Title: A Tally of Trump's Profits

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Brian: All right. We said cue the band, but they were backstage talking to the opening act, and so there was another few seconds of dead air there. Anyway, Brian Lehrer on WNYC. It's well-reported and almost broadly accepted that President Donald Trump and his family have been profiting off his presidency. The amount that Trumps have gained these past nine months of his second term has snowballed in a way not seen in his first term and maybe ever for a sitting president. On Monday, the entire Trump family hit a big payday, it's reported, with the venture into cryptocurrency.

The digital assets firm, World Liberty Financial, co-founded by Trump's sons last year, launched a public sale of its flagship tokens, they're called tokens, for those of you who don't know that world, that resulted in $1 billion worth of trades on popular crypto exchanges. Several founders of those crypto exchanges, ones like Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, have close ties with the administration. Crypto isn't the only revenue stream for the family. The New Yorker's David Kirkpatrick recently set out to answer the question, "How much money is Donald Trump making off the presidency?" He joins us now. Hi, David. Welcome back to WNYC.

David: It's great to be here.

Brian: Your reporting came out before the news of this week, where Trumps made an additional $1 billion plus on crypto, it's reported. Let's not bury the lead. How much do you estimate Trump has made from his presidency since January 20th?

David: When I did my article for The New Yorker, the total I came up with was $3.4 billion. Now, some of that is going to be money that the family made in the run-up to his regaining the White House, but it's all presidency-related. In light of this new deal, a cursory look at the numbers suggests that that's probably risen by $1.1 billion. If I were doing it now to update the story, I would come up with something like $4.5 billion.

Brian: It's mostly crypto, because you tried to do in your article a full accounting of Trump's various ventures, including Mar-a-Lago, a $2 billion investment from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince. Maybe Eric Adams will soon be able to get a piece of that, who knows? And that luxury jet from the emir of Qatar. You think he's made the most off profits from at least five different ventures that you call peddling crypto. Talk about the bigger picture of Trump and crypto this year.

David: Crypto is a pretty intuitive way to make money if you are the family of the president for two reasons. One is a lot of people, very understandably, have doubts about the safety and credibility of crypto investments. If you come in and say, "Look, I'm the president of the United States and I endorse this," right away, you've added a lot of value because people are going to trust that. The second reason is that if you look at the crypto industry, their hopes really rely on regulation.

To put it in simple terms, if the government, and in particular the Securities Exchange Commission, decides that crypto assets need to be regulated like stocks, that's bad for everybody in the crypto industry. It makes it much harder for them to make a ton of money. If they decide to regulate them a different way, like gold or commodities or barely regulate them at all, that's super lucrative. If you're a crypto investor and you can say, "Look, the president's on my side," people are going to listen to you.

Entering into the crypto sphere, it makes a lot of sense if you want to make a buck and you're the Trump family. The biggest way is, according to my calculation, there's a bunch of things he's done. He's sold non-fungible tokens, which are digital cartoons of himself. He's sold this famous meme coin, which is an online novelty that just allows you to say you've bought a Trump meme coin. He's made $300 million here, $200 million there. The biggest money has come through two different kind of financial engineering arrangements involving crypto.

The first one that I wrote about has to do with his company, Trump Media & Technology Group. Now, we know that company as the parent of Truth Social. Truth Social, the social media platform, is not that valuable. By most measures, it's not really making a profit. It doesn't really have a path to profit, but its stock trades at a surprisingly high level because of its association with President Trump. It's what investors call a meme stock. They've taken that meme stock and they've sold shares of that meme stock, issued new shares.

With the money, they have bought $2.4 billion of Bitcoin. They've also raised nearly $800 million of cash. All in all, this company where the primary business is quite questionable, Truth Social, has racked up $3.4 billion in liquid assets, most of it crypto. That's real money, and Trump has a pretty sizable minority stake, 42%, I think, right now of the company. I'm going to call that about $1.3 billion in value added to Trump.

Then the second move is this parallel thing that just happened this week, where another Trump family-connected crypto concern, World Liberty Financial, that's their main crypto venture, which promises to be a new kind of financial firm. They effectively traded some of their tokens, as you said, for control of a public company. It's a low stock value, maybe a penny stock even, public company, ALT5 Sigma.

ALT5 Sigma buys a lot of tokens from World Liberty Financial. It becomes a way for regular investors to buy World Liberty Financial tokens, a holding company. The Trumps, the family, makes about 75% of token sales. ALT5 Sigma puts in $1.5 billion. The Trumps get roughly 75% of that. That's another $1.1 billion right there. Those two transactions, I would say, are their biggest haul.

Brian: I want to ask you why you think anybody should care about all of this, from the, what does this have to do with the price of eggs or national security or public safety in the streets in the United States? I think a common refrain from the Trump family and administration broadly would be, he's a businessman. Why would he stop now? Like all presidents before him, Trump's businesses are in a blind trust. In fact, here's a clip of Donald Trump Jr, I believe that this was in response to your article on Fox & Friends. Listen.

Donald Trump Jr: Trump was the only guy that was actually a businessman before that. Are we supposed to stop running our businesses? Are we supposed to stop doing anything? He's not involved in these things. We are running those businesses as we have.

Brian: Your response to that, in particular, and more broadly, why should the general public care?

David: I'm glad you asked that. That's the big question, and it was on my mind all the way through. I have three answers to that. One preliminary: his assets are not actually in a blind trust. Uniquely, what he's done is say his sons are going to run the company while he's in the White House, but he hasn't really said, "I'm going to shield myself from knowledge of what they're doing." Nor could he. His name is on everything. In some cases, he's actively helped to promote these things. He got out there and helped sell his meme coin. He endorsed World Liberty Financial, which continues to use his name actively. He has not put his assets into a blind trust. That's something other presidents have done.

There are three reasons to care about this. The first is on the way into the White House in January 2017, Trump held a press conference. He said, "Look, I've just recently learned that as president under the laws, I can still run a business on the side," which is true because our remedy for the conflicts is disclosure, not divestment. He says, "I can still run a business on the side, but you know what? It looks bad if my business is out there doing foreign deals. I'm not going to do any foreign deals because it would look like somebody might be trying to influence me from abroad."

He said that himself. He said, "I'm going to try--" In fact, his lawyer stood up and said, "The Trump family will never do anything that even looks like they are profiting off of the presidency because that would be inappropriate." First of all, it's worth noting that he pledged not to do this, and now he's doing it with both hands, both foreign deals and profiting off the presidency.

The second reason, and this is what people really want to know about, is it's just ugly. The presidency belongs to all of us. The White House is a public asset. What Trump is doing is inarguably trading on the prestige of that institution and thereby diminishing it. It demeans the office of the White House, which is why, on the way into the presidency in the first place, he said, "We're not going to do anything that appears to cash in on the White House." It demeans that public asset. It's a little bit like building yourself a mansion in a public park. The public park is still there, but it's just gross.

The third thing, and this is what people really worry about. The question that hovers over all of this is the possibility of real classic corruption, a quid pro quo. Somebody paying money to a Trump business venture because they want to get some public benefit out of Trump in the White House, that Trump will use his powers as the head of the government to do a favor for somebody who's putting money into one of these Trump enterprises. Now, I don't have evidence of that. Evidence of that is very, very hard to come by. It's very unlikely ever to emerge.

What stands out from this tally and really blew my mind is just the speed, the zeal, the unbelievable eagerness of the Trump family to try to make money off of the presidency, especially in his second term, much more than in his first term. Now, if I were a foreign government and I were asking myself, "Should I do a deal with the Trump organization? Will that help me when I have to do business with the White House? Will I get some public benefit out of the US government at the taxpayer's expense if I do this deal with the Trump organization?"

If I'm asking myself that question and I see the almost feverish determination, the almost desperate rush to make money on the part of the Trump family, I'm much more inclined to think, "Yes, this is probably going to work out for me. I should do this hotel deal. I should do this crypto deal because this guy and his family really want to make money, and it's going to work out for me." Do you see what I'm saying? Just the speed of it is what raises the biggest issue for me.

Brian: Maybe crypto is the best example, which, of course, we've been talking about crypto a lot already in this conversation, but of something that might go beyond the appearance of conflict of interest. NPR reported last November that the crypto industry was the largest corporate donor to the elections. Trump himself initially was skeptical of the industry, but then promised to make the United States the crypto capital of the world. I wonder if you dug into those industry ties in your reporting and what may have been a flip on policy.

David: I'll tell you what. I have tried to be as conservative as possible. I hope that people will read my article and trust it because whenever there was a question, I tried to decide it in favor of Trump. My number is a baseline. One of those questions is, I said, "What am I going to make of campaign contributions?" Trump has raised an enormous amount of campaign contributions. Unusually, he's continued to raise political money while he's in the White House in his second term and can't run again.

There are instances where you might say, "Look, a campaign donor like the crypto industry has obtained some policy benefit." You know what? That's the American system. Candidates across the political spectrum raise private dollars to fund their campaigns, and then, when in office, they sometimes do things that benefit their donors. I'm going to leave that aside. That's not an area where Trump is a real innovator. What I'm focused on here is actually his personal profits, not the money that goes into a PAC or a campaign fund, because he can't really use that for himself. Everybody does it, where he's a real innovator is making money [crosstalk]

Brian: I'll point out that you did write in your article, all modern presidents have sold access for campaign money and all have rewarded donors with political appointments, especially ambassadorships. There's that Eric Adams story again. [chuckles] Sorry if you didn't hear that, folks, earlier. The New York Times is reporting today that the Trump administration is considering giving Adams the ambassadorship to Saudi Arabia to get him out of the mayor's race. Of course, that's not because of a donation, so I digress. You wrote, "In the campaign money game, Trump plays at an Olympian level, but he hasn't changed the rules." Again, making the point that this is about something different than normal campaign contribution influence, right?

David: Exactly. This is personal profit, which is a horse of a different color and something that we've really never reckoned with on this scale before.

Brian: Listener writes, "Doesn't the Emoluments Clause directly forbid any US president from profiting off the office?"

David: Clause. The Emoluments Clause appears to prohibit the states or federal government from paying benefits to a president or his companies. There are some interpretations that would preclude payment or benefit from a foreign government. That was litigated extensively in his first term, around foreign governments doing business at his hotels or the Secret Service who follows him paying to stay at his hotels. I'm going to leave that aside for this purpose. It's definitely a question, and maybe it'll be litigated again. I try to just focus on how much money has he made. Really, what we're talking about in terms of things that would come under the Emoluments Clause is small potatoes compared to the rest of the money that's come in here.

Brian: A few minutes left with David Kirkpatrick, who has an article in The New Yorker trying to assess just how much money President Trump has made from being president. Listener asks, "Did Kirkpatrick cover the Biden children doing something similar?" The premise of that, did they do something similar?

David: I did not. I was abroad for The New York Times during the Biden administration, and that was not my beat. To the general question, what about the Biden family or other families of previous presidents? 100%. I think that many of them have tried in various ways to profit off of their ties to the president. I haven't looked closely at it, but I'm pretty sure the market for Hunter Biden's art has dried up since Biden left the White House. Fair enough.

On the other hand, we're not talking about the same number of digits, and we're not at all talking about the active participation of the sitting president. This is really something new, and I think it's justifiably gotten a lot of people's attention. I'm not writing off what the family members of other presidents, both Democrat and Republican, have historically done, and that is unseemly, but this is actually different.

Brian: Listener writes, "Trump is also using the tariffs to gain personal favor with foreign governments. Example, Vietnam fast-tracked a Trump hotel deal, and Trump lowered their tariff rate. Pure quid pro quo." You did write about the Hanoi hotel, as you call it. How much do you accept that listener's premise?

David: I totally understand the question. In time, you're correct. The Trump family does a lucrative hotel deal. The communist government in Vietnam expedites that deal in an extraordinary way, sidestepping local laws to benefit the Trumps. At the same time, President Trump is negotiating a trade deal with the government of Vietnam, which has every incentive to curry favor with him. Looks pretty fishy. That's in the article. I came up with an estimate of $40 million for their profits from that.

Honestly, that's one of the places where I was really extrapolating the most. They've pulled in, according to his own financial disclosures, $4 or $5 million in licensing fees already, and I just projected that forward for 10 years and did a present value calculation. In all likelihood, they're going to make a lot more from that property because it is vast. It is about three times the size of Central Park and includes 54 holes of golf.

Brian: Maybe this is a good thing to end on. "People may remember that in his first term, many pundits were skeptical of Trump's billionaire status," listener writes in the text. "Now, is he really ascending to the multi-billionaire level?"

David: It does look, if you read the article. He was actually in some financial trouble on his way back into the White House. Things were probably pretty tight for him by his standards. Now he is much, much better off. If I could add one last point. We talked before about these crypto investments, two investments in particular, where he's made a lot of money by turning public companies that regular investors can buy into, holding companies, vehicles for his crypto. Now, those crypto assets are not regulated by the Stock Exchange, and only foreigners or really rich people can buy them because they're considered quite risky.

These transactions have enabled regular people. I wouldn't recommend it, but some of your listeners out there who have a stock market account can go out and buy one of these public companies, allowing them effectively to invest in these risky assets. Maybe they love Trump, and they get into one of these things. That's a lot of risk, and our securities laws are actually supposed to protect them from that. By doing these transactions that turn holding companies into vehicles for his crypto, he has introduced a new level of risk to potentially unsophisticated public market investors.

Brian: David Kirkpatrick's New Yorker article is called "The Number: How Much Is Trump Pocketing Off the Presidency?" Thanks for sharing it with us.

David: Thanks for having me.

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