{"id":9951,"date":"2026-02-08T12:37:37","date_gmt":"2026-02-08T12:37:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2026\/02\/08\/is-there-a-remedy-for-presidential-profiteering-the-new-yorker\/"},"modified":"2026-02-08T12:37:37","modified_gmt":"2026-02-08T12:37:37","slug":"is-there-a-remedy-for-presidential-profiteering-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2026\/02\/08\/is-there-a-remedy-for-presidential-profiteering-the-new-yorker\/","title":{"rendered":"Is There a Remedy for Presidential Profiteering? – The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

In some ways, \u201cMelania,\u201d the new documentary about Melania Trump, feels almost avant-garde. It rejects everything we normally associate with the commercial success of a bio-pic: narrative, suspense, authenticity, even one unguarded moment. But in another way it\u2019s bracingly honest. President Donald Trump and his wife have made no effort to hide that, over a dinner at Mar-a-Lago shortly after the 2024 election, she personally pitched the project to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who has vast financial interests in government contracts and antitrust policy. Nor have the Trumps dissembled about Amazon\u2019s payment of forty million dollars for the rights to the film\u2014more than twice as much as the second-highest bid\u2014with twenty-eight million reportedly flowing directly to the First Lady.<\/p>\n

President Trump has been less up front about a far larger payment\u2014negotiated at about the same time that his wife was pitching \u201cMelania\u201d but revealed on its opening weekend\u2014from the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. That payment came through World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency business announced by Trump and Steve Witkoff, his friend and now his Middle East envoy, with five of their sons and two other executives, in September, 2024. (Trump and Witkoff are currently listed as \u201cemeritus\u201d co-founders.) World Liberty billed itself as \u201cinspired by \u2018Chief Crypto Advocate\u2019 Donald J. Trump\u201d with a mission \u201cto leverage the global reach and recognition of the Trump brand\u201d to get internet users into crypto. But its business plan was vague.<\/p>\n

In October, 2024, World Liberty began selling digital tokens that gave owners a right to \u201cvote on certain matters\u201d about what the company might someday do, without conveying any ownership or share in potential profits. Before Trump won the election, the tokens predictably found very few buyers. The company did not yet have a track record, any revenue other than those token sales, or any apparent advantage (other than its Trump connection) over better-established competitors, so determining a fair market price for it would have been exceedingly difficult.<\/p>\n

Yet World Liberty has now acknowledged that, four days before Trump\u2019s second Inauguration, a company controlled by the U.A.E.\u2019s ruling family agreed in secret to pay half a billion dollars for a forty-nine-per-cent stake in the nascent venture. According to the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, which first reported the transaction, internal documents show that the Trump family immediately pocketed about a hundred and eighty-seven million dollars, the Witkoffs thirty-one million, and the two other executives another thirty-one million, with a second payment of two hundred and fifty million dollars expected six months later. (The Journal<\/em> could not determine how the second payment may have been distributed.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In May, between the two payments, Trump, overruling objections from his national-security advisers about Emirati ties to China, approved a huge sale of cutting-edge A.I. computer chips to the U.A.E. (A spokesman for World Liberty said that the President and Steve Witkoff had not had \u201cany involvement whatsoever\u201d since the election and that the Emirati deal had nothing to do with Trump\u2019s decision about the chips. Trump told reporters that he does not know about the investment and that his sons \u201care handling that.\u201d)<\/p>\n

It is well documented that Trump and his immediate family have exploited the Presidency for personal profit on an unprecedented scale. Last summer, The New Yorker<\/em> calculated that over the past decade those profits came to $3.4 billion. Six months later, at the end of his first year back in office, that tally had climbed to more than four billion. But the Emirati payment raises novel questions, beginning with the Constitution\u2019s prohibition against officeholders accepting any \u201cpresent\u201d or \u201cemolument\u201d from a foreign state without congressional consent. In Trump\u2019s first term, his lawyers contended that renting hotel rooms at Trump properties to foreign states was not the kind of \u201cemolument\u201d that the Founders had in mind. They argued that this was a \u201cfair value\u201d exchange and that, in any case, Trump donated the profits to the U.S. Treasury.<\/p>\n

Trump did abstain from new business deals outside the U.S. in his first term. In his second, he has abandoned such scruples. Yet the Trump Organization maintains that it still avoids deals with foreign governments\u2014a claim the Emirati payment appears to vitiate. Will Trump say that it, too, was a \u201cfair value\u201d exchange and donate the profits?<\/p>\n

Then, there\u2019s the secrecy. The sheer brazenness of the Trump family\u2019s operations has been in some ways Trump\u2019s strongest defense against charges of corruption. Because Presidents cannot be expected to jettison all their financial ties, government ethics rules rely mainly on public disclosure to allow voters, and their elected representatives, to judge whether a President puts personal interests ahead of the public\u2019s. And, until now, Trump always seemed unembarrassed to crow about his side hustles. But, if the Emirati payment was kept secret, what else might be? Both World Liberty and Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars from unnamed investors over the past year. Neither the companies nor the President has disclosed the sources of that money.<\/p>\n

In the run-up to the 2020 election, Bob Bauer, who was a lawyer in the Obama White House, and Jack Goldsmith, an Assistant Attorney General under President George W. Bush, published a book, \u201cAfter Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.\u201d In it, they offered reforms to curtail the opportunities for the abuse of executive power that Trump\u2019s first term had exposed\u2014opportunities that his second term has taken to extremes. To address potential financial conflicts of interest, one proposal would require Presidents to certify that they have fully removed themselves from any role in any private businesses in which they own stakes, with no access to information about them that is not also available to the public. A second would force any such business to disclose its assets, liabilities, and other stakeholders (precluding a secret investment by a foreign government). A third would give teeth to the emoluments clause: any business connected to a President would be required to publicly report any expected payment or benefit from an arm of a foreign state. If Congress did not consent to it within sixty days, a President would be forced to sell off that interest.<\/p>\n

Such measures are, of course, out of the question as long as Trump has a veto. But most of our current government ethics rules date back to a bipartisan backlash after the Watergate scandal. It is hardly impossible that Trump\u2019s self-enrichment, at four billion dollars and counting, might yet trigger a similar wave.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In some ways, \u201cMelania,\u201d the new documentary about Melania Trump, feels almost avant-garde. It rejects everything we normally associate with the commercial success of a bio-pic: narrative, suspense, authenticity, even one unguarded moment. But in another way it\u2019s bracingly honest. President Donald Trump and his wife have made no effort to hide that, over a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9952,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}