Mary Childs

Their response was to refer us back to Caroline's earlier comments.

And Fred is the president of Democracy 21.

It's a nonprofit that works to reduce the influence of big money in politics.

Nonpartisan.

Fred is a big government ethics and campaign finance reform guy.

And he says the U.S.

has never seen a president make so much money.

Fred says there are examples of presidents having conflicts of interest, though, and profiting, you know, some from the presidency.

And we can go back farther to the 1920s with President Warren G. Harding.

Remember him?

Fred says it is not something that a U.S.

president has done before.

So there's Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, and a few others.

When we spoke to him four months after his magazine article came out, that number had already gone up by about half a billion dollars.

Today's episode of Planet Money was produced by James Sneed.

It was edited by Jess Jang and fact-checked by Ciara Juarez.

Robert Rodriguez engineered it.

Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

I'm Ciara Gonzalez.

And I'm Mary Childs.