Going Deeper: The Corruption of Donald Trump - Part II
First we examined his businesses. Now we look at the grifts since he was elected.
Note: This is part 2 of a 3 part Going Deeper series on the corruption of Donald Trump, his family, and those around him. You can read Part 1 HERE.
We must start with the understanding that the Trumps are unlike any political family we have ever seen. Monstrously self-interested, they have monetized both the White House and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement to the tune of more than $4 billion.
The Trump grifts are so varied, and shameless that it’s truly impossible to track them all. They have, to quote the notorious Steve Bannon, “Flooded the zone” with so much shameless self-dealing that we cannot see the forest for the trees. Along the way they have all but normalized the notion of cashing-in on the Presidency.
But it is not normal. Normal Presidents, and their families, have refrained from Trump-style money grubbing for three reasons. First they respected the office. Second, they respected the American people. Third, they didn’t want to cause a scandal. With the Trumps we see the opposite dynamic. They don’t respect the people, or the office and they are all – including the President – so shameless that they don’t care about scandal.
The fact is that the Trump grift is a scandal. With the exception of Watergate it is the greatest Presidential scandal in history. As citizen we have an obligation to keep track, the best we can, and refuse to accept their new normal. Fortunately the outlines of their exploitations are visible. The worst is Jared Kushner’s profiteering diplomacy.
Unknown number calling? It’s not random.
The BBC caught scam call center workers on hidden cameras as they laughed at the people they were tricking.
The BBC caught scam call center workers on hidden cameras as they laughed at the people they were tricking. One worker bragged about making $250k from victims. The disturbing truth? Scammers don’t pick phone numbers at random. They buy your data from brokers.
Once your data is out there, it’s not just calls. It’s phishing, impersonation, and identity theft. That’s why I recommend Incogni: They delete your info from the web, monitor and follow up automatically, and continue to erase data as new risks appear. Try Incogni today and get 58% off annual plans with code ADAM. I use it myself, and it’s a service that’s really important to me.
Husband of Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, the 45-year-old Kushner is the son of a convicted-but-Trump-pardoned real estate mogul who is now America’s ambassador to France. (I know. This alone is a scandal.) As a first-term “senior advisor” to the President, Jared befriended the mega-rich leaders of the oil rich states of the Persian Gulf including Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. In the time between administrations, he snagged $2 billion in Saudi capital for his investment fund -- Affinity Partners.
This time around, as he serves as the second administration’s peace envoy, Jared is trying to raise $5 billion in the region. Once again, he has turned to the Saudis, meeting with the country’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which puts the vast wealth generated by the country’s oil and gas exports to use around the world. It is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
You may remember that MBS, as he’s called, ordered the 2018 murder of American-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Murder aside, the President and Kushner regard him as a close friend and ally. As Jared campaigned for cash, Trump approved the sale of our most advanced fighter jet, the F-35, to the Saudis, who are also getting access to sensitive Artificial Intelligence technology.
Less advanced jets were approved for Bahrain, which put $200 million into Affinity. And Qatar has gotten permission to open a military training base in the U.S. What did Qatar put up for this arrangement? It also invested $200 million in Kushner’s fund. The Qataris are also partnering with the Trumps in the development of a luxury golf resort AND they have gifted the Trump with a luxury 747 jet worth $400 million.
The gift jet is being overhauled by the Department of Defense to serve as Air Force One. The project will cost at least $1 billion in taxpayer funds. Add this to the $2.4 billion being spent on two new copies of Air Force One, and you get the idea that there’s going to be more of these planes than a president can use. Don’t worry. Once Trump leaves office, the Qatari 747 will be donated to his Presidential library, which will make it available for his use.
About that library. Tens of millions of dollars in special donations now seem to be unaccounted for. The donations were special because they were made by media companies -- ABC News, Paramount (CBS News), Meta, and X -- to settle frivolous lawsuits filed by the President. To be clear, experts in the field of media law saw no merit in any of the suits. However, the companies feared the prospect of tangling with President Trump. Meanwhile, the fund that accepted the money has been dissolved, and no one knows where the cash is. Of course, when it’s eventually found, it will become available for the care and feeding of the ex-President whenever he might claim to be on library business. Say, for example, flying abroad -- to Saudi Arabia? -- on the 747 to accept items for the library’s collection.
While the library’s money can be used as a petty cash machine, this is hardly worth mentioning when you consider the motherlode the Trumps have tapped in the world of cryptocurrency, and crypto-related electronic investments. Here we find the kind of opaque and esoteric dealings that fit the Trump family tradition. The Trump Organization operates more than 500 businesses, which were so intertwined that it would take a platoon of accountants years to understand them.
I would love for you to watch the YouTube video on Part I of Donald’s corruption. You might learn a thing or two and the more of you who watch, the more people YouTube will push this to. So stick it to ol’ Trump by watching this video.
Crypto can be imagined as an unregulated electronic currency that is issued as extremely secure digital “money” that can be traded or used to buy goods and services. Various companies create crypto -- sometimes in the form of so-called Bitcoins -- and its value can rise and fall like stocks and bonds depending on investor enthusiasm. Some crypto, called stablecoins, are pegged to the dollar, which softens price swings. Crypto can be converted to dollars via exchanges that facilitate buying, selling, and trading. The largest is called Binance.
The Trumps went big on Crypto before the 2024 election when they announced the creation of a company called World Liberty Financial (WLF), which would specialize in borrowing and lending in a stablecoin called USD1. Binance provided technical assistance for WLF’s launch, while the United Arab Emirates bought $2 billion worth USD1, which was then parked in Binance.
The UAE-Binance-Trump nexus occupies the center of the Trump family’s corruption, but let’s pause for a minute to consider a small-scale crypto scam that began just before Trump’s inauguration. It involved the sale of “meme coins” named $Trump and $Melania (after the First Lady). The value of these coins was based solely on investor interest. If a lot of people wanted them, they rose in value. If buyers started to sell them, they declined. The Trumps got a big chunk of the initial meme coin revenues, which the President goosed by offering the biggest investors a private tour of the White House. But while the family profited immensely, investors suffered as the coins plummeted in price. As of today, they have lost about 95 percent of their value.
Now, back to the Binance/WLF deal. WLF puttered along until Trump was elected in November 2024. Then sales soared as Binance, the world’s largest exchange, promoted the sale of the currency to its customers. (One promotion allowed them to convert other coins to USD1 without paying the usual fee.) The promotion worked. Today, WLF is worth a reported $5 billion. Most of it has been invested in conservative federal money market accounts that yield more than $200 million per year.
As his family has plunged into crypto, Trump, who once called it a “scam,” has pushed Congress to help exchanges do business in the United States. (Binance surely wants access to the U.S. market.) Days after his inauguration, he created a crypto “working group” to promote the currency. He ordered the creation of a federal crypto reserve and a “digital asset stockpile” and, most notably, pardoned Bitcoin founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who had been convicted of enabling money laundering. Binance, you see, had allowed terrorist organizations to use its platform.
While the value of Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners fund and the Trumps’ crypto ventures can be measured in billions, it’s difficult to say how much actual cash spins off of these investments. Other small-scale grifts are easier to parse. One is the $40 million Amazon paid to secure the rights to produce a film based on the First Lady’s preparation for the 2025 inauguration and for the rights to produce an accompanying docuseries. The payment set a world record for documentary rights, and exceeded the next highest offer, from Disney, by $26 million. Add promotion and production costs, and Amazon’s investment ran to about $70 million.
What did Amazon get for its money? Well, it wasn’t a return at the box office. Global ticket sales totaled a pathetic $16.7 million. However, Amazon does lots of business with the federal government. It provides AI, consulting, and cloud computing services, and founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company holds billions of dollars in government contracts. With these revenue streams in mind, perhaps Bezos thought $70 million worth of goodwill was a wise investment.
Although few can throw around Bezos’s kind of cash, other players in Washington looking to buy a little favor can pony up $500,000 for a membership in Donald Trump Jr.’s private Washington, D.C. club called The Executive Branch. Inside the club, they can cavort with other wealthy members of the Make America Great Again movement and maybe encounter a cabinet member or Donald Jr himself. Although with just 50 or so members signed up, it’s likely a quiet place.
About 900 miles south of D.C., Trump’s Mar-A-Lago club is a truly bustling place where members pay $1 million to join and then annual dues of $20,000. This is up from $700,000 charged before Trump was elected. Membership is capped at 500, and there are no openings. It’s no wonder. The Mar-a-Lago club is one of the few places where it’s possible to literally bump into the President and have a chat. It’s where Bezos and the Trumps struck the Melania movie deal.
Ordinary people who want the Trump experience can buy produce from Ivanka Trump’s Planet Harvest company or purchase a pair of $40 flip flops from a Trump online MAGA store. (Although it looks like a campaign operation, the site is a for-profit business that has clocked about $28 million in revenue.) For something less kitschy, you can invest in a $130 sweatshirt at an online store operated by Donald Trump’s granddaughter. Kai Trump, who rode the family name to prominence as a social media influencer (8 million subscribers on Tik Tok) advertises her brand with a video shot on the White House grounds.
With her baby grift, Kai recalls the years of Trump’s first administration, when the schemes could be tracked quite reliably. A good example: The Trump Hotel in Washington, in the old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue. In those days, hangers-on dwelled in the hotel dining room and bar, hoping to encounter someone important but mostly talking to each other. Foreign governments or corporations spent lavishly on rooms at the hotel, making sure that the bureaucrats they did business with knew it.
China stood out among the countries that invested in the first-term Trumps. It entered into a long-term, $5.5 million lease for offices in Trump Tower, New York, and granted Ivanka’s consumer product companies valuable trademarks. She also caused a stir when she wore a $10,000 bracelet sold by one of her companies for a 60 Minutes interview, and the company then put out a press release calling attention to it.
Inside the government, the Department of Defense managed to spend nearly $1 million at Trump’s hotels and the Secret Service spent at least $1.4 million for its agents to stay at his properties as they guarded him.
Although Trump’s first-term corruption seems quaint compared with today, when it was happening, Congressional Democrats screamed bloody murder about how foreign government payments and favors violated the Constitution’s ban on presidents accepting gifts, which it calls “emoluments.” “Impeachment!” they cried, as Trump exceeded by many multiples the conflicts of interest practiced by any former president.
In the annals of the White House, it’s not possible to find anything comparable to the corruption of the first Trump term. I mean, President Carter’s brother Billy tried to profit off his famous sibling’s name by selling Billy Beer, and it was suspected that advertisers paid inflated rates to radio stations Lyndon Johnson owned. All presidents have profited after their terms by getting big book deals and giving speeches for enormous fees. But no president or his family ever profited the way the Trumps did during his first term in office. Now, in his second term, they are grabbing money at a rate that compares with Vladimir Putin’s raids on the Russian economy, which have given him a net worth estimated to be $200 billion.
Similarly astounding is the silence of the Democrats, much of the press, and most of the public. When he was asked about it by The New York Times, Trump said that in his estimation, he’s just doing what the system allows. “I found out that nobody cared,” he said, “and I’m allowed to.” In fact, I would say that among the MAGA faithful are many who believe all Presidents and their families grab what they can. They appreciate that their guy does it better.
Strictly speaking, Trump and his greedy family are allowed to do what they are doing. The only thing that would hold them back would be a concern for the public trust. In other words, they would have to match the morality of other First Families who strove to avoid even the appearance of corruption.
Money seems to be everything to these people. In a fitting gesture, the President will have his glowering likeness engraved on a commemorative gold coin the mint will issue in honor of America’s 250th anniversary, which will be marked this summer. Trump will also be featured on a $1 coin that will be circulated as currency. Roman emperors put their faces on coins to communicate just who was in charge. As America’s Caesar, Trump is doing the same thing. Like I said, these people have no shame.
Note: Stay tuned next week for Part 3 of the series where we look at how Trump’s cronies cash in and the pardon for pay pipeline.
What’s been built is a parallel revenue structure where sovereign wealth funds, defense contractors, and crypto exchanges pay into the same family enterprise that controls regulatory and military policy. The price of access to the U.S. government is now denominated in investment stakes and jet donations.
The mechanism is more Gulf than Roman. The line between sovereign and personal wealth dissolves, and the state becomes a vehicle for dynastic accumulation.
The silence from the opposition isn’t surprising. “Everyone does it” is the most powerful immunization against accountability ever devised. Once it takes hold, exposure becomes irrelevant. That belief wasn’t organic, it was cultivated.
The coins are the tell. That’s a statement of permanence.
If there is a bigger grift in the history of this country’s presidents, we have never heard about it. Previously, we saw pure power grabs. This is both blatant stealing and abuse of power. Adam, are there people outside of our equally corrupt justice department preparing for the departure and arrest of these criminals? Meaning the day after they leave, will they be prosecuted? The case against them just from an outsider’s perspective, appears very clear cut. The evidence is staring us all in the face.