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As the first billionaire president of the United States, Donald Trump is nothing if not an indictment of American excess.
He’s spent over $100 million in taxpayer dollars on various golf trips, and committed millions more to gild the Oval Office in gold and dig out a massive emergency bunker under the White House’s east wing.
Those vanity projects provide the backdrop to the Trump family’s obscene pilfering in their return to power, characterized by crypto scams and government handouts to personal allies. His latest windfall, an obscene $1.4 billion earned in a single year as president, may be the most damning proof yet of just how little our elected leaders care — and how powerless the rest of us are to stop the profiteering.
New financial disclosures have revealed Trump’s massive profits for the year 2025, which is up significantly thanks to his position as president. As the New York Times notes, Trump’s total earnings the year before he returned to the White House were around $622 million.
“I found out that nobody cared,” Trump told the NYT in a two-hour interview when asked about his financial gains as president. “I’m allowed to.”
“You know, George Washington, when he was president — did you know this, in his equivalent of the White House, it was a little before the White House — he had two desks,” Trump continued. “He had a business desk and he had a president desk, and he did both. It’s OK to do that.”
His profiteering has drawn criticism from even the traditionally conservative editorial boards at the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, as well as the broader American populace. According to one Pew Research poll, 61 percent of US residents believe Trump has probably or definitely “used his office to enrich himself or his friends and family.”
The fact that a clear plurality believes this — but cannot stop it from happening — isn’t just a condemnation of Trump, but of the whole political system that granted a billionaire one of the most powerful offices on the planet.
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