How Donald Trump has used the White House to boost his bank account (Trump-Con Man with No Peer!)

How Donald Trump has used the White House to boost his bank account

In less than a decade, the president has turned his office into a billion-dollar pipeline for legally dubious personal enrichment

President Donald Trump is, by his own repeated admissions, first and foremost a businessman. Even after entering the rarified echelons of hegemonic decision-making, he often touts his track record as a corporate wheeler-dealer as proof he's prepared for the pressures of managing a geopolitical superpower. Now, as commander in chief, Trump has seemingly merged the political with the profitable. From teasing tariffs to raking in royalties, the president has used the Oval Office for his own financial interests in many ways.

Cryptocurrency

Of all the various Trump-linked business projects operating concurrently with the president’s administration, “none” pose a conflict of interest that can “compare to those that have emerged since the birth” of cryptocurrency firm World Liberty Financial, said The New York Times. Trump is now “not only a major crypto dealer” but one of the industry’s “top policy makers,” whose family-owned foray into digital currency is “eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy.”

During the first year of his second term, Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, thereby establishing federal regulations that the “industry had sought around stablecoins, a kind of cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar,” said Time. “Earlier that year,” Trump launched USD1, “his own stablecoin business.”

Real estate development

You can take the president out of the cutthroat world of elite property deals, but you can’t take the elite property deals out of the president. At least that is how Trump seems to have operated since taking office, with his geopolitical responsibilities in office often overlapping with international development deals being pursued in his corporate name.

While the eponymous Trump Organization “did zero deals in foreign countries” during the first Trump term, it has done at least eight in his second, “all ostensibly complying with the Trump Organization’s self-imposed rule not to do business directly with foreign governments,” said the AP. But “authoritarian” and one-party states “rarely take a hands-off approach” when it comes to big business deals — “especially when the business belongs to a sitting president.”

The president “continues to profit” from his partnership with a “major Saudi developer with a history of close ties to the royal family,” said The New Yorker. This past winter, the Trump organization began “licensing its name” for the development of a “new golf club, a luxury hotel and a number of mansions in Diriyah, near Riyadh.” It has also “sold the use of the president’s name for a Trump Plaza development in Jeddah.”

Tariffs

In his second term, Trump has centered tariffs as a load-bearing policy of his entire administration. But to “truly understand why Donald Trump likes tariffs so much,” said Jen Psaki on MS NOW, “you have to look at the Trump International real estate development” project moving forward in Vietnam.

Trump’s threat to slap the Vietnamese government with exorbitantly high tariffs on the self-titled “liberation day” came amid a push for luxury developments in and around the country. Hanoi was facing “intense pressure to strike a trade deal that would head off President Trump’s threat of steep tariffs,” said The New York Times. That pressure prompted Vietnamese officials to request support from the top levels of government, as the project was “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally,” per a letter obtained by the Times.

Trump’s “freewheeling use of tariffs as a tool of American power” has seen him apply the economic measure toward “national security goals, as well as the interests of individual companies,” The Washington Post said. Tariffs are a “tool the president enjoys because it’s personal power,” former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said at HuffPo.

And on and on....not to mention lawsuit settlements and the money Jared, Don Jr, and Eric are extorting from international contacts. The Trump Crime Family is all in on the grift.