The Trump Corruption Ledger

A factual inventory of how the presidency is being used for personal enrichment.

Corruption thrives when it is treated as normal. That is the choice before us now.

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Why is he doing this?

Donald Trump has no stable ideology. Once, he described himself as “very pro-choice”; now he brags about ending federal abortion rights. He used to support universal health care; now he’s destroying the ACA and empowering Big Insurance. He even criticized Mitt Romney in 2012 for being too harsh on immigration and said Republicans needed to be more welcoming to immigrants.

Trump believes in nothing. Except his own glorification—and, even more than that, perhaps—his personal enrichment.

The scale of President Trump’s personal corruption is no longer speculative, hidden, or even subtle. It is brazen and richly partisan.

A brief inventory—necessarily incomplete—tells the story.

1. Monetizing the Presidency Before Taking the Oath
Even before his second inauguration, Trump and his family moved aggressively to cash in on the power he was about to wield. The most striking example involves World Liberty Financial, the Trump-linked crypto venture.

According to The Wall Street Journal, four days before Trump took office, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal to purchase 49% of World Liberty Financial for $500 million. Half was paid up front—sending $187 million to Trump family entities and $31 million to entities linked to Trump ally Steve Witkoff.

The deal was backed by Tahnoon bin Zayed, the UAE’s national security adviser. Two executives from his firm, G42, were installed on the company’s board—alongside Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff.

Yes—a foreign government official secretly took a giant ownership stake in the president’s family company. Foreign money, straight into the president’s pockets (Trump is “Founder emeritus”). It’s hard to even calculate the huge national-security implications and entanglements. And this was all before the inauguration; a sign of what was coming.

2. Crypto as a Corruption Machine
World Liberty Financial is not an isolated case. Trump-branded crypto ventures—most notoriously the $TRUMP meme coin—have created opaque vehicles for funneling money to Trump-linked entities while skirting traditional disclosure, ethics rules, and campaign finance scrutiny.

Crypto is here to stay. But it’s volatility and anonymity are beloved by gangsters, crooks and scammers around the world. They are perfectly suited to a presidency now held as a private franchise.

3. The Qatar Jet and the Normalization of Graft
This one’s just gross. Trump’s blithe contempt for traditional presidential ethics, his comfort in accepting lavish gifts from foreign powers—such as the widely reported luxury jet tied to Qatar—signals something deeper than impropriety. It’s a worldview in which the presidency is no longer a public trust, but an instrument of leverage for personal gain. And—can you imagine how insane MAGA and the GOP would have gone if Barack Obama had cut the same deal Trump did for a jet from any Muslim nation?

4. Cash for Clemency
The financial fraudster Trevor Milton was pardoned by Trump last March, after Milton was convicted of securities and wire fraud, and ordered to pay $675 million in restitution to investors he ripped off. His pardon came after he gave nearly $2 million to Trump’s re-election campaign; it wiped out the restitution for all his victims. Milton’s pardon was not an aberration; it was a model. There are lots more Trevor Miltons out there—Trump’s pardons favor his political allies, loyalists and donors.

The message is unmistakable: loyalty and money buys mercy. Pardons now function as a transactional commodity—another lever of personal enrichment and political reward.

5. Politicizing Federal Law Enforcement
Last week, Chad Mizelle, former Chief of Staff at the Department of Justice, publicly solicited applicants for U.S. Attorney jobs based on ideological loyalty: support for President Trump.

Even the well-known conservative legal analyst and Fox contributor Andy McCarthy recoiled.

“If support for the sitting president is now a condition of enforcing federal law,” McCarthy warned, “Congress should defund DOJ.”

What he means is that a Justice Department that’s focused only on doing the president’s bidding instead of doing—well, justice—becomes too dangerous to liberty to exist. Had Merrick Garland’s DOJ done this, impeachment cries would be deafening.

6. Corruption as Strategy, Not Side Effect
The brazenness is the point. Trump steals money and planes openly because he knows he can. Courts have delayed and shied away from vindicating our values in law. The Republican Congress has abased itself before Trump, abandoning its constitutional role. Norms have collapsed.

And the Republican Party—through cowardice, complicity, or greed—has gone merrily along with all of it.

Trump gets richer. His family business flourishes. America’s standing in the world erodes, dirty dollar by dirty dollar.

7. Why the Elections Matter
The only remaining check is a Democratic House with subpoena power. That is the threat Trump seeks to eliminate. That is why he is so determined to control the electoral machinery itself. And that is how to read his unhinged social-media post this weekend:

Why does he do it? For love—of himself. And for the money.

—Terry