What it takes to put a question to Trump
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Hi, I'm Patricia Carvellis, the host of Politics Now. And sometimes it can be hard to cut through all the noise from the Canberra bubble. But on the Politics Now podcast, bursting it wide open is our core business. I'm joined by the brightest minds at the ABC to break down the polyspeak and have a chat about what's actually going on behind the scenes. It's called Politics Now and you can find it on ABC Listener.
This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people. G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. On Thursday, we dug into the eye-watering amount of money Donald Trump is making in his second term. Today, I wanted to catch up with a man who has asked the president about this directly in this incredible moment.
It is inappropriate, President Trump, that a president in office should be engaged in so much business activity.
ABC America's editor John Lyons spent months investigating Trump's money for the Four Corners episode Chasing Trump's Billions.
In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now. And they want to get along with me.
Now that his financial disclosures have given us our clearest picture yet of how much the president is really making, it felt like a good time to check back in with John. John, welcome back to If You're Listening.
Thank you, Matt.
In the olden days, when we talked about sort of payments being made to the president, we talked about thousands of dollars. But now we're really talking about billions of dollars being disclosed that are flowing into the president's pockets. When you saw these disclosure forms that were released at the end of June this year, did they surprise you in terms of the magnitude of the amount of money Donald Trump is making in office?
No, they didn't surprise me at all. Part of that Four Corners program, we looked at all available information, published information, public records to try to get a sense of President Trump's wealth and The huge boost in Donald Trump's personal wealth has come from crypto. And that's where the Trump wealth has gone from extremely rich to incredibly rich to numbers that most people can barely compute. And we've never before seen that increase. in the same time that someone has been the president of the United States, the most scrutinized person probably on the planet, and yet he's managed to make the sort of wealth that most top American investors and business people don't make. And in fact, Donald Trump has made this part of his political success.
In many countries, like in Australia, we saw our Prime Minister Albanese endure several days of hard media coverage because he bought, openly bought a house on the central coast of New South Wales. And yet here is a president making billions of dollars who rarely gets asked about it. I go to the White House press briefings as often as possible and he'll rarely or his spokesperson, Caroline Leavitt, will rarely be asked about this. It's been baked in now to the Trump presidency.
You've asked him about this. What was the process of getting in a position to ask that question to the president like?
Getting to ask any president any question is difficult. It's a battle. This is the most competitive media environment I've ever seen by far. So you have some of the best and brightest and most ambitious American media who are all in that briefing room. It has 49 seats, seven by seven, a row of seven by seven, and those 49 journalists and then You'll have, you know, sometimes 50 or 100 other journalists sort of spilling into around the side of those chairs. So to get to ask a question of any president, particularly this one, is difficult. For Four Corners, we tried four times fronting up to the Marine One helipad where the helicopter takes off. And for people like me who don't have one of those 49 chairs in the briefing room, that's the best way to try to get to ask the president.
And the process itself is quite extraordinary.
What is the episode about and who is the guest?
You wait in that briefing room, which we see on television all the time.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:40
2
What is the episode about and who is the guest?
4:40–8:03
3
How big are the financial disclosures showing what Trump is earning in office?
8:03–15:12
4
How did John Lyons prepare to ask Trump a question at the White House helipad?
15:12–21:35
5
What tactics and positioning helped Lyons get the president's attention?
21:35–25:43