Although the notion that Trump is making colossal sums off the Presidency has become commonplace, nobody could tell me how much he’s made. Norm Eisen, a government-ethics lawyer and a vocal Trump critic, said, “We don’t know the full amounts.” Robert Weissman, a co-president of the left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen, said, “We will never really know.” Wertheimer noted that for decades Trump had boasted constantly, and in detail, about how rich he was. “He doesn’t talk about it anymore,” Wertheimer said. “He may be the greatest con artist in American history.”
A more considered accounting seemed in order. I decided to attempt to tally up just how much Trump and his immediate family have pocketed off his time in the White House.
He makes the case that Trump isn’t (yet) a true oligarch in the classic sense of the word, offering up a number of examples of those who simply drain the national treasury into their personal coffers. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t exploiting his position for maximum benefit:
Personal self-enrichment is where Trump is a true innovator, and his winnings in that category are also harder to quantify. On his tax returns, Trump has aggressively minimized the value of his assets and maximized the extent of his losses. On loan applications, he’s done the opposite, puffing up his wealth to borrow as much as possible. And on the financial-disclosure forms he’s been required to file as a candidate or as President, he usually provides only a business’s gross revenue, not its bottom line, thus reporting tens of millions of dollars in “income” from hotels that are actually losing money.
Bruce Dubinsky, a forensic accountant who testified in the fraud trial of Bernie Madoff and investigated the collapse of Lehman Brothers as a part of its bankruptcy, closely followed Trump’s New York fraud trial. Dubinsky told me that the opaque ownership structure of the Trump businesses makes it difficult to assess changes in his net worth. It’s similarly hard to isolate his Presidential profits, in part because estimating how much his businesses might have made if he weren’t President would require detailed comparisons with similar enterprises that have non-Presidential owners. By way of example, Dubinsky, who lives in Florida, noted that he’d recently visited the Trump golf course in Jupiter, “just to play golf.” He added, “So how much value to assign to his status as President is a daunting task.”
He looks at Mar-a-lago, Trump merch and legal fees, the D.C. hotel, middle eastern “deals”, the private jet, Trump Hotel Hanoi, the “corporate squeeze”, Truth Social, 1789 Capital, and his crypto schemes. The running total? $3.4 billion.
Read the whole thing in detail if you can to see how vast his corruption truly is. It’s mind-boggling.
And he will never pay any price.