Posts Tagged ‘Trump’
“If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.”*…
Stoicism is having a moment. The estimable Timothy Snyder considers the events of the day in the light of Marcus Aurelius‘ thoughts– and actions…
As Donald Trump announced his whimsy war in Iran, I was reading about another imperial campaign, long ago, against an Iranian people.
In the late second century AD, the Roman Empire confronted armies that had crossed the border at the Danube River and even broached the Alps in northern Italy. Among them were the Iazyges, speakers of an Iranian language, who hailed from the Ukrainian steppe.
In Ukraine this February, I was learning about an archaeological find which reveals the interactions of the Romans and the Iazyges, which included alliance as well as enmity. The Roman war against the Iazyges allies was commanded personally by Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who spent the years between 171 and 180 AD at the front. During that time he kept a philosophical diary, probably written at night in his tent. Discovered after his death, that text, known as the Meditations, is a great work of Stoic philosophy.
I turned to the Meditations to see if I could learn anything that would help me to understand the work of Ukrainian archaeologists about the interactions between Romans and Iazyges. I found something else: perspective on the wars of today, and a sense of why, beyond his obvious incompetence in military matters, Trump had to lose his.
It was shaming to read the bombast of Trump: (”no president was willing to do what I have done tonight”) alongside the reflections of Marcus (“when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves.”) Trump broadcast his arrogance to millions of people; Marcus wrote for himself.
Despite the fact he was commanding an army at the front, Marcus never mentioned the war in his Meditations. War was simply something he had to do; he had no difficulty seeing the other side as people, or understanding their motivations. He mentions the Iazyges only once in the text: to make a broader point about hubris, to suggest that it was wrong for Romans to take pride in taking a prisoner of war.
Although Marcus did not broach the subject of my interest, I could not stop reading his Meditations. The contrast with Trump’s utterances was astounding, and vertiginous. The one could spend nine years in command and write a philosophical diary in which he did not even mention the war; the other immediately leapt to praise himself for a war he would lose in weeks…
[With an focus on the “adventure in Iran,” Snyder elaborates the (painfully unflattering) comparison…]
… The American leaders had no idea of who they were or what they wanted, aside from the satisfaction of their emotional needs by the killing of others. They were unable to imagine that people on the other side might have ideas about their own interests and plans for their own behavior. The could not see the world, even in its plainest representation as geography; whereas Marcus exploited a bend in the Danube River to tactical advantage to win a battle; Trump chose to ignore the physical limit the Straits of Hormuz can place on world trade. As soon as the war began, the Iranians did the obvious: they responded to American long-range attacks with the same; and they blocked the Straits.
Because the Americans were operating without a sense of themselves, of the world, or other people, this came as a surprise. Marcus Aurelius offers this mild comment: “How absurd — and a complete stranger to the world– is the man surprised at any aspect of his experience in life!”
The Americans, strangers to the world, reacted to their feelings of surprise with fantasies of destruction. The pleasure they took in killing became a vision of annihilation. Rather than confront the errors they made about war, the Americans leapt to visions of violence in which no one would ever have to think again. Trump lost control on Easter Sunday when he tweeted: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” He then promised that he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age, where they belong” and said that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” In our modern legal and ethical language, this is of course genocidal language. The American bombast was followed by American surrender.
Marcus Aurelius won his war against the Iazyges. He combined victory and prudence, and for this he was and will be remembered. The defeated Iazyges returned to their previous role as Roman clients, offered thousands of cavalrymen as soldiers of Rome, and opened trade routes to the east. Marcus’s philosophical diary has been read for the better part of two millenia; so long as we are present as a literate civilization, it will be read. Despite Marcus’s certainty that we will all be forgotten, others built a victory column in his honor after his death; it still stands in Rome, more than one thousand eight hundred years later.
Another legacy of Marcus’s victory also touches the center of what we think of as Western culture. As part of the peace accord, he dispatched 5,500 Iazyges cavalrymen, taken into his service, to the north of what is now northern England, to defend the Roman border at Hadrian’s Wall. Their first commander was a man named Arthur, and it is possible that the Iazyges and some of their Iranian-speaking kin incorporated his name into stories of their own — of a lady in the lake, of a sword in a stone, of a quest for a golden cup — which, with time, became the legend of Christian chivalry. That is another story, and one worth telling.
But it is also part of the story of Marcus Aurelius, which, despite the fact that he chose not to tell it himself, or rather precisely for that reason, is instructive about our predicament today. Stoicism is a way not to be a stranger to the world; it can protect the powerful from vanity and folly. To fall into a stupor of self-absorption, as Trump has done, is to flee from reality. Few wars are worth fighting; those that are fought can only be won in the world, and not within the tortured confines of estranged minds. Trump hastens now towards our shared horizon of death, seeking honors that only posterity can accord and will not…
On what Trump could– and should– learn from Marcus Aurelius: “Of Stoicism and Stupor,” from @timothysnyder.bsky.social.
“We are the other of the other”
“Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?”
“Kindness is invincible.”
– Marcus Aurelius
(TotH to MKM)
* Marcus Aurelius
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As we barrel back to basics, we might recall that it was on this date in 1956 that Elvis Presley, working for the first time with backing vocal group the Jordanaires, recorded “Don’t Be Cruel,” which had been written by Otis Blackwell.
The single was released on July 13, 1956, backed with “Hound Dog.” Within a few weeks “Hound Dog” had risen to No. 2 on the Pop charts with sales of over one million. Soon after it was overtaken by “Don’t Be Cruel,” which took No. 1 on all three main charts; Pop, Country, and R&B. Between them, both songs remained at No. 1 on the Pop chart for a run of 11 weeks. “Don’t Be Cruel” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002. In 2004, it was ranked No. 197 in Rolling Stone’s list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”*…
As the U.S. prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore unpack the ways in which in Trump administration is working to control the country’s future by bulldozing its past. They open with a recounting of the marking of the 250th birthday of the Army (and of Donald Trump’s birthday) last June: several thousand came to watch the military parade; an estimated 5 million Americans held counter-protests…
… spectators had lined up for hours to get inside the security perimeter. Uniformed troops were handing out free bottles of Phorm Energy—a beverage launched nationally the month before by Anheuser-Busch and Dana White, a vocal Trump supporter who runs the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Phorm, which bills itself as the “ultimate energy drink,” is an official sponsor of America250, a government-funded nonprofit organizing a series of celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday, culminating on July 4 this year. When asked, a soldier explained he had been ordered to hand out the samples—despite Defense Department rules that bar the military from endorsing “a particular company, product, service, or website.” The Pentagon didn’t answer questions about this apparent violation…
But the parade was simply a warm-up…
… So it goes with the Trump administration’s approach to the country’s semiquincentennial. Congress is expected to allocate some $150 million for the festivities, but that’s not enough to fulfill Trump’s vision. So corporations with links to the president or his inner circle—UFC, Palantir, Oracle, Amazon, Coinbase—have signed on as sponsors, pouring in millions of dollars alongside companies like Chrysler, Coca-Cola, and General Mills…
… America250 and the White House insist they are planning nonpartisan festivities for all Americans, rather than creating a slush fund to throw the president militarized birthday parties and advance hard-right ideology. But in reality, American history is being subordinated to Trump’s cult of personality. The president’s face is suddenly everywhere—next to George Washington on America250-themed National Parks passes; alongside Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on giant banners hanging from federal buildings; on a $1 coin under consideration by the US Treasury.
Faced with sporadic pushback from a congressional commission overseeing America250 and from career officials at various agencies, Trump is now seeking to evade even these modest constraints. In December, he launched a new organization, Freedom 250, that could implement his most outlandish anniversary events without the inconvenience of legislative oversight or mandatory bipartisanship. For the president’s 80th birthday this year, Freedom 250 will help organize a UFC fight on the White House lawn.
The semiquincentennial is just one part of the commander in chief’s broader campaign to harness the mechanisms of the federal government to enforce his preferred version of the nation’s history and culture—a Trumpified presentation of America’s past and present. On the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, the administration even rolled out a taxpayer-funded webpage seeking to recast the day’s events as a patriotic effort to protest “the fraudulent election.” Three weeks later, Trump’s FBI seized hundreds of thousands of 2020 ballots and other election material from Georgia’s largest county. “TRUMP WON BIG,” the president declared the next morning. “Crooked Election!”
Since his inauguration last year, Trump has taken personal control of the Kennedy Center—reshaping its artistic programming, installing a MAGA-dominated board that claims to have renamed it in his honor, and then closing it for renovations. He’s railed against “OUT OF CONTROL” museums that he insists are too focused on “how bad Slavery was.” He has successfully pressured the Smithsonian Institution to review displays to ensure “unbiased content” and has extracted significant concessions over what top universities teach students. At his direction, the National Park Service has altered or removed scores of exhibits at parks and historic sites on topics including slavery, Native Americans, climate change, and even fossils. Trump acolytes are also leveraging federal dollars to stop local librarians and educators from sharing content they dislike.
Under the pretense of stamping out “woke” ideas and promoting patriotism, the White House is attempting to mandate uncritical acceptance of its own take on the American story, one that celebrates the martial feats of mostly white men and an imagined religious and ideological conformity that minimizes the fights, tribulations, and dissenters who have defined the country. It’s an effort that flies in the face of American ideals—and reality.
“In a pluralist democracy, there are invariably conflicts of values,” says Alexander Karn, a Colgate University historian who has written about the 250th anniversary. “To deny that messiness by seeking to erase the perspectives that don’t flatter a dominant group or help create a triumphal history is anti-egalitarian and, therefore, anti-democratic.”
Instead, Karn argues, “the road to a ‘more perfect Union,’ which is enshrined in the Constitution, runs through the past, and it depends on our willingness to confront our history in an honest and thoroughgoing way.”
Which is not the road we’re on…
[Friedman and Moore supply much more detail on the revisionist (in some case, “suppressionist”) efforts underway, and their relationship to the MAGA agenda. They conclude…]
…Rallies that celebrate a simplified, sanctified historical narrative have long been a favorite tool of autocrats. “Dictators brook no opposition, and this extends to the past,” says Karn, the Colgate historian. “When a dictator is intent on creating or sustaining a hierarchical social order, he will see to it that history abides.”
The military parade through Washington four days later proved to be a clumsy prelude for Trump’s very real efforts to deploy troops, along with heavily armed federal agents, on the streets of even more cities—often against the wishes of local officials. To justify sending the National Guard to Portland, the president made false claims about widespread violence, perhaps because Fox News repeatedly re-aired violent footage from 2020 as though it were part of the 2025 anti-ICE protests.
Since August, the Labor Department’s DC headquarters has displayed an America250-branded banner with a Mao-style image of Trump above the words “American Workers First.” The spectacle drew attention when National Guard members deployed by Trump were photographed beneath it—an image that captures the authoritarian ethos of his second term.
The troops, supposedly dispatched to Washington to fight crime, are now staying on in connection with the semiquincentennial. In an October court filing, the DC attorney general revealed that Guard leaders were planning for a prolonged deployment. “We know that America250 occurs this summer, and that will be a factor in determining the future of the mission,” a Guard commanding general wrote in an email included in the filing. In January, Trump officially extended the DC operation through the end of 2026, even as he bowed to court rulings blocking him from unleashing the armed forces on other parts of the country.
That Trump’s enthusiasm for the domestic use of troops is merging with America’s 250th festivities is almost too easy a metaphor. To celebrate the anniversary of a war sparked in part by the quartering of soldiers in US cities, the administration is lengthening a military occupation vehemently opposed by the local population.
A quarter-millennium later, amid “No Kings” protests and an unprecedented executive power grab, the arguments against tyranny that inspired American independence are alive and pressing. It seems worth asking whether America250 will celebrate the ideals of the country’s founders—or those of the monarch they rebelled against…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Trump’s War on History,” from @dfriedman.bsky.social and @noturtlesoup17.bsky.social in @motherjones.com.
* George Orwell, 1984
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As we face the past, we might send heliocentric birthday greetings to Galileo Galilei, the physicist, philosopher, and pioneering astronomer; he was born on this date in 1564. Galileo (whom, readers will recall, had his share of trouble with authorities displeased with his challenge to Aristotelean cosmology), died insisting “still, it [the Earth] moves.”
Draft of Galileo’s letter to Leonardo Donato, Doge of Venice, in which he first recorded the movement of the moons of Jupiter– an observation that upset the notion that all celestial bodies must revolve around the Earth. (source)
“See, all our people are businessmen. Their loyalty’s based on that.”*…
In his nifty newsletter, Benedict Evans observes…
In ‘Godfather II,’ the Cuban representative of ITT gave President Batista a solid gold telephone. In 2025, Apple’s Tim Cook gave President Trump a piece of Corning Glass on a gold plinth…
See this University of Florida piece for more background on the 1959 “gift” to Bautita and the corruption it came to symbolize. (But note that the U of F note incorretly attributes the gesture to AT&T; it was in fact from ITT.) And see Tim Cook pay Apple’s “tribute” here.
Apposite: “A UFC fight at the White House.”
Oh, and (from The Onion): “Frito-Lay CEO Gifts Trump Gold Funyun.”
* “Michael Corleone” (Al Pacino), The Godfather Part II
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As we ponder payola, we might remind ourselves that things have been– and can again be– different: on this date in 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, part of his New Deal program that created a government pension system for the retired.
By 1930, the United States was, along with Switzerland, the only modern industrial country without any national social security system. Amid the Great Depression, the physician Francis Townsend galvanized support behind a proposal to issue direct payments to older people. Responding to that movement, Roosevelt organized a committee led by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins to develop a major social welfare program proposal. Roosevelt presented the plan in early 1935 and signed the Social Security Act into law on August 14, 1935. The Supreme Court upheld the act in two major cases decided in 1937.
The law established the Social Security program. The old-age program is funded by payroll taxes, and over the ensuing decades, it contributed to a dramatic decline in poverty among older people, and spending on Social Security became a significant part of the federal budget. The Social Security Act also established an unemployment insurance program [only a few states had poorly-funded programs at the time] administered by the states and the Aid to Dependent Children program, which provided aid to families headed by single mothers. The law was later amended by acts such as the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which established two major healthcare programs: Medicare and Medicaid.
“What protectionism teaches us to do to ourselves in time of peace is what enemies seek to do to us in time of war”*…
This post, written on July 29, is dropping on August 1, the deadline set by President Trump for the imposition of “reciprocal tariffs.” Here, in spirit of a search for a silver lining, Paul Kedrosky with an argument that, while the traiffs are both prima facie and fundamentally a bad idea, they could lead to a good place…
Tariffs are dumb. They distort trade, favor inefficient local producers, cause trading partners to retaliate, and make people worse off than a world without them. On these points, economists almost universally agree.
But tariffs are not useless. They may even be sort of, almost, kinda, a … good idea in these very weird U.S. circumstances.
Hear me out, because three things are going on, so it can get messy:
- The U.S. is, as the line goes, an insurance company with an army, which has straitjacketed its budget, which I’ve written about previously.
- The U.S. hates taxes, and most voters are innumerate, so it finds silly ways to hide them.
- Tariffs are a kind of horrible, second-best solution to the above problems.
The first two points are mostly self-explanatory. Entitlements plus defence are now around 70% of the U.S. budget—see also, insurance company with an army—leaving little room to do much other than cut, unless you find new revenue. But new revenue is hard, because Americans hate income taxes, and have long resisted carbon taxes or a value-added tax (VAT). They aren’t coping well with what I’ve called life under 2%.
Enter tariffs. They raise money because consumers buy things. We can argue about whether the producing companies pay the tariff (they mostly don’t), or whether consumers pay it via higher prices (they mostly do), but the effect is the same: consumers buying things increases government revenue. That is tariff income.
So far, so … suboptimal. Because tariffs aren’t a good tool for this. I will come to why they aren’t very good in a few paragraphs, but they distort, create weird incentives, invite retaliation, etc.
A much better tool is a value-added tax (VAT), a broad tax applied to consumer purchases of goods and services. Most countries have one, including all of the OECD except for the U.S.
It is generally agreed that VATs are a good idea, that they can be less distorting than income taxes. And, most importantly, if you’re a government, they produce gobs of income for countries that have them. How much income? The average nation’s VAT income is around 6% of GDP.
So, why doesn’t the U.S. have a VAT of its own? After all, the country has what are often obfuscated as significant long-term fiscal challenges. These mostly revolve around trying to run a costly modern social democracy on a low-tax system. This mathematically intractable “challenge” is made worse by a healthcare system unrivaled for all the looting intermediaries demanding to be seen instead as paragons of competition and capitalism.
There are various reasons for having no U.S. VAT, but the most important is in the name: it is a tax. And Americans hate taxes. Just ask them. The U.S. government cheerily indulges them in their hatred of taxes by cutting the taxes they can see, like income taxes, and hiding the ones they can’t, like the pre-tax corporate deductibility of healthcare premiums (costing $300b and 1.5% of GDP). This has costly & malign effects, like a 6+% structural budgetary deficit and the most screwed-up and expensive healthcare system in the world…
… The U.S. is foregoing approximately $2.8 trillion annually in potential VAT revenue at an OECD-average rate. Even at half that rate—because, America!—a U.S. VAT might produce, all else equal, around $1.4 trillion a year.
To put that in a kind of context, the current U.S. budget deficit is around $1.8-trillion a year. A VAT set at even half of OECD average levels would nearly zero out the U.S. deficit. (And, of course, reforming U.S. healthcare by eliminating premium pre-tax deductibility, instituting universal Medicare Lite, and requiring catastrophe insurance would flip the U.S. to surpluses, but I digress.)
Let’s now turn to tariffs. Like a VAT, they are broad consumption taxes, just not applied defensibly. They are applied only to imports, not to everything bought and sold in the country. This makes no sense, unless you think tariffs aren’t taxes (they are), and you think tariffed companies pay them (they don’t). So, Americans.
But tariffs are a species of VAT, albeit a poorly designed one. A universal tariff on imported goods—say, at 15%—would raise VAT-lite revenues. Based on recent data, U.S. annual imports are around $4 trillion. Applying a uniform 15% tariff to manufactured goods, which is 80-ish% of that. might yield roughly $300-$400 billion annually. While this is a fraction of the revenue of an actual VAT, it is real money. The choice then is not between a perfect VAT and an imperfect tariff, but between an imperfect tariff and continued reliance on deficit financing or distortionary taxes on labor and capital income.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, you might rightly protest. This is just a bad solution. Sure, but it is, in practical terms, a “second-best solution”, even if it is also perhaps the second-worst.
We should want more second-best solutions, economics tells us, if the alternative is doing nothing. There is a framework, with which I won’t bore you, that says it’s okay to do something less than perfect, if by doing so you counteract some of the problems preventing you from doing the best thing.
In this case, American politics prevents an actual VAT from happening, so perhaps tariffs aren’t so bad, if the alternative real distortion is structural deficits. To that way of thinking, distorting trade via a uniform tariff (a second distortion) may increase overall welfare relative to the status quo (deficits), despite being shitty trade policy.
And, if we want to spitball here, tariffs could even lay the groundwork politically and psychologically for a future transition to an actual big-boy VAT. Citizens and businesses might recognize that consumption taxation you can see is better than consumption taxation that you can’t. A future administration could leverage dissatisfaction with tariffs to propose replacing them with a more economically efficient and lower-rate VAT. Politically, the VAT would then become not a “new” tax but rather a tax cut (in rate terms only) eliminating import tariffs.
The debate over tariffs versus VATs is about the current structural problem in U.S. budget, a refusal to recognize life under 2%. Economically ideal policies frequently fail politically, leaving policymakers with second-best solutions. Tariffs, undeniably flawed and distortionary, are a usefully ugly compromise. They generate meaningful revenue, shift some production domestically, and potentially serve as a stepping-stone toward a VAT.
[Lest we got our hope up too high… Kedrosky is addressing the revenue half of the equation. But where and how that money is spent (whether raised by tariffs or a VAT) obviously matters absolutely. It’s clear from the examples he cites along the way, that Kedrosky would see that income most usefully applied to the social infrastructure that, as he observes, we have (to put it politely) neglected. Sadly, the “Big Beautiful Bill” and the rhetoric that surrounds it suggest that the Trump administration has other, darker plans, beefing up Defense and Homeland Security and creating a “sovereign wealth fund“… all of which could all-too-easily (and obviously) go horribly wrong, creating more damage in the form of social infrastructure destruction, and souring the public on the very idea of Federal action. Still, as Kedrosky concludes…]
Hey, a boy can dream, can’t he?…
Tariffs are a bad idea.. but could they lead somewhere good? “Tariffs are Dumb Enough to (Almost) Work,” from @paulkedrosky.com.
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As we search for silver linings, we might recall that it was on this date in 2023, that Justice Deartment Special Counsel Jack Smith unveiled the case alleging that then-former President Donald Trump broke several laws in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election…
On June 8, 2023, a grand jury in the Southern Florida U.S. District Court indicted Trump on 37 felony counts, including charges of willful retention of national security material, obstruction of justice and conspiracy, relating to his removal and retention of presidential materials from the White House after his presidency ended. Thirty-one of the counts fell under the Espionage Act.
On August 1, 2023, a grand jury for the District of Columbia U.S. District Court issued a four-count indictment of Trump for conspiracy to defraud the United States under Title 18 of the United States Code, obstructing an official proceeding and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding under the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, and conspiracy against rights under the Enforcement Act of 1870 for his conduct following the 2020 presidential election through the January 6 Capitol attack.
Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges in both indictments. Trials were scheduled but never held.
On July 15, 2024, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents prosecution against Donald Trump, siding with the former president’s argument that special counsel Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed.
On November 25, 2024, Smith announced that he was seeking to drop all charges against Donald Trump in the aftermath of Trump’s victory in the 2024 United States presidential election. The Justice Department, by policy, does not prosecute sitting presidents of the United States.
Smith submitted his final report to the Justice Department on January 7, 2025, and resigned three days later…
… [In fact] The special counsel prepared a two-volume final report: the first volume about the election obstruction case, and the second volume about the classified documents case.
Trump’s lawyers were allowed to review Smith’s final report from January 3–6, 2025 in a room where they could not use their electronic devices. They objected to the report’s release. On January 6, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira (who could still face criminal charges in the classified documents case asked the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to stop its release to avoid influencing their case, and the next day, Judge Aileen Cannon blocked the report’s release until three days after the 11th Circuit decided. Later in the evening on January 7, the special counsel provided both volumes to the attorney general, and the next day, the Department of Justice said it would release the first volume publicly and may provide a redacted version of the second volume for a limited review by select members of Congress. On January 9, the 11th Circuit allowed the release of the first volume, and on January 13, Cannon said she would likewise allow it, given that her own authority was limited to the classified documents case. On January 14, the 137-page first volume was released.
– source
The 137-page report that was released is here.
The matter did not, of course, rest there. In 2024, in Trump v. United States, filed in response to the Smith indictments, the Supreme Court determined that presidential immunity from criminal prosecution presumptively extends to all of a president’s “official acts” – with absolute immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate. (In practice, as we’ve seen in 2025, his immunity seems to extend even to things that Congress is supposed to regulate.)
“I seen my opportunities and I took em”*…
Since he kicked off his campaign, Trump’s business empire has landed billions of dollars of deals at home and abroad. Max Abelson and Annie Massa bring the receipts…
The way Donald Trump sees it, he’s the greatest businessman to campaign for the White House.
“I’m the most successful person ever to run,” he told an Iowa reporter in 2015. “I have a Gucci store that’s worth more than Romney.”
That might have been an exaggeration, but this isn’t: A decade later, no modern American president has positioned his family to make so much money while in the White House. Already, since the early days of his reelection campaign, he’s more than doubled his net worth to about $5.4 billion.
In that time, the Trump name has powered more than $10 billion of real estate projects, a multibillion-dollar valuation for his money-losing social-media company, more than $500 million in sales from just one of his crypto ventures and millions of dollars more from stakes in companies that offer financial services, guns and drone parts. Family members have also scored an array of corporate positions — at least seven new roles as an adviser or executive for his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., alone.
Compared with the tumult of the presidency, the empire’s approach is consistent and clear: Sell the family name. In any other era, this scale of presidential moneymaking would threaten to be the story of the year, but political uproar has hogged most of the attention.
In his first months in power, Trump put tariffs on and took some off, blamed Ukraine for Russia’s attacks, sent immigrants to a foreign prison and teased a third term that the Constitution doesn’t allow. And as he’s hacked away at the government’s workforce and budget, he’s shrunk the agencies and offices that oversee his public company, crypto projects and even conflicts of interest.
Trump has loosened constraints on overseas dealmaking that were put in place in his last administration. (He also let Elon Musk, the billionaire leading an effort to slash government spending, police his own conflicts). This week, he’s scheduled to dine with his new memecoin’s top holders.
What makes this era even more remarkable is how close Trump came to ruin. His first term ended with a riot at the Capitol, later followed by a $454 million civil fraud judgment and his conviction for falsifying business records. Trump has appealed both.
Now, his assets are in a trust overseen by his oldest son. And despite talk of a recession, the clan stands to get richer than ever.
“President Trump has been the most transparent president in history in all respects, including when it comes to his finances,” said a White House spokesperson. “President Trump handed over his multibillion-dollar empire in order to serve our country, and he has sacrificed greatly. President Trump has disclosed his financial holdings through his annual financial disclosure report and he will continue to do so.”
Trump Jr. said he shouldn’t be expected to change his career on account of his dad’s power.
“I’m a private citizen who has been a businessman and serial investor my entire adult life,” he said in a statement. “It’s ridiculous to expect me to stop doing what I’ve always done to provide for my five children just because my dad was elected president.”
These are the corporate connections, crypto projects and licensing deals — all of them since the 2024 campaign began — that the Trumps are using to climb higher than ever…
The gory (and mind-boggling) details: “The Trump Family’s Money-Making Machine” (gift link) from @bloomberg.com.
Apposite: “A World of MAGA Liquor Is Exploding Online. But What If It’s Not Real?“
* “Everybody is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.” — George Washington Plunkitt, New York State Senator and “Sage of Tammany Hall” (See also)
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As we ponder probity (and its absence), we might spare a thought for Jonathan Wild; he died on this date in 1725. An English thief-taker and a major figure in the organization and growth of London’s criminal underworld, he was notable for operating on both sides of the law: posing as a public-spirited vigilante known as the “Thief-Taker General,” he simultaneously ran a significant criminal empire, and used his crimefighting role to remove rivals and launder the proceeds of his own crimes (fencing, but also selling goods he’d stolen back to their owners).
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