Want to get rich in Trump’s America? Be a Trump

This week, Forbes published an investigation into the wealth that Donald Trump’s children have accrued through his second term as president.

You may recall that, during the first Trump term, there was a big fuss about members of the First Family enriching themselves. The Donald himself was particularly brazen about it. Soaking the Secret Service for staying at Trump hotels and whatnot? Kerching! Taking millions of dollars in payments from foreign governments – this, according to a report by Democrats on the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Accountability – kerching!

Yet all this falls by the wayside compared to a second term in which the US presidency has apparently become a subsidiary of the Trump Organization, and a ridiculously lucrative one at that.

Forbes has performed a public service in reporting the scale of it, which is frankly dizzying. Cryptocurrency, enthusiastically promoted by the president, accounts for two-thirds of the $3bn (£2.2bn) explosion in Trump’s estimated net worth over the last year.

It should be noted that crypto is a highly volatile asset class and business, sustained solely by its popularity with the tech bros who play dice with it. There is no underlying commodity like gold behind it, nor is investing in it like holding shares in a boring old workaday listed company with customers, accounts, and a predictable earnings stream. At some point, the markets might very well say: “Hey, the emperor ain’t got no strides on.” And then it’ll be bye-bye baby. The tears and tantrums will be heard around the world.

But Trump won’t be crying for long, if at all. He has also made a tidy $400m from licensing the Trump name. His children, Don Jr, Eric, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner, and even New York University sophomore Barron, have all joined the party, with the family’s net worth estimated to have doubled to $10bn in the space of a year. They’ve been off glad-handing in the Middle East, advising the anti-woke business community, and more besides.

Crypto is a major driver, however, notably through Trump and his sons’ role in co-founding World Liberty Financial, in the midst of the US election campaign. Its $WLFI digital tokens leapt in value in the wake of Trump’s win.

For the US as a political entity and nation, it hasn’t been so good. The New York Times described the operation as having eviscerated “the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in ways without precedent in modern American history”.

True, it is not unusual for presidents to push against the ethical codes that govern them, or that are supposed to. Nor is it unusual for their families to seek to profit from their association. Democrats do it just as Republicans do. So do their families.

Remember Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy and his enthusiastic promotion of Billy Beer? Just a bit of Southern good ol’ boy fun – but his links to the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi certainly weren’t such a joke. America’s noisy conservative media has long mined a rich seam from the Clintons’ business affairs, not to mention those of Hunter Biden.

Enriching themselves is typically the chief concern of ex-presidents when they have left office. The Obamas certainly aren’t going hungry. Nor is George W Bush. Nor are the Clintons. The same is also true of British ex-prime ministers. The important part of that enrichment, however, is the prefix “ex”. Advising banks and maybe foreign governments, palling around with sheikhs and flogging names and contacts is, at worst, unseemly, maybe even undignified. But they are private citizens, and they are entitled to pursue comfort in their retirements when shorn of the burden of office. Trump is doing it while in office, which is a different matter entirely, and to an unprecedented degree.

But here’s the thing: he’s done it in plain sight, buying off those struggling to make a buck and pay their bills with a mixture of economic nationalism (those tariffs) and pouring a jerry can of gas over the concerns about immigration that pre-dated his election.

Most people know this. Trump is who he is, who he has always been. The members of his family are who they are. It didn’t take a Deep Throat and months of painstaking research by latter-day Woodwards and Bernsteins to blow the lid off. It was all there, in public.

The Trumps have got away with it because they have been allowed to, in part by the ineptitude of their opponents. The American electorate signed up to what many, even most, knew was a Faustian pact with Trump because they saw his opponents as aliens: inept, out of touch, and preoccupied with the concerns of those occupying the dorms of elite US colleges and hyper-liberal enclaves on the coasts.

Those concerns don’t register with ordinary Americans. The results in the midwestern battleground states speak to that.