President Donald Trump rings the opening bell for the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq in the Oval Office at the White House, Monday, July 6, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein) President Trump told his followers he would “drain the swamp.” Instead, he became the biggest swamp monster ever. He has obliterated the line between public service and personal enrichment.
Trump’s recent financial disclosures revealed that he made $2.2 billion in the year since he returned to office. That is a breathtaking figure. It is more than 20 times the annual budget of the city of Ithaca, N.Y., where I served as mayor for 10 years.
In other words, Trump raked in, on average, more than $6 million a day, seven days a week. The presidency is more than a full-time job, but Trump’s side hustles were pulling down 15 times the president’s yearly salary of $400,000 — every single day!
Even the conservative Free Press recognized this, writing, “There is no modern parallel for the scale and shamelessness with which the president is enriching himself in office.”
“Earned” would be too generous a term for the way Trump promoted scams like his meme coin, structured so that he would make money no matter what happened to other investors. As Forbes has reported, Trump “asked his political supporters to become his business partners. Those who trusted him got hurt the worst.”
Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander looked at similar ventures by other members of the Trump family and told CNN’s Erin Burnett that “it’s a consistent pattern.” If you add them up, he said, the Trump family has cashed out about $1.9 billion and had its net worth lifted by about $3.1 billion. “Meanwhile, their supporters collectively are down, we estimate $7 billion,” he said.
Crooked crypto deals are just part of the Trump grift. We now know that Trump made 327 stock purchases on April 8, 2025. The next day, he posted “GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” before causing the market to jump by rolling back some of the tariffs he had just imposed.
Then there are billions of dollars in federal financing for mining deals that are profiting Trump’s sons and the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
And consider how Trump insiders diverted tens of millions of dollars from the bipartisan organization Congress had created to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and funneled it into Freedom 250, a newly created company run by Trump insiders.
The sparsely attended “Great American State Fair” was a bust by just about any traditional measure — one commentator called it “a crime against fun” — but as journalist Liz Dye noted, it was a “rousing success” as a grift.
“Trump was able to snatch congressionally allocated funds, commingle them with cash from corporations seeking favor from his administration, enrich his buddies, and throw himself two spectacular birthday parties,” she wrote.
Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee recently documented how the anniversary was hijacked and turned into a “hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment.” They have called for an investigation of possible criminal fraud over the diversion of funds that donors intended for the bipartisan America 250 into the Trump-controlled Freedom 250.
Unfortunately, there’s been no effort by the Justice Department to rein in Trump’s corruption. In fact, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, has advanced the corruption. He cut a deal to give Trump, his family members and their massive network of business operations immunity from IRS investigations or prosecutions. And he backed the creation of a massive slush fund Trump could use to funnel still more tax dollars to his supporters.
I am not a historian, but it is hard to imagine that there has ever been a more corrupt deal made by a U.S. attorney general. That is why the coming confirmation hearings for Blanche are so important. Senators must not reward Blanche’s brazen corruption of the Justice Department by confirming him as attorney general.
More than 1,200 former Department of Justice attorneys and officials have urged senators to reject Blanche’s nomination.
A letter sent last week references “the corruption and abuses that have defined the Justice Department under Todd Blanche’s leadership,” including “the vindictive prosecutions and investigations of the president’s foes; the deals designed to reward lawbreakers with taxpayer dollars; the erasure of accountability for January 6; the mishandling of the Epstein files; and the denigration of judges and repeated violations of their orders.”
The letter also slams Blanche’s “degradation” of the department’s career workforce through the firing of people for “declining to initiate vindictive prosecutions” or “refusing to lie in court.”
Trump has claimed that nobody cares about his corruption and conflicts of interest. That is not true, and saying so encourages more destructive cynicism about politics.
The upcoming confirmation hearings for Blanche will be an opportunity for Republican senators to put country over party. And the upcoming elections will be an opportunity for voters to elect representatives who are more willing to do their duty.
Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way.
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