How the Presidency is Making Trump Richer

I'm Ayesha Rascoe, and you're listening to the Sunday story from Up First where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. After he was first elected president in 2016, Donald Trump bucked tradition and refused to release his tax returns. Although some of his tax information has come out, Trump has continued to try to shield information relating to his personal wealth. Since Trump's reelection in 2024, there's been increasing evidence that Trump and his family are personally profiting from his presidency. To learn more about how the Trumps may be cashing in, we're bringing you a story from our friends over at NPR's Planet Money, where host Mary Childs and Sarah Gonzales went on a little presidential accounting adventure. We are one year into president Donald Trump's second term, and some things are really different this time around. Going over some math to be, all up to date. That's New Yorker reporter David Kirkpatrick. Now if if well, as we go through this, I turn pages. Is that a problem? No. No. I think we actually like that sound. Oh, is that right? Okay. Alright. Okay. Fine. David has been doing the near impossible task of following every new business and business deal and financial transaction that Trump and his family have made this past year and in the first term. And he's noticed this shift. You know, in the first term, they said voluntarily, we're not gonna do any hotel or other business deals overseas because that would be bad optically. That's gone. That's out the window. This term, they've done deals all over the place overseas. In the first term, we actually said we're not gonna do any any foreign deals. That's Donald Trump junior talking. And the reality is it didn't stop the media from constantly saying you're profiteering anyway. We're like, we stopped entirely. So this time around we said, hey, we're gonna play by the rules, but we're not going to go so far as to stymie our business forever, lock ourselves in a proverbial padded room because it almost doesn't matter. They're gonna hit you no matter what. So So effectively, they've just said, since we're gonna get criticized, we might as well take the money and run. And that's when they've started making money kind of hand over fist. And it's not just foreign hotel deals or other investments from abroad. It's crypto, merch, President Trump's social media platform that he makes official White House announcements on. In fact, it's hard to find a case where they've turned down an opportunity to make money off the presidency. Okay. Before Trump's first term, David says Trump was in a tight spot financially. He was losing income from licensing and endorsements. And at the beginning of his second term, he was in an even tighter spot, David says. At the time, he owed hundreds of millions in fraud and defamation lawsuits. But after just six months into …