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This is how Trump makes billions from the presidency: "Makes me completely dizzy"
Updated yesterday 18:50 Published yesterday 16:28
Trump arrives at his crypto gala by helicopter from the White House. Photo: John McDonnell/AP
Over the past year, Donald Trump has not only moved into the White House – he has also more than doubled his fortune.
No previous president has made as much money from office as he has. But Trump's supporters are not bothered by the flow of money into the president's pockets.
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Much news surrounding the 47th president of the United States tends to be drowned in a flood of orders, social media outbursts, and geopolitical upheavals.
In just a couple of days last week, there was the decision to ban foreign students from Harvard, the humiliation of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office, and the announcement that EU countries would face punitive tariffs of 50 percent.
And while the media is wondering how they will have time to cover everything, money continues to flow in to the private individual Donald Trump and his family.
According to Forbes magazine, the president's fortune doubled in the year to May 30 this year – from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion.
Many have pointed out that Trump's self-image as a successful businessman has little to do with reality. A 2021 calculation showed that he would have been richer if he had invested his father's inheritance in a regular index fund instead of venturing into high-profile deals.
But now he has finally found a commodity that can be sold with a guaranteed profit: access to himself as the world's most powerful man, the opportunity to influence the decisions he makes.
There are many examples of this in the last few weeks alone.
Perhaps most flagrant is the decision of the oil country Qatar to donate an aircraft worth 400 million dollars to the United States, where it will serve as the presidential plane Air Force One. When Trump's term in office is over, ownership will pass to his own presidential library, and thus, by all accounts, will be available for his use.
Trump speaks with Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani during his visit to Qatar. Photo: Alex Brandon/AP
In Qatar, the Trump family has simultaneously received the green light for a golf resort , as it has for hotels and skyscrapers with the Trump brand in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Another example is the gala dinner that was organized a little over a week ago for the 220 people who had invested the most money in "$TRUMP", a kind of cryptocurrency with no real value that the president's family earns large sums of money from.
The guests had collectively spent upwards of $150 million to attend, of course in the hope of influencing the president or benefiting in some other way. Among the investors at the gala were at least a couple of Chinese billionaires.
The Trump currency therefore has no value in itself, if it were not for the connection to the president.
Meanwhile, another of the Trump family's companies is opening an exclusive club in Washington , called The Executive Branch. The cost of membership is $500,000 – something that many wealthy people are believed to be prepared to pay to somehow gain advantages in the White House.
Pardons also appear to be for sale during Trump's second presidential term.
A week ago, Paul Walczak , the owner of a Florida nursing home who had been convicted of embezzling $11 million of taxpayer money, escaped his sentence.
Walczak's mother is a well-known Trump supporter and donor. And after she paid $1 million to attend a fundraiser for the president in April, news broke that her son had been pardoned.
In liberal circles in the United States, many are outraged by what they see as large-scale corruption centered in the White House.
"No president in American history has attempted or even imagined anything like this," writes David Frum in The Atlantic .
"This is corruption on the lines of some post-Soviet republic or post-colonial African dictatorship."
The president's son Donald Trump Jr. is investing heavily in
cryptocurrencies and business in the Middle East. Photo: Ian Maule/AFP
Michael Johnston, a professor who has written several books on corruption in the United States, describes Trump as historically unique.
– I have been following and writing about corruption for 50 years, but this makes me completely dizzy, he tells the New York Times .
Remarkable in this context is that neither Trump nor his sons – who officially manage his companies – try to hide the deals they do in the shadow of the presidency.
Son Donald Trump Jr. claimed this week that the family businesses had been at a low ebb during his father's first presidential term from 2017-21, but still received harsh criticism. Therefore, he saw no reason to hold back now.
– They will come at us no matter what we do. So we will simply play the game.
Are voters upset by the Trump family's dealings?
Not particularly. The trade war the president has unleashed against the rest of the world is certainly not popular, and more than half of Americans disapprove of him according to the latest opinion polls.
But neither the high-profile crypto deals nor Qatar's plane gift seem to have made any impression at all. Instead, his opinion figures have improved slightly in the past two weeks.
Paul Rosenzweig , a Republican lawyer who worked under George W Bush, believes that Trump's norm-breaking behavior does not concern his supporters.
– Either the public has never cared about such things, or they used to care but no longer do. The outrage has probably existed mostly in the imagination of the elite.
Read more:
Corruption risks as the Trumpsphere strengthens ties to the Middle East
Crypto investors paid over a billion for gala dinner with Trump
How Trump became the crypto elite's best friend
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