The following is merely a list of a few highlights, and omits many items:

*Trump founded a cryptocurrency firm at the same moment he was deregulating the entire crypto industry.  He then bought a separate firm that he used to buy his own cryptocurrency, while at the same time raising nearly one billion dollars from investors to buy that very same cryptocurrency.

*He launched a meme coin, aka, a lightly tarted up Ponzi scheme, that netted him hundreds of millions of dollars, even as the coin lost 97% of its value.   Mandatory financial disclosures revealed eventually that investors had collectively lost $3.8 billion on this scheme, while Trump himself had netted $636 million, since he made money on every transaction, whether the value of the coin went up or down.

*Relatedly, he received the benefit of enormous crypto “investments” from foreign nationals, that were often barely disguised bribes.  He pardoned one of these investors, Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, wiping out a serious criminal conviction.  Prior to Trump issuing this pardon, Binance had provided critical software and infrastructure to World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency start-up co-founded by Trump and his sons.

*His son-in-law Jared Kushner, a man with no experience in either high finance investment or international diplomacy, was given two billion dollars to manage by Saudi Arabia – this generated a $40 million investment fee per year for Kushner – and then was appointed by Trump to handle wartime negotiations with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s bitterest regional rival.  In the midst of the negotiation, Kushner solicited five billion more dollars for his fund from the Saudis and other Middle Eastern governments.

*In the summer of 2025, the nation of Qatar gave Trump a $400 million luxury jumbo jet as a gift.  This was a completely unambiguous violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.

*In May of 2026, it was revealed that the amount of money managed by an investment fund run by Trump’s oldest son had increased by a factor of fifteen since Trump’s re-election, going from just over two hundred million dollars to more than three and a half billion.   Much of the new “investment” was coming from companies and individuals who were seeking, or had already received, various favors from his father’s administration.  Just as in the case of Trump’s son-in-law, nothing in Donald Trump Jr.’s background indicated he was even minimally qualified to be investing billions of dollars, transferred to his firm in the form of all but open bribes.

*Also in May of 2026, Trump’s lawyers negotiated an agreement with the IRS to create a multi-billion-dollar fund, to pay Trump’s allies for damages they had supposedly incurred because they were investigated by that agency.  This group was made up primarily of people who tried to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021.  Trump, in other words, was paying off domestic terrorists for having engaged in sedition for his benefit.   By doing so, Trump was in effect suing himself, while using taxpayer money to fund this astonishing act of self-dealing.  In a particularly corrupt touch, Trump’s lawyers dismissed the suit without a formal settlement with the government, because such a settlement would have required that judge sign off on it.  Instead, he simply ordered his own DOJ to set up the fund to pay the 1/6 seditionists.  The Attorney General – formerly Trump’s personal lawyer – then forced the agency to enter into an agreement to never pursue any investigation into either Trump’s own taxes, or those of members of his family, or of his businesses.  This episode illustrated particularly well how Trump has essentially broken investigative journalism.  That is because investigative journalism requires the exposing of hidden scandals.  If the scandals aren’t hidden, then it turns out they’re not really scandals.

This scheme was so outrageous that a federal judge ruled that the lawsuit was an improper exercise in in self-dealing, and barred Trump from claiming that the extraordinary tax protections the settlement purportedly gave him were part of a legitimate enforceable agreement.  In addition, the judge referred the lawyer who brought case against the I.R.S. to the Florida bar for disciplinary proceedings, and forwarded her decision to the New York bar, which was already investigating then-acting (later permanent) Attorney General Todd Blanche.

*In June, a Reuters investigation found that the president and his family had profited to the tune of at least $2.3 billion from his various crypto schemes, while very much not coincidentally, investors in those same schemes had collectively lost $2.3 billion.   This reporting was officially confirmed by the government in July, when mandatory financial disclosures revealed that Trump himself had earned more than two billion dollars in 2025, a figure representing a level of corrupt self-enrichment that even the normally reticent New York Times noted was unknown outside authoritarian kleptocracies.

*In July, the administration admitted in federal court documents that it had canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects, “based solely,” in the administration’s lawyers’ own words, on political considerations, targeting only projects in states that were represented by Democrats and voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.

*In October, the New York Times reported that Trump was “enraged” when he learned that his former lawyer Alina Habba had been given a $50 million employment contract by a Venezuelan plutocrat, who was trying to influence Trump into granting him a pardon for a criminal conviction.  What enraged Trump, according to the Times, was that Habba had failed to “donate a portion of that money” to some “Trump-related entity.”  In the argot of the mob, this is known as “kicking up to the boss.”

 

I think it has some value to try to curate this stuff and put it where some people might see it. 

It’s a marker of many, many things that Very Serious People can’t even begin to bring themselves to say things like, “The Trump Organization is mainly a real estate scam/money laundering operation, and the guy and his spawn care mainly about politics as a vehicle for further self-enrichment and empowerment.”  Instead, they insist on talking about What the President’s Strategy for Iran Might Entail.