Trump's Corruption: By the Numbers

It is a metastasizing cancer in our Republic

The corruption in the Trump Administration—from the Oval Office on down—is so vast and so brazen that it has begun to feel ordinary.

And that is the worst warning sign any country can face, as the rot sets in, as the public fisc is looted in plain sight, as the Boss and his bagmen go to town.

Each new outrage is buried under the next; the public mind glazes over in self-defense. That, of course, is part of the design.

So let’s slow down. Let’s look at the numbers.

The former Pardon Attorney at the Department of Justice, Liz Oyer, has just published one of the most devastating accountings I have read in months—a dense and damning breakdown on her excellent Substack, Lawyer Oyer, of the financial disclosure form Trump quietly filed with the Office of Government Ethics this month. (Months late.)

Three thousand six hundred individual stock trades. Between $220 million and $750 million in personal transactions, in three months—and only the personal ones, since his corporate holdings are not subject to disclosure at all.

Form 278-T is a public document. It is, as Oyer writes, a roadmap to the looting of the presidency.

A partial inventory of where the road leads:

• $10,000,000,000. This is the sum Donald Trump is suing the IRS for. He is, as he has publicly admitted, the plaintiff and the defendant. “I’m sort of suing myself.” He smiles when he says it.

• $1,776,000,000, This is the proposed “President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission,” a taxpayer-funded slush fund Trump’s own Department of Justice would create to “settle” that self-dealing lawsuit. My former colleague Katherine Faulders at ABC News ( one of the best reporters on this administration I know) broke the story. The recipients could include the roughly 1,600 January 6 rioters Trump has already pardoned.

• $6,300,000,000. Let’s say this number: “Six billion three hundred million dollars”—is Trump’s personal net worth, per Forbes. It’s up 60 percent since he returned to office. Let that one sink in.

• $4,000,000,000. This number represents new profits to the Trump family business since January 2025, per the Wall Street Journal.

• $400,000,000. This is the value of the luxury jet the government of Qatar gave him. Just gave him. (Poor old Bob Dole. Remember when he hollered, “Where is the outrage?” about Bill Clinton’s little failed real estate deal back in 1996? Outrage over corruption is so 20th Century for the MAGA GOP.)

• $2,000,000,000. This number represents the purchases of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial stablecoin (a kind cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar) by the UAE. And it came right after the “spy Sheikh” in that country took a 49 percent share in Trump’s crypto just days before the inauguration. Then, a little while later, the UAE was suddenly granted access to the advanced AI chips the Biden administration had refused give them on national-security grounds. Translation: They are selling the national security of our nation.

• $1,500,000,000. This is the value of the golf course outside Hanoi that the Vietnamese government approved…right in the middle of tariff negotiations.

• $1,250,000,000. Here’s a huge chunk of taxpayer money routed by the State Department to Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace,” for which he has installed himself as “Chairman for Life.”

• $1,000,000,000. This is the cost of paying for Trump’s hatred of wind power. One billion taxpayer dollars routed from the Treasury’s Judgment Fund to the French oil giant TotalEnergies, after the Interior Department killed two American offshore wind projects on a “national security” pretext that appears to have been invented after the deal was struck.

• $1,000,000,000. Here’s what Senate Republicans want taxpayers to cover for Trump’s new White House ballroom.

• 3,600. This number represents what may be the most blatantly corrupt thing any president has ever done. It’s the number of Trump’s individual stock trades in a single quarter, including Nvidia, Boeing, Palantir, Oracle, Paramount, Warner Brothers, and a long list of crypto positions whose value Trump personally, using the powers of the presidency, is in a position to move with a single sentence. Every modern president since Lyndon Johnson has placed his assets in a blind trust, an index fund, or—in Jimmy Carter’s case—sold the peanut farm. Trump bought Nvidia. Then he flew the CEO of Nvidia to Beijing on Air Force One to sell the chips we had been blocking from China.

And this is just what we know about. This is the catalog of a single year.

It’s why Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on House Judiciary, has launched a formal investigation into the TotalEnergies payoff, opened a probe into the Trademark Office’s role in concealing the “Board of Peace,” and is now vowing to use every tool of Article I—lawsuits, hearings, the power of the purse—to block the $1.776 billion commission before it can mature.

Raskin has called what we are witnessing a “massive and unprecedented presidential plunder of the American people.”

Senators Wyden, Warren, and Van Hollen have echoed the alarm.

Does anyone care?

The Trumps think we’re chumps.

But the conservative writer Mona Charen, in a sharp piece for The Bulwark, argues we may at last be approaching the moment when voters stop shrugging. Her theory is simple and persuasive: people generally tolerate corruption when the economy is good and the accusations feel partisan. Both conditions are collapsing.

Groceries are up. Gas is near five dollars. And it is not Democrats making the case for the gold leaf and the ballroom and the Qatari jet—it is Trump himself, in the Oval Office, on Air Force One, on his own disclosure forms.

The American Bar Association’s Human Rights magazine, in a clear-eyed March essay, named the pattern: an unprecedented “pay-to-play culture” in which appointments, pardons, regulatory decisions, and foreign policy are openly exchanged for money.

There is no quick legal remedy.

The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling has closed down many possible avenues of investigation and accountability. (By the way: Do you think any of them—Roberts, Gorsuch, the rest of the “originalists” and “textualists” on that Court ever regret their utterly un-originalist and counter-textual ruling that opens the door to this corruption? Me neither.)

The Office of Government Ethics has been hollowed and staffed with loyalists. The current Congress will not move.

Which means the only remedy is political. It has to be.

The plundering of our Treasury by this family, the self-dealing, the pay-to-play operation going on in front of our eyes, the CORRUPTION—must be one of the top issues of the 2026 midterms.

A republic in which the head of state openly converts the office into a family enterprise is not a republic.

It is something dark, sad, familiar, and brittle. You see it all across the world, all throughout history.

The Framers saw it. They read deeply into this precise subject. But they did not design a constitutional architecture that could withstand a president like this. What they counted on, what they trusted in, what they hoped for as a defense against this kind of civic cancer—was us.

They hoped that the plain, sturdy character of most Americans would be the guarantor against the Trumpist looting of our nation’s wealth.

They hoped public shame and a vigilant citizenry would do most of the work.

The shame, alas, seems gone. The vigilance is on us.

And the numbers are how we begin.

Get informed. Get angry. Get ready. Get out the vote.

—Terry