Donald Trump, grifter-in-chief

Talking of those, Trump probably thinks Carter was a sucker for not making millions from the presidency. That is how far the USA has fallen, and it is Trump who has pulled it down.

For Trump, the presidency is not a job of service but a vehicle of vengeance and a goose that lays golden eggs. 

Before Trump first made it to the White House, it is far from clear that he was actually anything like as wealthy as he liked to make us think. He certainly would be a far wealthier man if he had put his inheritance from his father ($500 million in today’s money) into the stock market, which has grown much faster than Trump’s business empire has. 

In fact, his business career has been littered with failures, bankruptcies, and a great deal of tax-dodging and alleged fraud, mainly by overvaluing his property assets in order to borrow vast amounts. Plenty of this borrowing has been done at very high rates of interest because the banks don’t trust Trump, mainly because he has defaulted so often. Not normally the behaviour of the successful entrepreneur. 

Trump’s star rose in the late 1980s – his 1987 book The Art of the Deal was a blockbuster – but by the early ‘90s he had suffered two embarrassing hotel bankruptcies. His entire casino chain went bust in 2004, and let’s face it, losing money while running casinos is a pretty tough thing to do. 

But in that same year, The Apprentice TV show saved Trump, helping to make his name into a brand that he can charge others to use. The Trump brand is now worth billions, and its value was massively boosted by his becoming president again; his name is on (usually gaudy) products including ties, Bibles, perfume, watches and even urine tests. 

Trump’s grift begins with milking the American state, shamelessly.  All those trips to his golf resorts mean hundreds of officials, security staff and hangers-on have to stay at his hotels and the taxpayer pays their bills directly to Trump’s business empire. The American lobby group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) found in the first six months of Trump’s second term there has been “a dramatic escalation of his presidential profiteering.”

Their research found that in that time, Trump made 99 visits to his properties, including 62 golf trips. Officials from 10 foreign governments have made 19 visits, and 49 events have been held at Trump properties by interest groups, political committees and foreign governments. It is shameless. 

But this is all just petty cash to Trump. One of his biggest recent earners has been to blackmail media companies that need government approval for deals by suing them for millions. CBS’s owner Paramount agreed to pay Trump’s presidential library $16 million to settle a spurious claim that it portrayed Kamala Harris in a too favourable light, with Paramount knowing full well that Trump could block its planned merger with Skydance Media unless it paid up. He also gouged $15 million out of ABC, which said – truthfully – that he had been found responsible in court for a rape. 

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This serves a dual purpose of gagging the press from reporting the truth and filling the coffers of his presidential library, which can now also boast of a $400 million Boeing 747 jet – or it will after the gift from the Qatari government to Trump has been retrofitted at taxpayers’ expense to be the new Air Force One. After Trump leaves office, his library gets to keep the jet, even though currently the law forbids the President from accepting gifts from foreign governments worth more than $480. 

Yet this is small potatoes next to the world of cryptocurrencies, from which Trump is said to have made $1.2billion. He is a majority shareholder in the crypto company World Liberty Financial, which boasts of its connections to the president and his circle. The New York Times describes it as “eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history”.

Meghan Faulkner from CREW told me that they calculated “Trump has made $3.4 billion from his two presidential terms” and that “the killing that he has made from crypto in the last six months is still just becoming clear… .these business ventures are directly linked to his role as president, and it is certainly on the scale of billions of dollars.” 

Trump’s crypto cons have all been embraced by MAGA supporters who believe that everything Trump touches turns to gold, and by investors eager to capitalise on that belief before selling at the right time.

Trump’s rapid enrichment through crypto is made much worse by the fact that the Biden administration was well advanced in attempts to regulate the wild west crypto world and was trying to prosecute several firms for not protecting their clients’ money. Trump has ended several of those lawsuits and is letting the market rip; he is even planning to let pension funds speculate in crypto. 

Then there are the deals which appear to be a direct pay-off for US foreign policy under President Trump. He cannot see a trouble spot without wanting to build a Trump hotel or golf course on it. Business deals are higher on the agenda than ceasefires and genocide.

Eric seems to follow the president around the Gulf, signing deals worth billions in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai and Oman. Countries which are not renowned for their anti-corruption policies and have obviously learnt the new White House rules very quickly: if you want the backing of the US and its military, you have to pay the president.  

Another relative, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, is also a useful conduit for those wanting to keep Trump happy. His investment company has received $4.8 billion in cash from Middle East investors, including Qatar and Abu Dhabi. This is chump change to the Gulf states but it is enough to make the Trump family rich beyond the dreams of avarice for generations to come. 

Laughably, the White House claims that there is no conflict of interest because Trump’s “assets are in a trust managed by his children”. Can you imagine Hunter Biden or Chelsea Clinton getting away with that one! “It’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency,” Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt has said. “This president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country.”

In a sane America, Trump’s plain-sight corruption of the presidency would lead to impeachment, removal from office and prosecution. But he doesn’t have to worry about any of that because the right wing Republican-dominated Supreme Court has now given the president unlimited powers to pardon anyone, including himself, of any crime. He is free to plunder the presidency at will, and he has almost three-and-a-half more years to do just that.

In the past, such blatant corruption would have destroyed the president – he would be another Nixon. Michael Johnston, a political science professor at New York’s Colgate University, doesn’t think that can happen with Trump. 

As he told me from his home in Austin Texas, “There is a chance of his coalition fracturing over Epstein but not over this style of corruption. His power is not based on his policies but on personal fealty and that is a difficult thing to dispel in the courts or the ballot box.” Enough people believe Trump to be honest, to be on their side and to be the victim of “fake news”, and Republicans know that if any of them turn on him they will be destroyed.  

Meghan Faulkner from CREW told me, “President Trump has shown us that our system that led to presidents declaring their tax returns, divesting from business interests, putting their stocks into mutual funds, which presidents from both parties did for decades, was just based on the good faith of those presidents caring about ethics.” And nothing more. But Trump obviously doesn’t even understand the meaning of the word ethics. 

Jimmy Carter must be spinning in his grave, because the billions Trump has taken from the presidency are hardly peanuts.