Hey MAGA, Here’s More of What Fox News Won’t Tell You

A decade ago, people said Donald Trump would make a good President because he was a businessman. He would, they said, run the United States like a business. Ten years later, he’s doing exactly that, and it’s proved to be extremely profitable. The problem is, the dividends aren’t for you and me—they’re for Trump, his family, and his clique of corrupt friends. Turns out, being President of the United States can be pretty lucrative when you serve your own interests instead of the American people’s.

He doesn’t even try to hide it. This week alone, Trump feted Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House, even scolding a reporter for asking MBS about the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which the Prince ordered in 2018, saying, “Things happen.” Could it be because his organization is in talks to bring a Trump-branded property to a Saudi Arabian government-owned real estate development? It’s certainly a big part of it.

While affordability continues to be a major problem for us little people, we also learned that Trump bought at least $82 million in corporate and municipal bonds in just over a month (late August to early October), with big investments in sectors benefiting from his policies. At a dinner for MBS, he essentially admitted who he’s really working for (hint: not us) as he teased his old buddy, the insanely wealthy Elon Musk, about how much he’s helped him. He then proceeded to insult everyone’s intelligence about “deductions.”

You and I know how corrupt Trump is. We wrote another piece on his corruption last spring. But there are a lot of Americans who don’t know the half of it, either because they’re not paying attention, or their news sources just don’t tell them. Some MAGA folks won’t care even if they did know; they’re too deep in the cult. But a lot of Trump’s voters—the kind who wanted to “drain the swamp”—just might. I hope you’ll share this piece with them. If we keep putting this material in front of them, not as a “gotcha,” but to respectfully inform, we will make some headway.

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The Profits

Trump’s second term is already a major success for his personal finances. In September, Forbes reported that 2025 was the “most lucrative year of his life,” with the President having jumped 118 spots up The Forbes 400 list to number 201. With continuing success in his real estate licensing business and enormous new profits from his foray into crypto, he’s managed to knock off some major liabilities while adding billions to his assets. It’s left him with a net worth of $7.3 billion, $1 billion more than in 2024.

How much of this is the direct result of Trump’s position and the powers with which he’s been entrusted by the American people? He was a sometimes successful and frequently unsuccessful businessman before he came down the golden escalator in 2015. Despite numerous bankruptcies (four or six, depending on who you ask), he managed to enter office with a net worth of $3 billion in 2017. During his first term, when there were still guardrails in place, his net worth actually dropped—to $2.3 billion when he left office—in the midst of the pandemic.

But since then, he’s changed his business model, and his new one is serving him well. In August, a New Yorker writer, David Kirkpatrick, published an analysis detailing the profits that Trump and his family have reaped directly from his role as President. Even after giving Trump the benefit of the doubt on a number of points, Kirkpatrick’s final sum came to a staggering $3.4 billion. But just how did he make all that money? And who is on the losing end of the deal?

The Business Model

Trump’s business model is inherently corrupt. But it’s not the good old-fashioned sliding of envelopes across desks or dropping off suitcases filled with money. Instead, it comes largely in the form of conflicts of interest and gifts smuggled through legal loopholes. Let’s take a deeper look at his core strategies.

Accept corrupt gifts through legal avenues.

What might come to mind first when you think of Trump’s corrupt behavior is when he was gifted a tricked-out private jet by the Qatari government last spring. Dubbed the “flying mansion,” the jet sports 4,500 square feet of vaulted ceilings, gaudy wood trim, and gold accents and is valued at no less than $400 million. Unsurprisingly, the gift sparked outrage from observers across the political spectrum, who saw right through the Qataris’ claims that the gift carried no intentions of influencing Trump’s policy. In fact, the Department of Defense/War later committed to allowing Qatar to build a military facility in Idaho. Coincidence?

The most glaring question here is how this transaction could possibly be legal. The Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution makes it very clear that it is unacceptable for any person holding office to accept gifts of any kind from foreign governments. Nonetheless, Trump found a sly workaround: the jet would not go to him, but to the Pentagon. And his Attorney General Pam Bondi reported that it was not technically a bribe because there were no explicit strings attached.

Even if we ignore the lameness of this conclusion by Bondi—who, after all, is not acting as an attorney general but as Trump’s personal lawyer-–it’s clear that Trump benefits from the jet in all but name. After all, it’s set to stand in as a replacement for Air Force One while the White House awaits delivery of the new official planes in 2027. And it won’t pass on to other government uses in the future. Once Trump leaves office, it will become the property of his presidential library. It would be like if Grover Cleveland kept the Statue of Liberty after leaving office.

This isn’t Trump’s only willful circumvention of the law to accept questionable gifts. More recently, he’s accepted hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to build his ridiculous White House ballroom. Donors include a plethora of private interests, including a generous handful of tech firms such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Trump has been very kind to these companies, with Microsoft and Google benefiting from lucrative government contracts, and Amazon receiving $1 billion in cloud-credit incentives.

Donors from the crypto industry stand to benefit through his policies as well (more on this later). Palantir and Lockheed Martin, two other major ballroom donors, have scored defense contracts under Trump. And Google is contributing its $22 million as part of a legal settlement with Trump. While we can’t say for certain what the intentions behind these transactions are, it’s hard to miss the pattern.

Use foreign ties to forge business deals.

Trump has also found more subtle ways to profit from his official relationships, and particularly those formed abroad. Qatar’s gift of a plane to Trump was not the first time he’d benefited financially in that country, or for that matter in the Gulf at large. Just weeks before he was officially gifted the jet, the Trump Organization signed a deal to license Trump’s name for a golf resort there. It licensed two additional projects with the same firm in Saudi Arabia. Kirkpatrick finds that those and a slew of other real estate deals across the Gulf have already gained Trump $105.8 million.

That’s not the only ties the Trump family has with the Gulf nations. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was the Middle East envoy during Trump’s first term, and Trump had hardly left the White House when Kushner went to Saudi Arabia to solicit investments for his new private equity fund. With Kushner lacking the experience required to manage such a fund, the Saudi Crown Prince was warned against buying in. Apparently Kushner made a good impression though, because the Prince famously fronted him $2.8 billion. Hunter Biden would like a word.

And it doesn’t end there. The crypto investment firm run by two of Trump’s sons, World Liberty Financial, made its own attempts to benefit from the Gulf nations’ prodigal wealth. Last May, an investment firm owned by the Emirati royal family bought $2 billion of a stablecoin cryptocurrency from the company. Not long after, an Emirati foundation announced it would buy $100 million of World Liberty Financial’s house token. Taken together, these transactions are set to benefit the Trump family by $243 million.

The irony in all this is that prior to Trump entering his second term, the Trump Organization promised not to make any new deals with foreign governments while he was in office. While he hasn’t strictly violated this promise, it becomes emptier by the day as his family merrily keeps on keeping on in his place.

Take advantage of supporters for personal gain.

Trump has also found another way to fuse his presidential visibility with his business interests. In this case, it’s his supporters who are duped.

First off, Trump has a broad range of merchandise that can be bought on his online “Trump Store”. The ridiculously priced products range from the classic MAGA hat ($55) to the “Ladies of Mar-a-Lago” cashmere cardigan ($550). The prices aren’t the most outrageous part though. Typically, proceeds from campaign merch go into a candidate’s campaign fund. In Trump’s case, however, they go straight to the Trump Organization. Trump has made $27.7 million from these sales.

When supporters do make donations directly into his campaign fund, he finds other ways to use them for his own ends. Under federal law, campaign funds cannot be used for personal purposes like, say, personal legal fees. What can be used to that end are PAC funds—into which campaign donations can legally be transferred. Trump caught onto this loophole, and since 2020 has directed hundreds of millions of campaign donations into his two PACs, MAGA PAC and Save America PAC. From these two PACs he has used more than $100 million to pay his personal legal fees on suits spanning from his New York civil and criminal fraud cases to the classified documents case.

But the most ridiculous of Trump’s attempts to rip off his supporters was his creation of the $Trump memecoin. In case you’re lucky enough to not have heard of it, it’s a form of crypto that’s based on a meme and bought and sold, sometimes as a joke, but also with the hopes of being on the lucky side of its volatile shifts in value. $Trump was launched just a few days before Trump entered office, and its price skyrocketed in April when it was announced that the top 220 owners would be invited to a dinner with the President—what he described as “the most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the world.”

True to his word, in late May he hosted the dinner at his golf club in Virginia. Kirkpatrick estimates that the entire affair gained him $385 million. Predictably, this caused widespread concern that Trump was “selling access.” Considering that he was quite literally auctioning a product in order to win contact with him, that seems like an accurate diagnosis.

Change the rules of the game.

Trump’s final strategy takes us back to the world of cryptocurrency. Trump long seemed poised against crypto, saying in 2021 that “it just seems like a scam.” But Trump never met a scam he didn’t like—as long as he’s the scammer, not the mark. Crypto lobbyists who approached him during his 2024 election bid appear to have persuaded him of crypto’s potential by contributing millions to his campaign fund, both during and after the 2024 election season.

Trump also seems to have been convinced of the profitability of cryptocurrency, which in the past year has become by far his biggest cash cow. This success came at the same time as Trump made sweeping changes to the way crypto is regulated. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has seen some major changes under Trump, who established a new crypto task force within the commission soon after coming into office.

The SEC dropped or paused a range of cryptocurrency lawsuits. This included a claim against Binance, a company with business ties to World Liberty Financial. Trump also recently pardoned the former CEO of Binance on money laundering charges, despite his purported connections to terrorists. For his part, Trump claimed in an interview with 60 Minutes that he didn’t know who he was pardoning—as if that’s supposed to be comforting.

The SEC also announced that it wouldn’t regulate memecoin, the form of cryptocurrency that $Trump is. Finally, Trump disbanded the DOJ agency which regulated crypto crime, removing a key check on the industry’s activities. These regulatory changes were joined by an effort by Trump to uplift the industry through a crypto reserve like the one the U.S. maintains on gold.

All this raises serious questions about Trump’s conflicts of interests, particularly when we look at the sheer scale of the gains the Trumps have made from crypto during his time back in office. According to Kirkpatrick, Trump and his family have profited a dazzling $682.9 million from a combination of crypto mining, investments via World Liberty Financial, and Trump and his wife Melania’s personalized NFTs.

The Point

All this just scratches the surface. It doesn’t even include Trump’s state-facilitated golf course deal in Vietnam, his unsubtle product placement on Coast Guard bases, his unrestrained use of presidential power to make sure his corruption goes undetected, and a lot more. Examples of Trump’s abuses of power for personal gain could fill an entire book (and there are many).

But the bottom line is far more simple: he doesn’t care about the interests of the American people. He’s doing what he’s always done. He’s being a businessman, and a crooked one at that. He’s profiting enormously at the expense of the American people, and putting America up for sale to the highest bidder. It’s not only unethical, it puts our national security at risk.

And he’ll keep doing it…as long as we let him.

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