Trump's Corruption: $1.4 Billion

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist. Trump is abusing his power to increase his wealth.

NYT editorial:

A review by the editorial board relying on analyses from news organizations shows that Mr. Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion. We know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view. And they continue to grow.

A hotel in Oman. An office tower in western India. A golf course on the outskirts of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. These are a few of the more than 20 overseas projects the Trump Organization is pursuing, often requiring cooperation with foreign governments. These deals have made millions for the Trumps, according to Reuters. And the administration has sometimes treated those same governments favorably. One example: The administration agreed to lower its threatened tariffs on Vietnam about a month after a Trump Organization project broke ground on a $1.5 billion golf complex outside of Hanoi. Vietnamese officials ignored their own laws to fast-track the project.

Amazon paid far more for the rights to “Melania” than the next highest bidder — and far more than the company has previously paid for similar projects, according to The Wall Street Journal. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chairman and one of the world’s richest people, has many reasons to curry favor with the administration, including antitrust regulation, Amazon’s defense contracts and his space company’s federal contracts.

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Mr. Trump’s sale of crypto has been by far his biggest moneymaker, according to Reuters. People who hope to influence federal policy, including foreigners, can buy his family’s coins, effectively transferring money to the Trumps, and the deals are often secret. One that has become public: A United Arab Emirates-backed investment firm announced plans last year to deposit $2 billion into a Trump firm — two weeks before the president gave the country access to advanced chips.

Gift Grift

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist. 

Julianna Bragg at Axios:

A Swiss delegation presented President Trump with lavish gifts — including a 1-kilogram personalized gold bar worth $130,000 and a Rolex desktop clock — during a Nov. 4 visit aimed at persuading him to ease the tariffs he imposed on their country.

The big picture: The Swiss visit is one of many this year in which foreign leaders and organizations have presented Trump with luxurious gifts as they try to maintain relations with his administration.

The Foreign Gifts and Decoration Act bars the president and federal officials from accepting gifts worth more than $480 — the current minimum value — unless they're accepted on behalf of the United States or purchased by the official.

Yes, but: Trump and his family failed to report at least 117 foreign gifts worth roughly $291,000 during his first term in office, according to a 2023 report by the then Democrat-led House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

Here's a look at some of the most grand gifts Trump has been given this year:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin presented Trump with a portrait of himself raising his fist — a depiction of him after the assassination attempt at Trump's 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
• The Qatari Royal Family sparked major ethics concerns after gifting Trump a $400 million jet to be used as the new Air Force One —the plane is worth 100 times more than every other presidential gift from a foreign nation since 2001 combined.

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• South Korean President Lee Jae Myung presented Trump with a ceremonial gold crown. He was also the first U.S. president to be gifted a gold medal representing the Grand Order of Mugunghwa, the country's highest honor.

Trump Corruption, Continued

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Its corruption is unprecedented. Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example. His memecoin is another. Abuse of pardons is third.

Kenneth P. Vogel at NYT:

As Paul Walczak awaited sentencing early this year, his best hope for avoiding prison time rested with the newly inaugurated president.

Mr. Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes days after the 2024 election, submitted a pardon application to President Trump around Inauguration Day. The application focused not solely on Mr. Walczak’s offenses but also on the political activity of his mother, Elizabeth Fago.

Ms. Fago had raised millions of dollars for Mr. Trump’s campaigns and those of other Republicans, the application said. It also highlighted her connections to an effort to sabotage Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 campaign by publicizing the addiction diary of his daughter Ashley Biden — an episode that drew law enforcement scrutiny.

Mr. Walczak’s pardon application argued that his criminal prosecution was motivated more by his mother’s efforts for Mr. Trump than by his admitted use of money earmarked for employees’ taxes to fund an extravagant lifestyle.

Still, weeks went by and no pardon was forthcoming, even as Mr. Trump issued clemency grants to hundreds of other allies.

Then, Ms. Fago was invited to a $1-million-per-person fund-raising dinner last month that promised face-to-face access to Mr. Trump at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla.

Less than three weeks after she attended the dinner, Mr. Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon.

An April 11 release from the US Department of Justice:

Owner Of Florida Health Care Companies Sentenced for Employment Tax Crimes

Friday, April 11, 2025
For Immediate Release
Office of Public Affairs
Defendant Did Not Pay Over $10M in Taxes


A Florida man was sentenced today to 18 months in prison, two years of supervised release, and ordered to pay $4,381,265.76 in restitution to the United States for willfully failing to pay over employment taxes and willfully failing to file individual income tax returns.

According to court documents and statements made in court, Paul Walczak controlled a network of interconnected health care companies operating under various names, including Palm Health Partners. Through another of his entities, Palm Health Partners Employment Services (PHPES), Walczak employed over 600 people and paid over $24 million annually in payroll. As such, Walczak was required to withhold Social Security, Medicare, and federal income taxes from his employees’ paychecks and to pay those monies over to the IRS each quarter, and to pay the companies’ portion of Social Security and Medicare taxes.

For more than a decade, Walczak was not compliant with his tax obligations and instead used the withheld taxes to enrich himself. In 2011, Walczak did not pay two quarters of withheld taxes to the IRS. In 2012, the IRS began collection efforts, including by sending him notices about his unpaid taxes, and by meeting with Walczak to help bring him into compliance. When that effort was unsuccessful, the IRS assessed the outstanding taxes against him personally. After that was imposed, Walczak paid the assessments in October 2014. Walczak’s compliance did not last long, however. By the end of the following year, Walczak was again withholding taxes from his employees’ paychecks and keeping the money.

From 2016 through 2019, Walczak withheld $7,432,223.80 of taxes from his employees’ paychecks, but did not pay those taxes over to the IRS. While Walczak was withholding taxes from the pay of his employees under the pretext of paying these funds to the IRS, he used over $1 million from his businesses’ bank accounts to purchase a yacht, transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars to his personal bank accounts, and used the business accounts for personal purchases at retailers such as Bergdorf Goodman, Cartier, and Saks. During this same time, he also did not pay $3,480,111 of his business’s portion of his employees’ Social Security and Medicare taxes.

By 2019, the IRS had assessed millions of dollars in civil penalties against Walczak. Beginning with the 2018 tax year, Walczak also stopped filing personal income tax returns despite that he was still receiving income including a $360,000 salary from PHPES and $450,000 in transfers from his business bank accounts.

Moreover, in 2019, Walczak created a new business, NextEra. Walczak used a family member as the 99% nominal owner of NextEra, but Walczak had ultimate control of the finances and operations of NextEra. Through NextEra, Walczak transferred in 2020 just under $200,000 to a bank account titled in a family member’s name, over $250,000 to a bank account in his wife’s name, and over $800,000 in payments directly to third parties for Walczak’s personal expenses, including clothing stores, department stores, and fishing retailers.

In total, Walczak caused a tax loss to the IRS of $10,912,334.80

Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney Karen E. Kelly of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and Special Agent in Charge Emmanuel Gomez of IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) Miami Field Office made the announcement.

IRS-CI investigated the case.

Trial Attorneys Brian Flanagan, Andrew Ascencio, and Ashley Stein of the Justice Department’s Tax Division prosecuted the case.
Updated April 11, 2025

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I interviewed a guy who did The Big Short, except using $TRUMP coin.

He got a free dinner with the President out of it. pic.twitter.com/NpLm5QEAop

— Tina Nguyen (@tina_nguyen) May 27, 2025

Trump's Corruption

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.    Its corruption is unprecedented.  Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example. His memecoin is another.

Peter Baker at NYT:

When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review.

Thirty-one years later, after dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket — 280 times the Clinton lucre and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband’s government. Scandal? Furor? Washington moved on while barely taking notice.

The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.

Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Mr. Trump’s use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued the plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined.

And Mr. Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency that he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in — not to a campaign account but to a business that benefits Mr. Trump personally.

Damien Cave at NYT:

This $1.5 billion golf complex outside the capital, Hanoi, as well as plans for a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City, are the Trump family’s first projects in Vietnam — part of a global moneymaking enterprise that no family of a sitting American president has ever attempted on this scale. And as that blitz makes the Trumps richer, it is distorting how countries interact with the United States.

To fast-track the Trump development, Vietnam has ignored its own laws, legal experts said, granting concessions more generous than what even the most connected locals receive. Vietnamese officials, in a letter obtained by The New York Times, explicitly stated that the project required special support from the top ranks of the Vietnamese government because it was “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally.”

And Vietnamese officials have waved the development along in a moment of high-stakes diplomacy. They face intense pressure to strike a trade deal that would head off President Trump’s threat of steep tariffs, which would hit about 30 percent of Vietnam’s exports.

The Bribery Dinner

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.    Its corruption is unprecedented.  Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example. His memecoin is another.

David Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton at NYT:

President Trump gathered Thursday evening at his Virginia golf club with the highest-paying customers of his personal cryptocurrency, promising that he would promote the crypto industry from the White House as protesters outside condemned the event as a historic corruption of the presidency.

The gala dinner held at the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Washington, where Mr. Trump flew from the White House on a military helicopter, turned into an extraordinary spectacle as hundreds of guests arrived, many having flown to the United States from overseas.
...

It was a spectacle that could only have happened in the era of Donald J. Trump. Several of the dinner guests, in interviews with The New York Times, said that they attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Mr. Trump and U.S. financial regulations.

...

Perhaps the best known crypto investor at the dinner was Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who runs the crypto platform Tron. He spent more than $40 million on $TRUMP coins, earning himself the top spot on the leaderboard.

Wearing a black bow tie and accompanied by an assistant who held an umbrella over his head, Mr. Sun was among the first guests to arrive. In a brief interview at the club, he told The Times that the dinner would be his first meeting with Mr. Trump.

“I’m very excited to meet him and discuss about crypto’s future,” Mr. Sun said.

Sangrok Oh, a Korean crypto executive, arrived at the dinner with a collection of red baseball caps emblazoned with the words “Make Crypto Great Again” that he planned to hand out at the event. He said he had flown all the way from Seoul to attend the dinner.

“It’s kind of a fund-raiser” for Mr. Trump, Mr. Oh said in an interview at his hotel in Virginia. “And he’ll always be good to his sponsors.”

Others guests included Vincent Liu, the chief investment officer at Kronos Research, a crypto firm founded in Taiwan. Kronos profits by conducting high-frequency trading on crypto platforms across the world — except in the United States.

But with a nod from Mr. Trump and his regulators, Mr. Liu wants to enter the U.S. market. His firm bought enough of the $TRUMP coins to ensure he had a seat at the dinner — with the hope he might get Mr. Trump’s ear.

“I will definitely not hesitate to share my perspective,” Mr. Liu said. “It’s great to see the current direction that everything’s going.”

Trump Is Soliciting Bribes

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.  Its corruption is unprecedented.  Qatar's gift of a jet is just one example.

Dan Merica and Matthew Choi at WP:

Trump launched his meme coin — $Trump — just days before his inauguration and has not been shy about promoting it. The coin thrust the president into an unregulated and volatile world where public figures can launch a cryptocurrency, use their notoriety to draw attention to the coin and benefit when the price surges.

The coin has no intrinsic value and is instead seen as a sign of support for Trump — the people behind it openly say it is “not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type,” and Trump said when the coin launched that it was meant to “celebrate everything we stand for.” But The Washington Post has found that small-time buyers have seen their investments in the coin collapse, while Trump allies and his businesses have benefited from the project in a host of ways.

The coin is now being used to buy direct access to Trump. The group behind the coin — a Trump Organization affiliate and a company run by a Trump friend — has been encouraging purchases of the coin with the promise of an “intimate private dinner” with the president for the top 220 Trump-coin holders. Democrats and government ethics experts have expressed concerns that the meme-coin dinner could be used in a foreign influence scheme. After its promoters offered access to Trump, the coin’s price surged from around $9 to more than $14. Drew Harwell and Jeremy B. Merrill found that nearly two dozen crypto wallets acquired more than 100,000 meme coins, worth roughly $100 million.

David Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton at NYT:

A struggling technology company that has ties to China and relies on TikTok made an unusual announcement this week. It had secured funding to buy as much as $300 million of $TRUMP, the so-called memecoin marketed by President Trump.

GD Culture Group, a publicly traded firm with a Chinese subsidiary, has only eight employees, its public filings show, and recorded zero revenue last year from an e-commerce business it operates on TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app.

But on Monday, GD Culture Group became the latest business with foreign ties to seize on Mr. Trump’s crypto venture, which channels profits directly to the Trump family and has generated conflicts of interest that have alarmed ethics experts. (Memecoins like $TRUMP are a type of cryptocurrency based on an online joke or celebrity mascot and have traditionally not had any utility beyond speculation.)

In its statement, GD Culture Group, which is traded on the Nasdaq, said it would spend $300 million on a stockpile of Bitcoin and $TRUMP, using proceeds from a stock sale to an unnamed entity in the British Virgin Islands, a popular tax haven. It confirmed that investment plan in a securities filing late Tuesday.

The purchase would create clear ethical conflicts, enriching Mr. Trump’s family at the same time that the president tries to reach a deal that would allow TikTok to keep operating in the United States rather than face a congressionally approved ban.

The announcement also shows how investors around the world, including some that have virtually no public footprint, have latched on to the president’s crypto ventures to boost their own business prospects.

Just asserting a connection to Mr. Trump’s business can quickly raise a company’s profile. GD Culture Group’s struggling stock rose 12 percent on Monday, before losing those gains the next day.

“Make no mistake. These foreign entities and governments obviously want to curry favor with the president,” said former Representative Charles Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican who was the chairman of the House Ethics Committee. “This is completely out of bounds and raises all sorts of ethical, legal and constitutional issues that must be addressed.”

 

For Sale at Mar-a-Lago: Environmental Deregulation

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.

Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow at WP:

As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.

Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.

Trump’s remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how the former president is targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection bid. At the same time, he has turned to the industry to help shape his environmental agenda for a second term, including the rollbacks of some of Biden’s signature achievements on clean energy and electric vehicles.

"Bribery"

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's character and record of bigotry. The update -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. This past summer, he told several Democratic congresswomen to "go back" to their countries. Impeachment is becoming likely.

From Pelosi's November 14 press conference:

But yesterday, you heard an appointee of the President speak in very unambiguous terms. A courageous public servant. The devastating testimony corroborated evidence of bribery uncovered in the inquiry and that the President abused power and violated his oath by threatening to withhold military aid and a White House meeting in exchange for an investigation into his political rival. Clear attempt of the President to give himself the advantage in the 2020 election. Doing so, as I said, to the President, ‘You jeopardize our national security, undermine our national security, jeopardizing integrity of our electoral system, violate your oath of office."

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Q: You talked about bribery a second ago, and that's a very serious charge. What's the case of bribery?

Speaker Pelosi. Well you know, we’re talking Latin around here. ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ from many one. Quid pro quo, bribery, bribery, and that is in the Constitution attached to the impeachment proceedings.

Q: So what was the bribe here?

Speaker Pelosi. The bribe is to grant or withhold military assistance in return for a public statement of a fake investigation into elections. That's bribery. Yes.

Q: Will you be looking at article of impeachment?

Speaker Pelosi. I don’t know that. We haven't made a decision to impeach. That's what the inquiry is about, and when the committees decide that, and they will decide what the articles are. What I am saying, that what is – the President has admitted to and says it’s perfect. I said it's perfectly wrong. It's bribery.

And a bit of trolling:

Speaker Pelosi.  Well, all of this milieu is it seeking of the truth.  It's called an inquiry, and if the President has something that is exculpatory – Mr. President, that means if you have anything that shows your innocence – then he should make that known, and that's part of the inquiry, and so far we haven't seen that, but we welcome it, and that's what an inquiry is about. 

This was bribery! Not “attempted”! Under 18 USC 201(b)(2) an official commits bribery when he “corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally . . . in return for being influenced in the performance of any official act.” 1/ https://t.co/XvLwHLE1o7

— Eric Columbus (@EricColumbus) November 15, 2019