THE GRIFT

Trump Gets Spectacularly Richer, While Putting the Country on a Path to Poverty

Algernon Austin

February 6, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Contrary to what many people may believe, Donald Trump is not a very impressive businessman. Not only has he had six businesses that went bankrupt, several of his other ventures failed and faded away. The now defunct Trump University was sued for defrauding students, and Trump settled for $25 million. The Trump Ice bottled water generally can’t be found alongside other bottled waters in stores. Although lobbyists and foreign governments funneled money into the Trump International Hotel during the first Trump presidency, the hotel still lost an estimated $74 million and was sold. This is far from a complete list of Trump’s failed ventures.

Donald Trump has been wealthy all of his life largely because he received $413 million from his father. The New York Times reports, “Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes.” It is much easier to make additional millions if one already has hundreds of millions. As scholars have observed, wealth begets more wealth.

Donald Trump’s real talent is his ability to get people to believe things that are not true. One of his biggest successes in this area is the idea that he is a tremendously successful businessman. Because Trump has gotten people to associate his name with luxury and success, he has been able to make millions licensing his name. Businesspeople pay Trump to put the Trump name on their ventures. This creates a feedback loop where these businesses that are not owned and managed by Trump give the public the impression that Trump owns more businesses than he actually does. It feeds into the image of him as a successful businessman.

Trump convinced many Americans that he would apply his supposed skill in business to address the problems facing the country. But as with many of his actual businesses, we may end up with a bankrupt country instead.

Trump’s Most Financially Successful Venture: The Second Trump Administration

Trump is using his power as president to bully, extort, and receive financial favors from companies and countries. For example, Trump has sued companies that depend on the government for contracts and mergers or that simply want to avoid a battle with the Trump administration. So far, Trump has made $90 million from these suits. Justin Sun was under federal investigation. He invested $75 million in Trump’s World Liberty Financial company. Then the federal government paused its investigation. The United Arab Emirates pledged to invest $2 billion in World Liberty Financial. The UAE is now able to purchase advanced artificial intelligence computer chips from the United States. There are many more examples.

There are different estimates of how many billions Trump has made off the presidency. Trump is not transparent about his business deals. He has multiple ventures and partnerships, and it is not always clear how much of the wealth from his joint ventures should be allocated to Trump. And his wealth is now constantly growing. All of this makes it hard to calculate exactly how much Trump has profited off the presidency.

In September of 2025, Forbes observed that Trump “just had the most lucrative year of his life.” It estimated that Trump made $3 billion from 2024 to September 2025. This amount would increase Trump’s net worth from $4.3 billion to $7.3 billion. In other words, Trump’s net worth increased by 70 percent by September 2025.

In January 2026, New Yorker reporter David D. Kirkpatrick estimated that Trump’s profits from the presidency had reached $4 billion. Based on the Forbes number for 2024, this would mean that Trump has basically doubled his net worth in about a year.

While 2025 was extremely profitable to Trump, 2026 is likely to be even more so. Trump has started the year with a $10 billion suit against the IRS and Treasury Department for failing to prevent the leaking of his tax information. If President Trump directs the IRS and Treasury Department to pay him $10 billion then he would have more than doubled his net worth again.

Fred Wertheimer, the president of the anti-corruption watchdog group Democracy 21, has worked on this issue for several decades. While most presidents profit personally in some way from the presidency, Wertheimer has never seen an American president profit personally on the scale that Donald Trump is. For Wertheimer, the president most similar to Trump is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump Puts America on a Path to Poverty

Trump is attacking the long-term health and strength of the US economy in several ways. His erratic tariffs are making it harder and more expensive for businesses to function. Although immigrants are important contributors to the US economy, his administration is virulently anti-immigrant. There are too many ways that Trump is harming the US economy in the long-term to address them all here, but I will briefly highlight three that might not come to mind when one thinks of the economic impact of Trump’s policies.

Trump’s climate-change-denial and pro-fossil-fuel policies are hurting the planet, the health of the American people, and the US economy. The Congressional Budget Office concluded that the harms of climate change in the United States will include an increase in mortality rates and hundreds of billions of dollars in flood damage — yet Trump continues with his denials. Trump’s pro-coal stance is among his most nonsensical. Coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, emitting a variety of harmful chemicals. Particulates from coal cause hundreds of thousands of deaths. And, as the conservative Washington Post editorial board stated, “Requiring aging [coal power] plants to operate after their scheduled closures hurts consumers, who pay the price.” But this is, in fact, what the Trump administration is requiring.

Electric vehicles are an important tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Trump’s anti-electric vehicle policies are helping China to increase its global dominance of the growing EV market and weakening the global competitiveness of the US auto industry. (Many of Trump’s policies are helping to “Make China great again.”) Although the harms of climate change and fossil fuels are clear, Trump is pursuing a policy agenda to accelerate and exacerbate the damage.

Science and technology have been critical to US economic development and growth. Many of the wealthiest US companies are technology companies. Many of the highest paying occupations are in scientific and technological fields. But the Trump administration is anti-science. The denial of climate change and the rejection of the findings of vaccine research are two prominent examples of this anti-science stance. Jennifer Duchon, a pediatric infectious disease specialist, described the latest vaccine recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as “an unmitigated disaster” and “grossly irresponsible.”

Although Donald Trump dined with the anti-Semites Nick Fuentes and Ye (Kanye West), has an administration with anti-Semites in prominent positions, and leads a MAGA movement that is increasing openly anti-Semitic and racist, the administration used the cover of going after anti-Semitism to attack the nation’s leading scientific research universities. These universities have lost research funding, have had to pay fines, and have had reductions in the number of foreign students.

About 25,000 scientists have been cut from government agencies. Joel Wilkins of Futurism concluded that the administration’s actions have resulted in a “colossal exodus of specialized expertise from institutions important to public health, environmental protection, and scientific research” and that “[t]he effects are likely to be catastrophic — and the reverberations could be felt for decades.”

Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, stated,

Over the last 80 years, we have built the greatest innovation engine that the world’s ever seen and it’s delivered cures and treatments for disease. It has delivered economic growth and jobs.

But now Trump is destroying that innovation engine — and the rest of the world is benefitting. France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, Australia, Norway and other countries are now actively recruiting US scientists. Given that there has been a jump in the number of US scientists looking for jobs overseas, these countries are likely to be successful in capturing US talent.

Rather than try to unify the country, Trump has worked to deepen divisions and intensify conflict. He has called Democrats “the enemy from within.” His administration tries to punish blue states. (Trump is bipartisan in that he will also go after Republican politicians who dare to oppose him, but most Republicans have toed the Trump line.) Blue states are economically connected to red states and to the federal government. If Trump succeeds in harming blue states, he weakens all of America.

It is difficult for a country to address problems when there is so much internal conflict. In a hyper-partisan environment, policies that are needed are viewed through a partisan lens rather than with an eye toward what’s best for the country. Division makes governing more difficult. A dysfunctional political system likely leads to a less responsive and more inefficient economic system.

Much more could be said about Trump’s anti-climate-change, anti-science, and pro-division policies. Additionally, there are many more risks that the Trump administration poses to the long-term economic health of the country. Among the potential sources of harm are Trump’s desire to control the Federal Reserve, underfunding and understaffing of the federal government, his deregulatory agenda, his failure to address rising healthcare costs, disastrous foreign policy, and his approach to artificial intelligence. This is not a complete list.

Trump may not be very good as a businessman, but he seems to be pretty good at creating bankruptcies and failed ventures. The United States may be the next victim of his reverse Midas touch.

This first appeared on CEPR.

Algernon Austin, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has conducted research and writing on issues of race and racial inequality for over 20 years. His primary focus has been on the intersection of race and the economy. 

Trump’s Incompetence Left of Thousands in Red States Without Power

Dean Baker

 February 6, 2026

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A long walk to the store on the Snake River Plain, near Melba, Idaho. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

We all know that Trump has declared war on Blue America. He has made clear that he intends to use the full power of the presidency to make the people who didn’t vote for him suffer. He is even going so far as to send in an armed force of invaders, as he did last fall in Chicago and is doing now in Minnesota. His masked gang openly touts the law and the Constitution.

But ostensibly Trump loves his voters in the Red States. After all these are the people whose votes put him in office and kept him out of jail for the crimes he committed. Many of them also buy Trump merchandise, like his MAGA hats, his bible, and his playing cards. Some of them would probably even go to see Melania, if they had the opportunity. In principle, Trump would like to help these people, since they count as real Americans in his book.

Unfortunately, regardless of what Trump may desire, he is falling down badly on the job of ensuring the Red States hit by recent winter storms, Mississippi (Trump +23), and Louisiana (Trump +22), and Tennessee (Trump +30) have power and other essential services restored. Tens of thousands were still without power nearly a week after the storm.

It is difficult to quickly restore services after a major storm, especially in areas like these in the South that are not accustomed to severe winter weather. But it’s a safe bet that cutbacks to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government agencies that might have been involved in the recovery did not help.

It is also worth noting that if a Democrat were in the White House we can be absolutely certain that the Republicans would be screaming bloody murder over this failing. They would certainly be scheduling Congressional hearings and probably even looking to do criminal prosecutions.

This isn’t hypothetical. In the fall of 2024, after Hurricane Helene hit much of Southern Appalachia, President Biden quickly rushed in assistance through FEMA. This effort didn’t stop Republicans from yelling and screaming about how about Biden had abandoned the area because they were Republicans. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and biggest spreader of disinformation on the Internet, even pushed absurd stories about how FEMA was blocking aid and seizing packages.

The Republicans also blamed (and continue to blame) Biden for the inflation caused by the pandemic. Even though the supply-chain problems caused by the pandemic led to jumps in inflation in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere, Republicans pretended that the inflation was just the result of Biden’s blunders.

Their efforts were so successful, that even Democratic consultants adopted their line, saying things like, “People don’t care about inflation in Germany and France, they care about the price of bread and milk.”

I won’t weigh in on whether the population lacks the ability to understand that a worldwide pandemic creates economic disruptions; but I will point out that it should be possible for Democrats to flip the story now that Donald Trump is in the White House and tens of thousands of people are suffering. It is in fact the government’s responsibility to prepare for disasters like the winter storms that hit last week.

It should have been able to respond quickly and ensure that the people in hard-hit areas had adequate food, shelter, and access to medical care. Insofar as this was not the case, it was a major failing of the Trump administration. Trump decided it was more important to terrorize the people of Minneapolis to score points against his political opponents than to help his own supporters get through the winter.

Elon Musk’s DOGE chainsaw cut down government workers who might have helped the people in these Red states in an emergency. Trump and the Republican politicians who backed them should be held responsible for this situation. With the Trump administration causing so much chaos and destruction in so many areas, perhaps his failing to protect his supporters in the South should not be at the top of anyone’s agenda. But it does deserve to be on Trump’s greatest hits list.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog. 

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

Trump and Vance Can’t Be “Pro-Life” While Committing Violence Against Children

Jordan Liz

 February 6, 2026

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Photograph Source: JD Vance – Public Domain

On January 20, ICE agents detained a five-year-old child just outside his home in Minnesota. The child was used as “bait” to try to draw family members out of their home.

A widely circulated photo of the boy being apprehended, with his Spiderman backpack and fuzzy little animal ears on his winter hat, may become an indelible image of ICE’s cruelty.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleges that ICE was conducting a targeted operation against the boy’s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias. Yet he and his son had entered the country via an official crossing point. They have an active asylum case and there was no order of deportation against them.

Zena Stenvik, the local school superintendent, reports that this was the fourth child detained by ICE in that community alone. A 10-year-old fourth grader and two 17-year-olds were also taken.

Since then, more children have been abducted. On January 22, ICE agents detained a 2-year-old girl and her father, Elvis Joel Tipan Echeverria, in south Minneapolis. Like Arias and his son, Echeverria and his daughter are asylum seekers without an active order for deportation.

On January 29, two brothers in the second and fifth grades were detained with their mother. She also has a pending asylum case.

Violence towards children is nothing new for the Trump administration. During President Trump’s first term, more than 5,000 immigrant children were forcibly separated from their parents. These children were held in dirty, crowded, chain-linked cages and only provided foil sheets to serve as blankets. In December 2024, Human Rights Watch reported that as many as 1,360 children had still not been reunited with their parents.

Treating children like this is morally abhorrent. Childhood is supposed to be a time of play, learning, and discovery — it is meant to be a sanctuary. For the Trump administration, however, childhood represents a frontline in a battle against “foreign invaders” who threaten “civilizational erasure.”

As Trump’s extremist Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller put it, “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

In this distorted view, the children of immigrants are just as — if not more — dangerous than their parents. Thus they merit none of the special protections we ordinarily extend to children. ICE will arrest, detain, cage, traumatize, and tear gas them. Agents will use them as bait, deny their rights, and deport them in the name of defending America.

For the Trump administration, there are two kinds of babies: those, in Trump’s words, with “bad genes” that jeopardize the nation, and those that make America great again.

This double standard is why Vice President J.D. Vance can defend ICE arresting a 5-year-old one day, and then the very next dayclaim that he wants to see “more families and more babies” in the United States. “The mark of barbarism is that we treat babies like inconveniences to be discarded rather than the blessings to cherish that they are,” Vance said at the 2026 March for Life anti-abortion rally.

While the irony is lost on him, he’s right about this much: All babies, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, are blessings. Instead of deporting them, we should cherish them. Instead of denying them citizenship, we should embrace them. No baby is an inconvenience to be discarded. ICE’s actions truly are “the mark of barbarism.”

The Trump administration will continue to preach pro-life politics while jailing babies. They will continue their anti-immigrant crusade with reckless abandon unless we stop them — and, for the sake of the children and all others who can’t defend themselves, we must.

Jordan Liz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at San José State University. He specializes in issues of race, immigration, and the politics of belonging.