Imagine If Trump Worked This Hard At Governing
Trump is working harder than ever. Just not to improve the country.
Note: video for paid subscribers follows article.
Americans are suffering. The cost of living has shot up due to unnecessary tariffs and a war of choice in Iran. Families are being forced to choose between gas and groceries. It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment for the Trump presidency as the midterms approach and his approval ratings sink to all-time lows.
And with challenges on all fronts, Donald Trump and his family are working tirelessly. They burn up the phone lines every day, never missing the chance to strike while the iron is hot. You’d be forgiven for thinking that all this work would be aimed at governing and resolving the most pressing problems for Americans. For any normal administration, it would be.
Instead, Trump and the family are hustling every day to find new and, sometimes jaw-dropping, ways to profit off the presidency. To put it frankly, Trump has turned the presidency into a family business. He isn’t just making money from businesses he happens to own while he is president. He has built businesses that make money because he is president.
The most recent and perhaps most egregious example is selling Wall Street a head start on the decisions he makes in office.
Trump’s company, Trump Media, which owns Truth Social, wants to charge big Wall Street firms as much as $100,000 a month to receive Trump’s posts through a superfast computer feed. Trump uses Truth Social to announce tariffs, war decisions and praise for individual companies, which can instantly move stock, oil and currency prices.
Trading firms with the feed could react in milliseconds—before an ordinary investor even finishes reading the alert—and make money from it. Simply by charging traders for the fastest possible delivery of the president’s words, Trump’s company could make a lot of money. It sounds crazy but it’s true: Trump can get superrich by saying crazy things on social media.
Technically, everyone gets the posts at the same time, but that’s not how things work in practice. By the time an ordinary investor reads the alert, a trading computer may already have moved millions of dollars. “For the big guys, it’s going to be something they need,” Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of Themis Trading, told the AP. “It’s market-moving information.” He added: “The loser is always the retail investor.”
Trump and his children have become very, very good at profiting off the presidency. In fact, they have put more thought and care into these businesses than Trump has into doing the job of president.
Trump Media has been losing money, but it found a way to make up ground. And it’s not by building a better social-media company. Rather than improve Truth Social, it found a way to make money from Trump’s sudden tariff threats and policy reversals. It’s pretty clever, in a back-alley bookie kind of way.
Every time Trump says something that catches the markets by surprise, traders have another reason to pay for the feed. The more erratic he is, the more useful the feed becomes. Everyone wants to know what Trump will do or say next, because it’s impossible to predict. And it pays to be the first to know.
Trump may govern erratically, but the family was scrupulous when it promoted Trump’s meme coin last year. The top 220 holders were promised dinner with Trump at his golf club, and the top 25 would also be treated to a private reception and a “Special VIP Tour.” A public leaderboard showed buyers where they ranked, giving anyone near the cutoff a reason to buy more. Trump called the dinner the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the world.” Investors spent an estimated $148 million competing for the seats.
The coin itself was beside the point. The point was to sell access to the president to whoever bought enough of it. The Trump family had worked out an ingenious way to keep people spending money simply for the chance to get near the president.
Donald Trump Jr. is using the family’s political connections in a more traditional investment business. Shortly after his father won the 2024 election, Don Jr. joined 1789 Capital, a small investment firm that backed companies likely to benefit from the new administration’s policies. Two years ago, the firm managed a few hundred million dollars. It now manages roughly $3 billion. The New York Times reported that its main fund had nearly tripled in value by the end of June.
Last fall, 1789 invested in a rare-earth manufacturer called Vulcan Elements. Three months later, the Pentagon awarded the company a $620 million loan. Are we to believe that was a coincidence?
Investors are not pouring billions into the firm because Don Jr. suddenly became Warren Buffett. They know his father runs the government, and they believe that connection is worth money. As a venture-capital professor told the New York Times, “People are paying for proximity to power.”
The businesses look different, but each becomes more valuable because Donald Trump is president. When the family’s money is involved, they work out the details. But when Americans pay higher prices or are sent to war, Trump just makes things up as he goes.
You may have heard about the war with Iran. Trump has handled it with his signature carelessness. He started it without a clear plan for ending it, only to repeatedly announce pauses and possible agreements that never took hold. After five months of war, the Army had used nearly all of its long-range precision missiles. And yet, throughout the war, Trump goes back and forth over whether to threaten new attacks or to claim that peace is at hand.
Imagine what would have happened if Trump had put five minutes of thought into the Strait of Hormuz before he launched his war. Maybe he would have had an actual strategy for what military experts predicted would happen. Or maybe he wouldn’t have started the war at all.
But I humbly suggest that he’s too busy making money off his presidency to think before he starts a war.
The real losers are the people who voted for Trump, the people who believed he would make their lives better. Imagine if he devoted as much time and attention to lowering their grocery bills and ending the war in Iran as he does on enriching himself and his family. We now know that he is plenty capable of planning ahead. He can be laser-focused, disciplined and relentless. It’s just that he simply reserves those qualities for his self-enrichment schemes. The people who trusted him are still waiting for him to work this hard for them.
Video discussion for paid subscribers:
