The Unprecedented Personal Profits of Trump’s Presidency
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm David Marchese. And I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. And we're the hosts of The Interview from The New York Times. David and I have spent our careers interviewing some of the most interesting and influential people in the world. Which means we know when to ask tough questions and when to just sit back and listen.
And now we've teamed up to have these conversations every week. We'll try to reveal something about the people shaping our world.
And we'll get some great stories from them, too.
It's The Interview from The New York Times. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.
To an extent never before seen in American history, President Trump has turned the presidency into a cash cow for his family's businesses. A recent financial disclosure shows that the president has made $2.2 billion since he retook office. But the Trumps are not done. And today, my colleague Eric Lipton explains the family's next potential windfall and how the president's position is once again helping it happen. It's Thursday, July 9th. Eric Lipton, welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me.
So, Eric, ever since President Trump returned to office, you have been trying to figure out just how much he and his family have made off of the presidency. And we recently got kind of an answer to that question when he released this enormous 900-page financial disclosure, which outlined what he made last year. And I wonder, as somebody who's been paying such close attention to this particular area, what was your initial reaction seeing that top-line number, $2.2 billion?
I was completely startled by this number. I've been tracking the Trump family for a decade now. And we all knew that with Trump back in the White House, that his family was getting into all kinds of lucrative business ventures. But I never imagined that he would see more than $2 billion in revenue in the first year that he's back as president. And I was so completely floored by it, I thought I had to talk to some historians.
Just to put it into context.
Yeah, I get on the phone, I start calling up some of the most prominent authors of American presidential history. One after another, every single one of them that I spoke with, the word out of their mouth was unprecedented, unprecedented. There's never been a president in the history of the United States that has made this much money while in the White House. And none of them could come up with any parallels except looking at other places around the world. authoritarian-styled places where there's a mixing of your job as a government official and the wealth of that country.
Basically, you have to go outside of the United States to find anything like what we are seeing here in this country.
Yes. I mean, there are parts of the world where it's normal for the royal family to both be running the government and be enriched by the government. I think particularly of some of the Middle East nations, like the royal families in Saudi Arabia or in the United Arab Emirates, where there is no line. They are the government and they are the financial beneficiaries of the government. The same thing in Turkey, where Erdogan has appointed members of his family to be the finance minister, and they also own business operations. Or in Russia, where Putin and the various oligarchs are all benefiting from their access to the power. This is a tradition that isn't seen in the United States, but Trump has put us into a whole new category where wealth is coming into the White House, in part because of the policy decisions that he's making.
Eric, when it comes to what we learned from Trump's fortune in particular, can you just tell us a little bit about where we're learning that money is coming from?
Yeah, the single biggest chunk of it comes from cryptocurrency, $1.4 billion. This is a sector that the Trump family had never been in prior to 2025, that it was only really during Trump's reelection campaign that he came to be kind of a crypto enthusiast.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:31
2
How much did President Trump reportedly make after returning to office?
4:31–10:56
3
Why do historians call $2.2 billion in presidential-linked revenue 'unprecedented'?
10:56–21:55
4
How did cryptocurrency generate $1.4 billion for the Trump family?
21:55–30:39
5
What are 'critical minerals' and why are the Trumps targeting them?
30:39–31:27