Excerpt from Our Investigation: The Presidency as a Business - From the Self Lawsuit Fund to the Gifted Jet

The White House is even right about this, just not in the way it thinks. Where public office and private business merge into one and the same thing, there can no longer be any conflict between them!

President Donald Trump attempted to establish a fund worth nearly 1.8 billion dollars whose proceeds could flow to his supporters, framed as a mechanism to settle a lawsuit he had brought against his own government. He even argued that he had “given up a lot of money by allowing it.” After the backlash in Congress and in the courts, however, the White House is now reconsidering the fund. That could mean that the lawsuit, and with it the possibility that the president may ultimately still collect, is back on the table.

Trump has never concealed that he sees the presidency as a productive source of personal gain. That extends from merchandise licensing deals to cryptocurrency ventures to expensive political and official events hosted at his own properties. Asked about possible self dealing, the White House dismissed such suggestions as “the same old tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.” Spokeswoman Anna Kelly stated: “President Trump acts solely in the best interests of the American public, which is why they overwhelmingly returned him to office despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses by the fake news media. There are no conflicts of interest.”

With that final sentence, the spokeswoman unintentionally delivered the most revealing statement in the entire matter. A conflict of interest requires two interests capable of conflicting with one another, that of the office and that of the person holding it. If the distance between the two disappears, the conflict disappears as well, and that is exactly what is being presented here as if it were an exoneration. The republic was once founded on the assumption that public affairs and the ruler’s private purse had to remain separate, and an officeholder who profited from office was considered the very definition of corruption. What Ms. Kelly communicates is not the absence of this problem but its completed form. The following examples show how far that process has advanced.

A Lawsuit Against His Own Government and Business for the Family

Last year, the president filed a claim seeking 230 million dollars in damages from the Department of Justice over the FBI search of his Mar a Lago property in Florida, which had taken place as part of an investigation into whether he had taken classified documents from the White House. In January of this year, Trump, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization filed a 10 billion dollar lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department after a former IRS contractor unlawfully disclosed Trump’s tax returns. To settle these matters, Trump’s administration agreed to distribute 1.776 billion dollars in taxpayer money to people who believe they had been politically prosecuted by previous administrations, including Trump supporters who had been imprisoned for attacking police officers during the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol. After resistance even from some Republicans in Congress, the Justice Department executed a remarkable reversal. Just days earlier it had announced that it would not allow itself to be stopped by the “political preferences” of individual judges. Then on Monday, that same department declared that while it strongly disagreed, it would comply with the order of Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema, who paused the fund for two weeks and scheduled a hearing for June 12. An institution that had just been lecturing the courts suddenly rediscovered respect for them at precisely the moment when such respect became politically useful. Republican senators remain unconvinced. A forced pause, they argue, is not the same thing as abandoning the plan, and they want to hear the president himself say that the matter is over. Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa demanded that the president “make very clear that there will not be such a fund.” But that still resolves nothing. A stop imposed from the outside does not eliminate self interest. It merely suspends it, and as long as it remains suspended, the question remains open whether the president ultimately pays himself after all.

Far less attention was paid to another part of the arrangement that allows the government to halt ongoing tax audits involving Trump and his relatives. Separately, the Air Force agreed to purchase interceptor drones from Powerus, a Florida company connected to Trump’s family. And as ProPublica reported, the Pentagon’s decision to lend 620 million dollars to the North Carolina startup Vulcan Elements, which is linked to Donald Trump Jr., was preceded by direct intervention from the White House. Trump Organization spokeswoman Kimberly Benza rejected any ethical conflict between the White House and the family business. “The Trump Organization operates completely separately from the presidency and fully complies with all ethics and conflict of interest laws,” Benza said. Regarding Powerus, she stated that Eric Trump is “a passive investor in an investment vehicle that holds a stake” in the company among many others but was not involved in decisions or management.

Trading in Markets He Can Move Himself

At this point, in addition to the 113 page disclosure already examined above, we have reviewed roughly another 500 documents. The word swamp would not even begin to cover it. Individual transactions alone sometimes move in the range of several hundred thousand dollars. For Microsoft, the disclosure lists only the broad range of 250,001 to 500,000 dollars - exact amounts remain hidden from the public, at least for now.

Trump has traded stocks and bonds on a scale without precedent for a sitting American president. Filings submitted to the Office of Government Ethics show that Trump completed more than 3,600 stock transactions in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with a total value well above 100 million dollars. Many of these transactions involved major purchases of stakes in technology and artificial intelligence giants such as Nvidia, Dell, Oracle, and Palantir, before his administration implemented measures that benefited those same companies. Comparable disclosures from the previous year show that Trump purchased more than 300 million dollars in bonds issued by corporations, states, and municipalities while repeatedly pressuring the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, a move that could increase the value of his holdings.

Business With Cryptocurrencies

Our review shows four price charts measured from their previous peaks to current values. In all four cases, prices collapsed dramatically, down approximately 88 percent, 93 percent, 98 percent, and nearly 99 percent from their respective highs. These are not normal fluctuations but extraordinary losses. For investors who entered near those peaks and held until today, movements of this magnitude would mean severe losses.

Since his reelection, Trump’s family has generated substantial profits in the cryptocurrency sector. The driving force was the meme coin $TRUMP, announced the day before his inauguration. Around 220 of the largest investors were subsequently invited to a private reception with the president. Trump’s family also holds the majority stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto company founded together with the president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and run by his son Zach. It operates its own stablecoin, USD1, and received a major boost shortly before Trump took office when an investment fund linked to the United Arab Emirates acquired a large position in it. An Abu Dhabi backed investment firm called MGX then pledged to use 2 billion dollars worth of USD1 to purchase a stake in Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, further strengthening World Liberty Financial.

Business in His Own Name

Beyond the digital world, countless companies pay to use the president’s name for tangible products ranging from Bibles, guitars, and sneakers to watches, fragrances, and a gold colored mobile phone. Trump promoted many of these products on social media, especially during his 2024 campaign, but they also appeared prominently inside the White House. When French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited last summer, Trump showed them a room adjacent to the Oval Office filled with products sold on his website. A few months later, a video appeared showing Trump inside the White House spraying Syrian President Ahmad al Sharaa with bottles of his fragrance “Victory 47,” which he presented as a gift. During a meeting with congressional Democrats last year, the president placed “Trump 2028” hats on the Resolute Desk, and during a televised cabinet meeting in May, a red hat marking the 250th anniversary of the United States was placed at every seat. Each of those hats is sold on Trump’s website for 55 dollars.

Revenue for the President’s Properties

The Republican National Committee and various political groups connected to Trump and his party have held fundraising events and political gatherings at Mar a Lago, as well as at Trump’s property in Bedminster, New Jersey, and at his golf clubs in Doral, Florida, and Sterling, Virginia. LIV Golf, controlled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund Public Investment Fund under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has hosted events in Doral. Trump is scheduled to host the G20 summit there in November. That means heads of state and government, support staff, business representatives, journalists, and everyone else involved will be paying the Trump Organization, which acquired Doral in 2012, in order to attend. The president has attempted to preempt criticism over self dealing by stating that government participants would be charged “at cost” and that “we will not make money from it.” Meanwhile, conservative groups and Republican committees have spent at least 26 million dollars at Trump properties since 2015. The actual amount is likely higher because some groups are not required to disclose their spending in detail.

Reconstruction and New Construction at Taxpayer Expense

Qatar gifted Trump an aircraft valued at 400 million dollars that he intends to use as Air Force One and place in his presidential library after leaving office. The gift has undergone extensive taxpayer funded reconstruction and security upgrades that lawmakers estimate will cost more than one billion dollars. Trump has also commissioned numerous construction projects intended to leave his mark on Washington while passing the costs to taxpayers. For a long time he insisted wealthy donors would cover the cost of the 400 million dollar ballroom, for which he had the East Wing of the White House demolished, only to later request one billion dollars in federal funds for security upgrades that he said had been required by the military and the Secret Service as part of the project. At least 15 million dollars in public funds are being spent on the triumphal arch Trump wants built at one of the entrances to the capital. The National Park Service is also paying a contractor 13.1 million dollars for the reconstruction of the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial ordered by Trump.

The documents show an entry in the official U.S. federal spending database, USASpending.gov. There, Atlantic Industrial Coatings is listed as a contractor for the National Park Service. Particularly striking is the highlighted amount. The federal database already shows contract obligations totaling $13.1 million across two transactions. This is the same company that was awarded the work on the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. The information does not come from political opponents but directly from our review of U.S. government spending and procurement records. The federal records themselves therefore document a substantially larger financial commitment than the $1.5 to $2 million that Donald Trump publicly claimed.

In the end, the conclusion returns to that one sentence with which the White House denies everything. There are no conflicts of interest, and in a strict sense that is even true. A conflict requires two entities meeting each other that are not the same thing. Here, one has dissolved into the other. Office serves wealth, wealth decorates office, and the man in the middle no longer has to choose between them because he possesses both at once. The old idea that public office is a fiduciary relationship, something entrusted that must be returned intact, assumes that there is someone to whom it belongs, and that someone was once understood to be the people. Whoever declares that his own interest is identical to that of the public abolishes the grantor and leaves only the trustee administering himself. This is no longer a conflict of interest. It is its calm, almost cheerful conclusion.

To be continued .....