How Trump Turned the Presidency Into a Profit Center

On the morning of June 16, 2026, a National Park Service employee waded into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with a vacuum pump, standing in water the color of a tennis ball, bent over a hose, trying to suck algae off a floor that had been repainted a few weeks earlier, at Trump’s command, in a color called “American Flag Blue.”

The President wanted the pool blue by the Fourth of July in honor of America’s 250th birthday. To get it done, his administration, citing the deadline, handed the job without competition to a Virginia firm called Atlantic Industrial Coatings. The contract started at $6.9 million and grew, through a series of amendments, to $14.7 million.

The paint began to peel almost immediately, and the algae it was supposed to suppress came back thicker than before. To deal with the algae, the Park Service hired, again without competition, an Ohio company called Green Water Solutions, for $1.7 million. Green Water is owned by a trust controlled by John J. Cafaro, a longtime Republican donor whom the President has called “a fantastic man” and who, in 2001, pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe a congressman.

We tell you all of this because it is the perfect metaphor for what follows. The man with the vacuum pump, standing in the muck: that’s all of us. We’re footing the bill, literally, with our tax dollars, while Trump and his cronies hoover up the green.

Teapot Dome was $7 million. This is $1.4 billion.

This is not normal. In 1922, the Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, secretly leased the Navy’s oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to two oilmen who had given him about $400,000 in cash and loans, about $7 million in today’s money. The Senate investigated for two years. Fall was convicted of bribery in 1929 and sent to prison for nine months, the first cabinet officer in American history to go to jail for conduct in office. For the next century, Teapot Dome was the name Americans used when they wanted to call something as corrupt as it was possible for the government to be.

But the money in Teapot Dome did not go to the President. Warren Harding was embarrassed by it and died before most of it came out. A half century later, the scandals that drove Richard Nixon from office were about power, not money.

After one year back in office, Trump made $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency and his crypto companies alone, according to his own financial disclosure to the Office of Government Ethics. $635 million came from a memecoin, a token with no function except that people who want to be noticed by him can buy it. Nearly $600 million came from World Liberty Financial, which he co-founded with his sons and with the family of Steve Witkoff, who is also his envoy to the Middle East.

That one line of one year is roughly 200 Teapot Domes, 200 times what Fall took. And it flowed not to a cabinet secretary but into the President’s own accounts.

This is what a kleptocracy looks like

While this is new to America, it is not new to the world. There is a kind of government in which the state exists to make the ruler and his friends rich. It is called a kleptocracy, and it has a well-documented history. The word comes from the Greek and translates literally as “rule by thieves.”

Ferdinand Marcos took somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion out of the Philippines. Suharto took as much as $35 billion out of Indonesia. Mobutu took $5 billion out of Zaire, and Abacha up to $5 billion out of Nigeria. Estimates of what Vladimir Putin and his circle have taken from Russia run from tens of billions to $200 billion. The people around the ruler get rich too. In Hungary, a gas fitter from Viktor Orbán’s hometown named Lőrinc Mészáros was a small businessman when Orbán took power in 2010; he is now the richest man in the country, worth about $4.5 billion, nearly all of it from state contracts. Orbán’s son-in-law doubled his fortune in 2024 alone. Sound familiar, Jared Kushner?

The United States has joined this list. The American version is larger than the Hungarian one, because the country is larger. The Pentagon, at the request of the White House, lent $620 million to a rare-earth startup called Vulcan Elements, and the Commerce Department took a $50 million stake; the President’s eldest son’s firm was an investor, and the company’s valuation went from $200 million to $2 billion. An Emirati sheikh bought a $500 million stake in the family crypto business days before the inauguration, and within ten months the administration reversed a national-security policy and approved the export of advanced AI chips to the Emirates. Qatar gave the President a $400 million airplane the week after the White House announced some $240 billion in deals with Qatar, including about $3 billion in arms. Jared Kushner runs an investment fund whose money comes from Gulf monarchies.

He fired everyone who could stop him

Trump’s first acts in office were about eliminating oversight of what came next. Since taking office he has fired at least 17 inspectors general, plus USAID’s; it was one of his first official acts. A federal judge later ruled that the firings were illegal, “that much is obvious,” but no one has been reinstated. He fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, and no new director has been confirmed since.

The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, created after Watergate to prosecute corrupt officials, had about 30 lawyers when he took office. It has two, and it no longer brings its own cases. The unit that investigated crypto fraud was disbanded by a deputy attorney general who himself held as much as $470,000 in crypto assets.

When the FBI recorded the future border czar, Tom Homan, in 2024 accepting $50,000 in a bag from undercover agents seeking contracts, Reuters and the Times reported, the investigation was closed because the Justice Department said there was “no credible evidence” of wrongdoing. Really? The Supreme Court held in 2024, in Trump v. United States, that a president is immune from prosecution for his core official acts and presumptively immune for the rest, and the Republican majorities in Congress have held no hearings. So Trump has been unconstrained.

In Hungary, in Russia, in every kleptocracy that has been studied, the thing that lets the grift grow from a scandal into a system is not greed, which is constant, but the removal of the fear of punishment. Teapot Dome was a scandal because Albert Fall went to prison. Nobody around this President expects to go to prison, because the President has told them they won’t, and he has fired the people who might have made it happen.

The Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, spent the spring filming a five-part video series called The Great American Road Trip, in which he, his wife and their nine children drive across the country for the 250th anniversary. Boeing and Toyota each paid $1 million to sponsor it. Shell, United Airlines and Royal Caribbean also paid. Every one of those companies is regulated by his department. When a senator asked him about it at a hearing, he declined to give details. A special adviser at Homeland Security, Corey Lewandowski, NBC News reported, told one contractor it would need to pay him to protect its contracts, and after it declined he told the department to stop awarding it work. He denies it.

What it costs you

Every item on the list is a thing you paid for, or a protection you lost, or both.

A poultry company called Pilgrim’s Pride gave $5 million to the inauguration, more than Amazon, and its trade group asked that a proposed rule limiting salmonella in raw chicken be dropped. The rule would have let inspectors pull contaminated chicken off the line before it reached a store. It was dropped. Salmonella sickens about 1.3 million Americans a year, puts 26,000 in the hospital and kills around 400, and poultry is one of its largest sources. You eat the chicken.

Nursing-home executives bought a lunch with the President and asked that the rule requiring minimum nurse staffing in nursing homes be rescinded. It was rescinded in December, without the usual advance comment period. The rule would have required a registered nurse on site around the clock and roughly three and a half hours of nursing care per resident per day. Its advocates estimated it would have saved 13,000 lives a year. Your parent is in a nursing home, or very well could be.

Tobacco executives gave $8 million and bought a lunch and asked that the rules on flavored vapes be loosened. The President called the FDA commissioner from the table. It was done within the week. The commissioner resigned. Your kid vapes bubblegum.

The owner of the bridge between Detroit and Windsor gave $1 million to the President’s super PAC and got a meeting with the Commerce Secretary, and within hours the President announced he would block the opening of the rival bridge, which was finished; it opened six weeks late, after a toll agreement. You sit in traffic on the old one and pay the toll.

The ballroom the President said would be “taxpayer-free” will cost around $600 million, and internal records show more than half of it coming from the Secret Service, the White House Military Office and the Executive Residence, which is to say from you. More than half of the ballroom’s known donors have since received new or expanded federal contracts, worth $50 billion in total, which is also from you.

The Pentagon’s $670 million for the President’s son’s startup, the $9.7 billion Dell contract that followed the President’s purchase of $1 million to $5 million in Dell stock, the $14.7 million for blue paint that peeled: all of it is from you. A woman paid $1 million for a dinner, and three weeks later her son was pardoned for stealing from the nurses at his own nursing homes, and the pardon waived the $4.4 million he owed in restitution.

Every rule on this list existed because, at some point, enough people got sick or died that the country decided to do something about it. Now every no-bid contract is a job done worse, for more, by someone chosen for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

The ledger

A partial ledger of the quid pro quos of this administration, in order.