfect conduit for bribes? What value are the "investors" receiving if not the access any large donor would expect? The opportunities for money laundering aren't insignificant either.
"......there are new real estate deals in the Middle East,
in Vietnam, in Romania, in the Maldives. He's struck a bunch of deals that
include some deals that are actually with foreign governments, like the
government of Saudi Arabia and in Qatar as well.
And then there are, as you mentioned, settlements from lawsuits and that are being paid to him from media companies. And there's also money in there from Melania, from Jeff Bezos and Amazon for the documentary. I mean, there's just — it's quite a crazy array of sources of revenue going to a sitting president.
...there's nothing like this in American history."
I'm not sure if Trump is donating his presidential salary as he did during his first term, but his $450,000 salary is peanuts compared to what he's raking in from what amounts to influence peddling. A lot of hot air has been exchanged about insider trading, and how stock trades by Congress should be banned. All of that pales in comparison to what is being done by Trump.
"...the big question here is, if Mr. Trump was not president,
could he or would he have made the same amount of money that he did?
It's hard to imagine that if he were not president that there would — that his meme coin or — it would be as profitable as it has been, or that there would have been the scale of investment in World Liberty Financial and the stablecoin.
It is — it seems as if his status as president is intimately intertwined with the success of those companies. And, I mean, the fact that he launched the meme coin as they were gathering in an auditorium in D.C. three days before his inauguration for what was called the Crypto Ball — it was a bunch of crypto executives and administration — soon-to-be administration officials there to celebrate his inauguration.
And that's the night he launched it. And it was like, follow
me as I lead the world. These things are so intertwined, I think it's hard to
imagine he would have made as much money. He's never made this much money in
his entire life as he's made in this one year. So I think that's part of your
answer right there.
The pay-to-pardon scheme that Trump has going has also become a lucrative income stream. Anyone with a few million lying around can get a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Not-So-Free card from Trump.
Let's not forget all his shady stock trades. From Democracy Now:
"...he purchased as much as $5 million in SpaceX bonds shortly
before he signed a new space policy that could benefit Elon Musk and his
company. In total, Trump bought up to $250 million in stocks in August,
including an investment of up to $25 million in Meta, the parent company of
Facebook. Such stock trading by a sitting president is unprecedented. ABC recently
reported Trump made 21,000 securities trades during his first year back in
office. By contrast, Joe Biden made a total of 13 trades during his entire
term. In related news, on Thursday, Trump honored SpaceX founder Elon Musk and
other tech executives at a White House science summit."
From The New York Times:
I"t is hardly the only issue to arise from having a businessman serve as president. The president’s family business, the Trump Organization, has also capitalized on Mr. Trump’s popularity in certain parts of the world, licensing the Trump name to properties in countries that are crucial to U.S. foreign policy interests, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Those two deals alone generated more than $14 million for Mr. Trump last year, the filing shows."
With Trump, if you want to know the answer to why anything is being done, just follow the money.
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