ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Before Donald Trump became the president of the United States, he was a business tycoon. And in some ways, that never really stopped. At the beginning of his first term, Trump and his family said they wouldn't make any new deals abroad. He did not make any such promise before he took the oath of office for the second time, and the Trumps now have five major deals in the Persian Gulf alone. He also has new crypto ventures, merch and so much more that it can be hard to keep it all straight. So David Kirkpatrick tried to answer a simple question that has a very complicated answer. How much money is Donald Trump making off the presidency? He breaks it down dollar-by-dollar in The New Yorker. David, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
DAVID KIRKPATRICK: Good to be here.
SHAPIRO: You're trying to figure out not just how much money Trump is making while he's president, but how much he's making because he's president. So to start with a specific example, tell us how you answer that question when it comes to a place like Mar-a-Lago - this private member's club - that Trump owned and was making money from long before he entered the Oval Office.
KIRKPATRICK: Right. So Mar-a-Lago, a lot of people are going there just to hang out, and they have been for a long time. So what I did is I looked at the way that their revenues have increased year over year since he began his first run for the White House. And they...
SHAPIRO: 'Cause their membership is at capacity. They're just charging more.
KIRKPATRICK: That's right. They're just charging more. So their operating costs are roughly flat, according to reports in Forbes, which is reliable on that. But their revenues have grown exponentially from something like $10 million a year to something like $50 million a year. And as an indication, their initiation fee - which is only a small part of their revenues - has gone from a hundred thousand in 2016 to a million last fall.
SHAPIRO: That was the line that I said, oh, my God, aloud when I read it. A hundred thousand to a million is a big jump. So on Mar-a-Lago alone, you calculate that Trump is making an extra $125 million by being president. When I read this long list, probably the biggest category of things that the president and his family profit from is cryptocurrencies and related financial tools. Tell us about their involvement there.
KIRKPATRICK: You know, the number of ways that they're involved is quite various at this point. It ranges from selling digital images of the president - non-fungible tokens - to selling, through a company they've created called World Liberty Financial, stablecoins, which is a kind of digital equivalent of U.S. currency, selling tokens that would allow buyers to participate in deciding what that company - World Liberty Financial - will eventually do, all the way over to their most recent gambit, which is turning Trump Media & Technology Group - the parent company of Truth Social - into a kind of crypto holding company. You know, that venture - which has a very unusually, anomalously high stock price - sold their stock at those inflated prices in order to buy up $2.3 billion of bitcoin to keep on their books.
And then there's another unusual venture where the Trump brothers have contributed their - basically, apparently only their name to a company that will mine Bitcoin. And they've come away with about a 13% stake in that company. It says its equipment is worth $100 million. Probably when it trades on the public stock exchanges, it'll be worth quite a bit more than that. So they've done very well for themselves there.
SHAPIRO: I'd like you to respond to some of what Donald Trump Jr. said in response to your reporting. Let's listen to what he told Fox News.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP JR: Unlike all the other people who'd served as a presidency before, basically since our founding fathers, Trump was the only guy that was actually a businessman before that. Are we supposed to stop running our businesses? Are we supposed to stop doing anything?
SHAPIRO: David Kirkpatrick, how do you answer that question?
KIRKPATRICK: Well, I don't think he was actually the first businessman to hold the presidency, but more importantly, what I'm talking about here are the ways that they have sought to leverage the presidency into money in the business world, right? So I've gone out of my way to say this article is not going to go look at - it's going to explicitly exclude the business that Trump was in before he ran for the White House. So we're only talking here about ways that he is actually exploiting the White House for his own personal gain.
SHAPIRO: So let's reveal the number. When you add it all up, what's the total that you reached?
KIRKPATRICK: I came up with $3.4 billion. But what I like to say to your listeners, most importantly, is that I've done my best to show my work. So people will read through this and they'll say, well, you're counting the management fees that Jared Kushner makes for managing a $2 billion investment from the - Saudi Arabia. He's going to make more profits than that. Or they might say, you know, you've undercounted the amount they're going to make from this project in Vietnam, or you shouldn't include Jared Kushner at all. That's unfair. He's just a son-in-law. And what I would say is, you know, please, be my guest. You know, read it over and do your own calculations. I'd show you how I got here.
SHAPIRO: You really do show your work. When I printed it out, it was 58 pages.
KIRKPATRICK: (Laughter) You'll need to block out some time.
SHAPIRO: As dizzying as that nearly $3.5 billion sum is, you point out that some of Trump's harshest critics overstate the case. They make false claims that Trump is not steering government funds directly into his bank accounts the way some other corrupt authoritarian leaders do. Why is that distinction important?
KIRKPATRICK: Well, when I talk to my liberal friends, they say, oh, he's just like Putin. He's just like this or that corrupt figure abroad. And that's really not the case. We're talking about people in other countries where the budget is not publicly disclosed and the ruler just literally embezzles money into their own offshore bank accounts. No one has credibly accused Trump of doing anything like that, and we shouldn't get carried away. Likewise, a lot of the allegations that were floating around during his first term that he was somehow using the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C., to squeeze money out of influence-seekers don't really hold water. In retrospect, that...
SHAPIRO: You conclude he lost money on the hotel.
KIRKPATRICK: Yeah, everybody concludes he lost money in the hotel. The hotel lost money every year he owned it, and it's turned out to be more profitable under a Waldorf Astoria brand after he left office.
SHAPIRO: Did you find any evidence of a quid pro quo?
KIRKPATRICK: Well, a quid pro quo is hard to prove. I don't have any shocking evidence of a quid pro quo. But what I will say is this, that the thing that really struck me is just the speed, the eagerness, the almost desperate zeal to make money. And that can't help but make you think a payment to the Trumps is more likely to win favor or gratitude. So it does make suspicions about a potential quid pro quo all the more pressing.
SHAPIRO: The U.S. has laws against using elected office for personal profit. Are they relevant here?
KIRKPATRICK: I'm not sure there's a specific law that prevents the president from, for example, selling a meme coin about his personal image or creating a social media platform that depends on his official statements as president like Truth Social. I don't think those two things are illegal. In general, the remedy that our political system requires of elected officials is that they disclose their outside businesses. And in Trump's defense, he certainly discloses it. I mean, about his meme coin, he was practically shouting about that from the roof of the White House.
SHAPIRO: That's David Kirkpatrick, and you can read his investigation in the latest issue of The New Yorker. Thank you.
KIRKPATRICK: You're welcome.
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