We are all sleeping through Trump's monetization of the White House

Comments: by Matt Lewis, opinion contributor - 05/22/26 9:30 AM ET Comments: Link copied by Matt Lewis, opinion contributor - 05/22/26 9:30 AM ET Comments: Link copied AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta Back in 2023, I wrote the wildly underrated (or so I believe) book Filthy Rich Politicians. It was a field guide detailing how the rich get elected and how the elected get rich. It was a bipartisan hit job. Democrats, Republicans, lobbyists, and congressional spouses with supernatural stock-picking abilities — I did my best to roast them all. But I have to confess that the book now feels quaint. It is like a corruption museum exhibit where schoolchildren point at the old-timey artifacts and say, Gee, Grandpa, politicians only used to steal millions? Because nothing — and I mean nothing — I wrote about and nobody I criticized (including President Trump in his first tour of duty) comes remotely close to the industrial-scale money machine that is Trump s second term. Take insider trading. I devoted an entire chapter to the topic, which heavily featured Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her husband Paul s suspiciously well-timed stock trades. This was fair game: Pelosi had both public policy influence and access to inside information. But Trump has something infinitely more valuable: the power to create the information. He can move markets — and he does. According to the Associated Press, during the first quarter of 2026 alone, Trump made more than 3,600 buy and sell orders, many of them involving companies whose profits have been directly impacted by his decisions as head of the government. Just to give you one example from earlier this year: MSNBC s Michael A. Cohen reported that Trump bought as much as $5 million in Nvidia stock right before the artificial intelligence chipmaker received permission to export its advanced H200 AI processors to China. It has reportedly been a good investment for him, which is no surprise at all. Somewhere back in time, Martha Stewart is staring out a prison window and muttering, Are you kidding me? Now, will the same people who spent years denouncing Pelosi apply the same standards to Trump? Please. And, naturally, this sort of thing has always been a family affair. In Filthy Rich Politicians, I criticized Hunter Biden for pulling down millions from his sinecure at Burisma and millions more for selling his so-called artwork. That was grubby stuff. But compare that to the Trump family, who — as of last October — had already hauled in $1.8 billion since Trump s re-election. It makes poor Hunter looks like a pre-teen running an unlicensed lemonade stand. The Biden grift leads people to say, See? Both sides do it! And they do. But people have a hard time grasping scale. We hear million and billion and our eyes glaze over. But the difference matters. A lot. A million seconds is about 12 days. A billion seconds is more than 31 years. A million buys a beach house. A billion buys the beach. Either way, the public sees you as rich. The same false equivalence applies when people compare Biden pardoning Hunter to Trump using a settlement of his own lawsuit against his own administration to secure lifelong IRS audit immunity for himself and his family. (Did I mention this happened through the same settlement that produced a taxpayer-funded $1.8 billion slush fund?) As usual, the Trumps are qualitatively and quantitatively worse than their predecessors. Another thing I harped on in Filthy Rich Politicians was how elected officials always seem to leave office far richer than their salaries could justify. Here, Trump — populist hero of the forgotten man — is no exception. As Steve Rattner recently noted, Trump s net worth has nearly tripled in his second term, reaching $6.5 billion. Where did it all come from? Since January 2025, Trump has been paid tens of millions from licensing his name, from an Amazon documentary about Melania Trump and from large settlements from tech and media companies — settlements which, let s face it, likely would not have been reached were he not president. And then there are the crypto deals, source of the vast bulk of his newfound wealth. Aside from the gaudiness of Trump profiting from his presidency, the crypto money is especially problematic. Even if we overlook the plight of any poor MAGA saps who bought $TRUMP coins and watched them lose 90 percent of their value, these tokens also represent a convenient means for foreign governments to curry favor with Trump. What s remarkable isn t merely that Trump is doing this, but that he has so desensitized us that the country stopped caring. His critics rarely raise this issue, and even his staunchest defenders don t even bother trying to justify it. Yet if any previous president had attempted anything like this, constitutional scholars would be hyperventilating into paper bags. I am just as guilty of underreacting, and I literally wrote the book on political self-enrichment. Compared with what Trump is doing t

We are all sleeping through Trump's monetization of the White House

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