The journalist behind a bombshell report detailing the staggering amount of money that President Donald Trump’s second term is raking in for the first family said Trump and Co. have cashed in on the presidency at an unprecedented rate.
The New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick calculated that Trump, his children, and their spouses will earn more than $3.4 billion thanks largely to deals, transactions, and investments that almost certainly would not have happened if Trump were just a real estate agent and reality TV star.
During an interview Sunday with MSNBC’s The Weekend Primetime, Kirkpatrick said other presidents and their children have found ways of “cashing in” with book deals and speaker fees but that it was all “small change” compared to the Trump family deals.
“The speed at which he and the family are doing it, they seem to turn down no opportunity,” he said.
Since Trump won re-election in November, the Trump family has announced deals for a new Trump Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a Trump-branded luxury golf course in Qatar that will be part of a $5.5 billion development project, and a $1 billion Trump hotel and residence in Dubai.
Other venture include cryptocurrency investments that now rival the Trump family real estate portfolio; a private members-only club in Washington, D.C., called The Executive Branch; venture capital investments; and various low-grade Trump memorabilia and souvenirs.
Also, the Qatari royal family is gifting Trump a luxury Boeing 747-8.
Kirkpatrick told MSNBC that he didn’t include some of the sketchier crypto ventures, like the Trump family meme coins, but that he did include the family’s Bitcoin holdings for a key reason.
The Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns the Truth Social platform, trades in meme stocks, meaning the company trades its stock at an irrational price that is basically just a barometer of how Trump’s supporters feel about him, Kirkpatrick explained.
The president owns 42 percent of the company, and he can’t sell his stock because the price would collapse. So his team has taken the irrationally inflated stock and swapped it for about $3 billion in cash and Bitcoin, giving Trump an influx of about $1 billion in just the past two months.
The situation is all the more remarkable because not only is Trump still in office, but he vowed at the beginning of his first term that he and his family would not do anything that could even be perceived as exploiting the presidency for personal profit.
“If I was a foreign government considering doing business with the Trump Organization as a way to try to curry favor with the president—perhaps to get some sort of official act in my benefit—I have to believe that I would see that eagerness for money and think, ‘Yeah, there’s an OK chance here that if I do business with the Trump Organization, they really want that money. It might work out for me,’” Kirkpatrick said.
In response to his comments, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Daily Beast in a statement, “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read. Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”
Trump’s children have also denied getting rich off the White House.
“If there’s one family that hasn’t profited off politics, it’s the Trump family,” son Eric Trump told the Financial Times in June.
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