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David D. Kirkpatrick
Staff writer
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It has been a lucrative year
for the Trump family. In just the past six months or so, a bitcoin
mining company headed by Eric Trump brought the family more than a
hundred million dollars. Promotions by a major crypto exchange (whose
founder the President recently pardoned) have positioned the family to
pull in about a hundred and thirty-six million dollars. A convoluted
deal that turned a company into a stockpile of Trump-linked digital
tokens appears to have brought the family another five hundred and
sixty-two million dollars. And crypto is hardly the only family
business. The Trumps sold the use of their name to a Saudi real-estate
company that is close to the royal family for a resort in the Maldives
and two other new megaprojects inside the kingdom. Donald Trump, Jr.,
made millions by reinventing himself as an adviser or director to half a
dozen companies. And President Trump, whose Administration regulates
the banking and securities industries, filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan
Chase demanding five billion dollars—not as a deposit in the U.S.
Treasury but as a check made out to Donald J. Trump.
Illustration by Erik Carter
This past summer, I set out to tally up just how much the Trumps have made off the Presidency—to
sum it all up in a number. The total then was $3.4 billion. Nearly six
months later, at the end of Trump’s first year back in the White House, I
am updating my reporting: the total has now reached four billion dollars.
Trump
promised at the start of his first term that neither he nor his family
would ever do anything that might even be “perceived to be exploitive of
the office of the Presidency.” But all the deals I included in my tally
do precisely that. A few of the Trump family’s recent deals—such as
those with the Saudis, or the crypto exchange—even create the appearance
of a potential payoff. When asked recently why he had abandoned his
former restraint, Trump told the Times that he had discovered “nobody cared.” Is the public really so nonchalant? A year in, the Presidential money-making continues.
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