How Donald Trump Can Continue to Make Billions in Office
He rightly judges the political costs to be manageable, but this could change.
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The New York Times recently reviewed the substantial wealth Donald Trump and his family have so far accrued in his second term as president and asked: “How much can one man make from being president?” It is a lot, which the Times estimates, on the basis of major news organization reporting, to be $1.4 billion and almost certainly more. A Wall Street Journal study puts the number at $4 billion in proceeds and paper wealth. Another question about Trump 2.0 is the longer-term significance of this unprecedented profiteering in office. Polling suggests strong public disapproval, though the degree of disapproval is far higher among Democrat and Independents than among Republicans. But given the openness and extent of his and his family’s self-enrichment since he took office, and given the clear conflicts of interest between his business interests and major administration policy initiatives, such as crypto, it is striking that these events have not attained the status of “scandal.”
The administration has evidenced its lack of concern by refusing to engage seriously with the issue, typically responding with little more than his press secretary’s contemptuous denials that there is any legitimate basis for criticism. Trump has apparently concluded that any political costs are manageable enough that he and his family can keep their lucrative businesses going.
Understanding what might be termed the politics of self-enrichment is important for two reasons. First, the public response is not necessarily fixed. As the term goes on, economic conditions overall could lead the electorate to grow less tolerant of the president’s and his family’s lucrative business pursuits. Second, if there is consensus that, in principle, presidents should not be able to do what Trump has done and reform is needed to prevent future presidents from following suit, a close evaluation of the Trump record is necessary in assessing the shape and prospects of potential bipartisan reform.
Explaining the Absence of Political or Legal Consequences for Making Billions in Office
There are a few possible explanations for how Trump has so far managed to redefine the ethical conduct of the presidency.
Trump’s presidency is bound up with claims about his business history and prowess. Other than a brief period, now running on five years in total, Trump has only been a businessman (and for this purpose, he treats his reality TV years as a business venture.) He famously said in 2016 that the country would be better off if he could run it as he did the Trump Organization. Making lots of money is part of his brand, proof of his skills, and he seems committed to keeping it fresh: more a political asset than a liability. The importance he ascribes to this personal brand has driven him to file the pending $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times for calling into question his narrative of business success.
Also operating in his favor are voter beliefs about the poor ethical standard among politicians across the board. Right now, the primary focus of Congress’s activity on conflicts of interest is a pending bill to impose a complete ban on federal legislators trading in individual securities, stocks or commodities. Congress typically ranks at the very low end of public perceptions of honesty in the professions; its overall approval rating is currently more than 20 points lower than Trump’s. This is an environment in which it is a simple matter for those who support Trump’s politics to shrug off his ethics as no worse than that of other politicians. For that matter, they may credit him for being commendably unapologetic, possessing the honesty to do what, in one form or another, other politicians also do but won’t admit.
A large swath of the electorate may view the situation transactionally, prepared to give Trump room for his profiteering if he delivers on the issues they care more about. If asked, voters state the obvious: that corruption is bad. But this expectation does not yet drive judgments about a president’s performance. In Trump 1.0, Trump refused to divest his business interests or establish a blind trust with trustees more independent than his two sons, and he started well down the road of mixing official and business activities. Still, he won another term, this time also carrying the popular vote.
Trump generally avoids the problem of directly taking the public’s money—that is, of raiding the Treasury. He has refused to take his government salary, modest as it is in relation to what he is making in his business pursuits. To support his project of demolishing the East Wing and setting about building a $400 million ballroom, he is raising private money, from corporations and wealthy individuals, and he has said he might put in some money of his own. He likes to present as a wealthy man who does not need the perks of the office or projects of a personal nature paid with tax dollars. This relates to his own and his press secretary’s insistence that he could make more money if he were not president; that he does not need the office for financial gain, and, what’s more, he has sacrificed to enter into public service.
The transactions and business structures by which the president is enriching himself are complex, particularly those involving crypto (though one such venture, the promotion of his meme coin, was remarkably brazen.) By contrast, Trump has not engaged in the sort of in-the-dead-of-night behaviors, like the stashing of cash in freezers or pay-offs in gold bars, which typically both fascinate and repel the electorate.
It does matter to the development of scandal that a politician making money off his or her office might have violated the law. But presidents are exempt from conflict-of-interest rules that apply to other executive branch officials, and while subject to the law against bribery, there are open questions about how other criminal laws apply to them.
Certainly, Trump’s Department of Justice, operating under his control, will not press the point. He does not risk prosecution, much less investigation. Rightly or wrongly, he might also consider the Supreme Court’s immunity decision as affording him the additional protection he needs if this administration is followed by a less friendly one. And he can test the legality of a preemptive self-pardon.
The Republican Congress will not conduct investigations into the effects of the president and his family’s business on policy. Democrats have attempted to probe and raise public awareness of these issues, but their minority status necessarily limits their investigative powers and requires them to rely largely on public record research and press reporting.
Finally, Trump seems to have benefited from the various ways in which he operates and tweets as president in provocative fashion, triggering outrage among his opposition. He may be enjoying a “discount” of sorts on the criticism another president would draw for this blatant profiteering. His critics have to spread their complaints across so wide a range of perceived offenses that presidential conflict of interest is only one of many. His defenders can dismiss these objections as one more manifestation of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
What Could Change
Trump’s poor ratings on the economy are a threat to his buccaneering disregard of conflicts of interest as he and his family make their fortune. Ethics problems for politicians take root in the soil of generalized voter dissatisfaction. The early glimmering of these problems is beginning to show up in polling data.
In one recent poll, the low numbers on the economy appear alongside a poor assessment of whether he cares about voters more than he does about himself. These surveys pinpoint specific complaints about this self-interestedness. Americans dislike his White House ballroom project. While the money he is assembling is not going into his own pocket, the voters may see this as a vanity project: a case of this being more “about him” than “about them.”
As self-interestedness begins to attract voters’ attention, it may be that the Trump family is sensing that there is a limit somewhere that they need observe. Kushner’s private equity fund originally joined other investors backing Paramount’s hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery but it has since withdrawn. Kushner’s involvement predictably attracted attention in view of the government antitrust review that will resolve whether Paramount or its rival bidder, Netflix, prevails—especially in light of Trump’s statement that the Netflix acquisition “could be a problem” and that he expects to be “involved” in the resolution.
Perhaps the Kushner withdrawal from the Paramount bid reflects a judgment that this very public clash of major U.S. corporations with the government acting as referee was too hot to handle. So far, however, there is no indication that other Trump-family ventures are slowing the pace of operations or reconsidering aggressive expansion. The Trump business interests stand to bring in billions more over the course of his presidency.
Conclusion: The Reform Challenge
It is possible that the public will remain relatively unconcerned about whether a president makes money off his office. Other than sheer unseemliness, it may not be clear to Trump supporters and other voters that his and his family’s self-enrichment should be among their primary concerns. Even if the profiteering becomes a political liability amid frustration over his performance, the problem may not prove sufficient to mobilize public consensus about the need for reform.
At the same time, the effect on policy of the pervasive conflicts of interests in this administration have yet to be brought fully to the light. We have not yet had the acute “scandal” that often powers reform movements. In the details yet unknown of how business and profit mix in this government may lie the potential catalyst for reining in presidential profiteering. The press will continue to do its own investigative reporting. But with the Department of Justice operating under Trump’s direction, and Republicans in control of Congress, the tools for exposing what is so far hidden are seriously limited.
A Democratic success in the midterms could bring more transparency. But the primary challenge in reform, as in others in the era of Trump, is to ensure that it is not, in the largest sense, only about the Trump. Of course, the record he is establishing is the clear case for reform. The norms that once constrained this behavior have failed. Trump tested them in Trump 1.0 and has in critical respects dispensed with them altogether in 2.0. Yet, if the development of that record comes to be defined as only one more investigation of Trump, however richly deserved it may be, any needed reform debate may become bogged down in the standard partisan crossfire.
This “for Trump or against Trump” dynamic hobbled reforms of the presidency that might have been fruitfully taken up after the first term. Of course, if details of his and his family business dealings as uncovered suggest wrongdoing, then it needs to be called out and all routes for a legal accounting must be pursued. But the stakes are still higher. The question is whether presidents—any president—should be meaningfully constrained in pursuing money-making ventures while in office, which, as Jack and I noted in a recent post, entail the extensive “entanglement of administration policy and family business.”
The reform debate might also progress more productively if it is framed not only in terms of clean-government concerns but as issues of presidential power and accountability. Conflict-of-interest rules and norms operate as constraints on executive authority: They limit the options open to a president to fashion policy as he or she chooses. The erosion of these limits comes at a cost to accountability, enabling forms of dealmaking in which the boundary between public purpose and private gain becomes difficult, if not impossible, to discern.
The extraordinary sum of money that Donald Trump and his family have made in this second term does not raise issues only personal to Trump. They underscore the institutional imperative to preserve the presidency as a public trust.