USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Fwd : This is how Trump makes billions from the presidency : " Makes me completely dizzy"

https://www.dn.se/varlden/sa-tjanar-trump-miljarder-pa-presidentskapet-gor-mig-alldeles-yr/

THE WORLD

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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Ingmar Neveus

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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

Topics in the article

• Donald Trump

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• Donald Trump Jr.

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• Cryptocurrencies

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• Qatar

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• American politics

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This is how DN works with quality journalism: information published must be true and relevant. Rumors are not enough. We strive for first-hand sources and to be on the spot where it happens. Credibility and impartiality are central values ​​for our news journalism. Read more here.

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On Saturday, 31 May 2025 at 23:22:59 UTC+2 Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Who is Indian-American MIT student Megha Vemuri, whose remarks on Israeil’s ‘genocide’ sparked a nationwide debate?" - ( What Did You Do During the Globally Streamed Genocide?)

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - "The Dreamer's Odyssey", by Toyin Falola: Mapping the Journey of Chika Okeke-Agulu,Pre-Eminent Art Historian

"The Dreamer's Odyssey", by Toyin Falola: Mapping the Journey of Chika Okeke-Agulu,Pre-Eminent Art Historian 

           Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                        Compcros

Toyin Falola's's "The Dreamer's Odyssey' (https://toyinfalolanetwork.org/the-dreamers-odyssey/) is an elliptically beguiling poem, celebrating the life's journey of art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu, at a climatic point in his career, climatic,  keeping in mind that other climaxes may follow in an ascending sequence of mountain peaks.

It is a beautiful poem about a steadfastly determined scholar.

To adequately appreciate the poem, however, in its eloquence, evocations and silences, one needs to know the specifics the poem is alluding to.

The poem would benefit from an expository accompaniment, like the poems with essays in Falola's In Praise of Greatness: A Poetics of African Adulation.

This poem reads like a gnomic yet extended lyric form, depths concealed in images the direct referents to which few clues are provided.

That hermeticism is part of the poem's beauty and power, complemented and amplified by the sequence of elegant images of Agulu that punctuate the piece.

The poem, though, sounds like an oracular discourse, striking but allowing quite limited penetration into the specificities of the history it tells, limited penetrability bcs its underlying universe of reference is unknown to the non-initiate, the two initiates here being Agulu and Falola, on account of the extensive sensitivity demonstrated by Falola in managing the relationship between interior and exterior worlds in the evolution of Agulu 's life.

Beyond such opaque beauty, Falola's poem cuts off the roots of its own discourse, like limiting the study of a tree to its crown without addressing the roots and stem.

The poem begins: 

"A dreamer was born on a red space
where the town criers woke residents
with disastrous news of buried casualties
yet survived the storm with only his dreams

the dreamer dreamed where dreams
were murdered in sequence
and flew beyond the Atlantic
to put himself on the map of success"

Clearly the poem is evoking Agulu's migration to the US where he eventually became a professor at Princeton.

But can the achievements represented by that relocation across the Atlantic be adequately understood apart from.the roots Agulu was coming from, roots which seem to be referenced in the poem only in terms of the murdering of dreams from which the subject fled to an environment where "dreams and realities stay"?

Is it possible to adequately understand Agulu's academic history and its influence on him and its resonance in his later work, as well as the trajectory of his scholarly career and its contributions to  art history, criticism and theory without a grasp of his academic and scholarly foundations at the art school of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, well before his migration to the US?

Agulu might be  the most prominent art 

scholar from the Nsukka art school while El Anatsui is the most internationally prominent artist from that school, trajectories intertwined in their journey to the top. 

Agulu's two most strategic books might be Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria( 2015) and El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture, 2022.

I don't know if any of his two other books known to me achieve the same level of ideational, historical and critical scope of those works.

El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture is described in its back cover blurb as the outcome of thirty years of "research, scholarship and close collaboration with the artist" , while in the preface, Agulu states "Anatsui...was my art school teacher, then studio master, and later a senior colleague at the University of Nigeria".

Those words encapsulate a universe, aspects of which are evident in the book and in his Nigerian Modernism, aspects telescoped into Agulu's programmatic essay "The Quest : From Zaria to Nsukka" in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa ed. by Clementine Dellis.

That universe is represented by the ferment embodied by the "Nsukka" of the essay's title, and the effects of the journey of one man, Uche Okeke,  from what later became Ahmadou Bello University,  Zaria to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, bringing with him the philosophy of "Natural Synthesis", which, radiating from Zaria would lay the foundations for what is now known as academically influenced  modern African art in Nigeria, seeding, catalyzing a creative ferment at Nsukka with such younger colleagues as Obiora Udechukwu, on whom Agulu has also published a book,Chike Aniakor and others, in tandem with such literary generators as Chinua Achebe in literature, creating an ecclectic scholarly and literary culture, in relation to an indigenous centred art and philosophical culture symbolized by the study of Uli, a classical Igbo artistic form demonstrating a visual, spiritual and philosophical resonance, intersecting with Nsibidi, the Cross River expressive  system combining graphic signs, gestural symbolism and object arrangement into a synthesis speaking to social, philosophical and spiritual values.

That  matrix generated a readily identifiable stamp in the artists and scholars of the Nsukka art school, where Agulu had his first degree and to which he returned to teach after his PhD in the US.

The creative ferment enabled by Uche Okeke and his disciples, from Chike Aniakor to Obiora Udechukwu, in one generation, to Olu Oguibe, Sylvester Ogbechie, Chika Okeke-Agulu and others in a subsequent generation, in which imagination and intellect, art, literature and philosophy were cultivated in unison, created one of the most successful art schools in Nigeria.

Agulu might not be the most expressively powerful of the alumni and teachers of the school and might not even be the most published, but he seems to have become uniquely positioned, beginning from his presence at Princeton, one of the world's most prestigious schools, to his steady escalation of  publications mapping the creation of what is now known as  modern African art, culminating in his Postcolonial Modernism.

Everything Agulu has done since leaving Nsukka, perhaps in challenging circumstances hinted at by Falola's poem,needs to be examined for its possible roots in his Nsukka journey, where he is likely to have been first introduced to the scholarly culture,the understanding of ideological, technical and historical currents of African art the study of which  became his life's work.

His later role on the editorial board of Okwui Enwezor 's Nka, created to project modern African art, the various art promotion initiatives in which he has  grown as a curator and scholar, contributing to shaping the art world, his eventual pioneering recognition as the first African, if I recall correctly, to hold the Slade Professorship at Oxford, and his admission to the British Academy, are they fully graspable unless in the context of the ideological, disciplinary and historical matrices provided by his Nsukka experience?

 

On Tue, May 13, 2025, 6:45 PM Adebayo Ajadi <toyinfalolabrandassistant@gmail.com> wrote:

The Dreamer's Odyssey, By Toyin Falola
https://toyinfalolanetwork.org/the-dreamers-odyssey/

Adebayo Ajadi (ND Business Administration )

Assistant Brand Manager,

Toyin Falola Network 

- Pan-African University Press

- The Toyin Falola Interviews 

- Toyin Falola Center for the Study of Africa 

- Toyin Falola Annual Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora (TOFAC) +234-810-7262-267 | +1 (512) 689-6067 | https://toyinfalolanetwork.org Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Linkedin

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