Trump family’s $4 billion graft shows no signs of stopping
Donald Trump announced last week that he is suing the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion because a contractor leaked his tax returns. This isn’t the first time the president has sued the federal government. He has already filed claims against the Justice Department for $230 million over the investigations into Russian collusion and the stolen classified documents. In each of these cases, it will be up to the agencies, which he oversees, whether to settle — with him. Gosh, I wonder what he’ll decide?
When asked about this curious arrangement over the weekend, Trump told the press, “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself… We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care, because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.” Evidently, American taxpayers are going to have to pay for yet more of Trump’s grievances — and give him what will almost certainly be a nice tax write-off. That’s assuming these “very good charities” aren’t along the lines of his defunct Trump Foundation, for which he was sued by the state of New York for funneling funds to himself and barred from ever running a charity in the state again.
Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University, told the New York Times in October that Trump’s “the ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it… It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
There was a time when that would have been true. But today, the administration’s corruption and profiteering are so blatant and commonplace that they hardly merit anything but a brief notice in the media.
When the Times asked him why he was openly doing deals in his second term after largely adhering to long-held norms against conflicts of interest in his first, Trump wasn’t wrong in his response: “Because I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to.”
When the Times asked him why he was openly doing deals in his second term after largely adhering to long-held norms against conflicts of interest in his first, Trump wasn’t wrong in his response: “Because I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to.” (He went on to claim that he previously prohibited his kids from doing business and didn’t get any credit for it, and then he saw “what went on with Biden.” Trump also noted that he “has a very honest family.”)
But it isn’t exactly true that nobody cared. There were several lawsuits filed against Trump during his first term over business interests. The Supreme Court sat on them for months, as they often do with thorny questions that might require them to let their partisan flags fly, and then dismissed the cases after Trump lost the election, saying they were moot. As the Brennan Center noted at the time, “[A]ny future president can use the Trump experience as a guide to avoid the constitutional prohibition on foreign emoluments. So long as foreign governments’ political spending is laundered through a future president’s business, he or she can make the argument that this is perfectly fine since Trump did it.”
Was that prescient or what? The Brennan Center also noted that all a president with only one term has to do is run out the clock, which the courts are happy to help him do. And Trump, lucky fellow that he is, essentially has had two single terms and will almost certainly be able to do the same thing again.
He is openly fast-tracking pardons, handing them out to everyone from drug kingpins to personal business associates willing to pay top dollar to lobbyists who will advocate for them. The going rate is reportedly set at a million dollars. The money mostly goes to the middle men, but one can assume it gets spread around in various ways.
In the case of “crypto’s richest man” Changpeng Zhao, a billionaire felon who was sentenced to a four-month prison term in 2024 after pleading guilty to federal money laundering charges, that reportedly came in the form of a deal his company struck that hinged on using a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency from World Liberty Financial, a stablecoin company partially owned by a Trump family entity. The result, according to the Wall Street Journal: World Liberty’s credibility was enhanced and its market capitalization skyrocketed to over $2.1 billion (from $127 million). The paper also reported that “World Liberty raked in about $1.4 billion in revenue over the past year…far more than the president’s real-estate portfolio ever earned annually.” In October 2025, Zhao received a pardon from Trump.
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The New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick has been tracking Trump’s graft for the last several months and recently published an update to mark the president’s first year back in office. By Kirkpatrick’s reckoning — and he’s very conservative in his estimates — Trump and his family have made at least $4.05 billion in the last year alone. This does not count any of the pre-existing Trump Organization properties and businesses, and he even generously left out the “funny-money assets he couldn’t readily cash out without setting off a fire sale that would eviscerate their value,” such as Trump’s shares in his social media company Truth Social.
Most of the profits have come from crypto markets, which Trump’s son Eric is spearheading, along with special envoy Steve Witkoff’s son Zach. There is American Bitcoin, a company to which Eric and Donald Trump Jr. have lent their name and nothing else in an arrangement that makes Hunter Biden’s penny-ante Burisma deal look like a sidewalk lemonade stand. But the big one is World Liberty Financial — the very company that became entangled with Zhao. According to Kirkpatrick, the president is listed on the web site as a “co-founder emeritus” with sons Eric, Donald Jr. and Barron, along with Witkoff and his son Zach, who serves as CEO. (Again, recall the GOP’s shrieking over Hunter Biden “trading on his father’s name.”)
There have already been several scandals associated with this scheme. But this past weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported on what appears to be a massive bribe from the man known as the United Arab Emirate’s “spy sheikh.” Sheikh Tahnoon, a senior member of the Emirati royal family, reportedly took a secret ownership deal worth $500 million in World Liberty just prior to Trump’s inauguration. A couple of months later, the U.S. agreed to sell advanced artificial intelligence chips to the UAE, a move that surprised most national security experts, since up until then there had been serious concerns about them being diverted to China. According to the Journal, Witkoff — Trump’s Middle East envoy — also got a $31 million piece of the action.
Considering the vast sums that are changing hands, it’s grimly amusing that Trump himself is still hawking consumer goods, including an online merchandise store owned by the Trump Organization. (He also has a little “store” in the White House where he keeps the merch to give away to foreign dignitaries anxious to get their hands on a “Trump was right about everything” hat.)
At this point, you may be wondering if the Republican House Oversight Committee, which spent years investigating Biden and his son’s dealings in Ukraine from a decade before, will be looking into these billion dollar deals. The answer is no. Kentucky Rep. James Comer, who chairs the committee, explained that “the difference between the way the Trump family operates and the Biden family is they’re admitting they’re doing this.”
Apparently, the new rules are that the more flagrant the corruption the more legal it is.
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