The Daily - The Unprecedented Personal Profits of Trump_s Presidency

0:01From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. To an extent never before seen in American history, President Trump has turned the presidency into a cash cow for his family's businesses. A recent financial disclosure shows that the president has made $2.2 billion since he retook office. But the Trumps are not done. And today, my colleague Eric Lipton explains the family's next potential windfall and how the president's position is once again helping it happen. It's Thursday, July 9th. Eric Lipton, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. So, Eric, ever since President Trump returned to office, you have been trying to figure out just how much he and his family have made off of the presidency.

1:08We recently got kind of an answer to that question when he released this enormous 900 page financial disclosure, which outlined what he made last year. And I wonder if somebody has been paying such close attention to this particular area. What was your initial reaction seeing that top line number $2.2 billion? I was completely startled by this number. I've been tracking the Trump family for a decade now, and we all knew that with Trump.

1:37back in the White House that his family was getting into all kinds of lucrative business ventures. But I never imagined that he would see more than $2 billion in revenue in the first year that he's back as president. And I was so completely floored by it, I thought I had to talk to some historians. Just to put it into context. Yeah, I get on the phone, I start calling up some of the most prominent authors of American presidential history, one after another, every single one of them that I spoke with.

2:05the word out of their mouth was unprecedented, unprecedented. There's never been a president in the history of the United States that has made this much money well in the White House. And none of them could come up with any parallels except looking at other places around the world, authoritarian-styled places where there's a mixing of your job as a government official and the wealth of that country. Basically, you have to go outside of the United States to find anything like what we are seeing here in this country? Yes. I mean, there are parts of the world where it's normal for the royal family to both be running the government and be enriched by the government. I think particularly of some of the Middle East nations, like the royal families in Saudi Arabia or in the United Arab Emirates, where there is no line. They are the government and they are the financial beneficiaries of the government.

3:00The same thing in Turkey, where Erdogan has appointed members of his family to be the finance minister, and they also own business operations, are in Russia, where Putin and the various oligarchs are all benefiting from their access to the power. This is a tradition that isn't seen in the United States, but Trump has put us into a whole new category where wealth is coming into the White House, in part because of the policy decisions that he's making.

3:27Eric, when it comes to what we learned from Trump's fortune in particular, can you just tell us a little bit about where we're learning that money is coming from? Yeah, the single biggest chunk of it comes from cryptocurrency, $1.4 billion. This is a sector that the Trump family had never been in prior to 2025, that it was only really during Trump's re-election campaign that he came to be kind of a crypto enthusiast. He had been a skeptic of crypto prior to that, and then suddenly he's back in office.

3:56and they are going gangbusters to try to make money off of crypto. Right. This is actually, I think the last time you were on the show was to explain how all of that worked. Basically, the family goes to launch several types of cryptocurrency. A lot of people bought that cryptocurrency. The value of those coins plummeted. But the Trump family, and this is what you have documented in your reporting, made money anyway, in large part on...

4:18fees from trading these coins. And all of that was happening while the administration was weighing how to regulate the cryptocurrency industry. That's right. And so they were simultaneously making enormous loads of money while the president was appointing a head of the Securities and Exchange Commission that was setting regulations that allowed their businesses to do some risky practices that would not have been possible during the prior presidency. Okay.

4:46huge windfall for the Trump's crypto. And you have been reporting on how crypto might actually just be the beginning for the Trump's, just in terms of business ventures that they are finding to be quite lucrative with the president in office. What else have you found just in terms of money making ventures that they might be having their eyes on right now? What we've found is that the Trump's sons are being very creative in searching for ways to make money.

5:13and all different kinds of sectors that they're moving into that align with the president's agenda. And one in particular that has really been fascinating to deconstruct is their enthusiasm for getting into critical minerals. Right. The rare earth minerals that we have been talking about a lot on the show. Yes. Metals, basically. Raw materials needed for all kinds of manufacturing in the United States. If we don't have access to metals, we can't build just about anything. We're talking about weapons. We're talking about oil drilling equipment, we're talking about AI, computer chips, even EVs, all kinds of products. And we're in a bit of a bind right now because China has dominated the sector for several decades and they've been restricting the United States access to these critical minerals. And the United States has figured out that it better get better access to these metals or else we're going to have a serious problem with economic growth.

6:07both the Trump family and the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, they see a money-making opportunity. I want to talk a little bit about how exactly the families are positioning themselves to profit from this. Can we start with the Trumps? How is this working exactly? Well, in order to understand that, you really need to go backwards several decades. Copper is found in the Katanga soil in the form of sulfide or oxide.

6:32During the Cold War, the United States was deeply invested in trying to make sure that we had access to these critical minerals, particularly in places like Central Africa. For a long time, though, the native tribes had mined and smelted copper. Where there was huge federal dollars and even the CIA was active in making sure that we were outmaneuvering the Soviet Union to get access to certain mining operations. The underground Prince Leopold mine at Kapushi produces more than a million tons of sulphide ore per year, which contain a hundred thousand tons of copper and 80,000 tons of zinc. But after the Cold War ended, the United States sort of took this position that this is dirty work. There's a lot of corruption in mining. We're just going to offshore this. We'll just leave other countries.

7:21to do this work that Kumbaya, we're all friends, we'll trade, and we can rely on our partners to get these medals and give them to us so that we can build the things we need to build here. But that got quite complicated when China realized all the leverage it had out of the United States, and it started to restrict access to some of these critical medals. And so starting with President Biden, they began to redirect American policy to make sure that American mining companies had access to these critical minerals, not only in the United States, but at mining sites around the world. But then... In a few moments, I will sign a historic executive order instituting reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world, reciprocal. That means... The Trump administration comes in and Trump makes the situation a lot worse because he starts a trade war.

8:11that leads China to say, you know what, fine, we're going to cut off your access to these critical minerals even more aggressively than we were doing before. What the Chinese have done is they've ordered the entire world that they have to submit for approval and permission by the Chinese government to export any kinds of materials that include rare earths that have been touched, processed, mined by China. And so suddenly the United States is in a jam and the answer is to pour money into critical minerals. And so the federal government is saying, here's more than $100 billion worth of financing. Who wants to go start mining? And the Trump sons are sitting there looking for business opportunities. And along with a bunch of other business partners, they decide this is a great sector to get into. I want to make sure I understand this, Eric. I understand that there's a problem.

9:08The United States government needs to solve that problem by either investing in companies that will mine or partnering with companies that will mine. But when you say that they're pouring $100 billion into doing that, what do we mean exactly? Well, as a mining company, you need several things. You need access to a space where there are these metals. You need capital to build the mine and to extract the metals from the ground. And then you also need a demand.

9:37for the metals once you dig them out of the ground. The federal government is trying to help with all those things right now. It's helping them negotiate access to the mines. It's helping them finance them. And it's also negotiating what they call off-take agreements where it says if you extract this many tons of a certain metal, we'll buy some of that metal from you. So the federal government is answering all of these demands from the mining sector. So of course there's all these entrepreneurs are saying there's money to be made here. And also it's sort of a patriotic cause.

10:06And so that's what the Trump sons are getting into, along with a lot of other business people. It's basically a gold rush, for lack of a better term. It is. It's a modern-day gold rush. Can you give us an example of what this looks like, just so we can understand kind of how this plays out in practice? I mean, sure. One of the best examples is in Kazakhstan. It's a former Soviet republic. It's in between China and Russia. It's a nation that has an incredible storehouse of metals in the ground.

10:34And there's a site there that has an enormous supply of tungsten, which is a metal that is just so vital to the Pentagon. In particular, it is used to build the tips of missiles because it is so heat resistant. If you don't have tungsten, then the missiles that the United States is now trying to build to replace all the missiles it used in Iran, you can't build them. So it's more valuable than gold in a certain way to the Pentagon. And Kazakhstan suddenly finds itself you know, as a really popular player. China wants to be able to tap into that tungsten supply. The United States wants to get in there. And so there's a bit of a beauty contest going on as different countries try to position themselves to get access. And so he's a beauty contest. Right. What do you mean exactly? Are they pitching Kazakhstan about who should be allowed to mine or? I mean, it's essentially Kazakhstan is this this date that you want to get. There's these two

11:31suitors that want to be able to match up with Kazakhstan to get its medals So how does this competition or this courting as you put it of Kazakhstan actually play out? So there's a key meeting in September in New York City at the St. Regis Hotel It's the week of the United Nations General Assembly and the president of Kazakhstan is in New York Lutnik is there and there's this elaborate room, the fountain blue room with these, you know, chandeliers and gold leaf all over the place. And it's in that room where the president of Kazakhstan is meeting with the CEOs of some major American corporations, Chevron's there, Citibank is there. And then it's meeting time for Lutnik. And he sits down and he wants to convince the president of Kazakhstan that this nation should give the United States access to the stunts in mind.

12:17And part of his pitch is that there's this one company, an American based money company, very low profile, almost no one's ever heard of it. He wants that one company to get access to the tungsten mine. And not only that, but he's essentially asserting that the United States government is tentatively prepared to put $1.6 billion behind that company to help it build the mine in Kazakhstan. So while this pitch is underway, A phone call comes, and it's President Trump, and he's trying to help close the deal. This is so important to the Trump administration that not only is the Commerce Secretary there making the argument, but the President of the United States is on the phone helping close the deal. It couldn't be a higher level pitch to the President of Kazakhstan, who it's not every day that he gets a call from the President of the United States. So how does the meeting end? They end with a tentative agreement that this

13:12small American mining company is going to be able to get access to this site in Kazakhstan to build one of the world's largest tungsten mines. But then something very interesting happens shortly after that meeting wraps up. Within a matter of weeks, both Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, the president's two oldest sons, are investors in a group of partners that are actually buying into the same company that has just tentatively won the right to build this tungsten mine in Kazakhstan. So what you're saying, if I understand you correctly, is that basically at the end of this meeting at the St. Regis, there's no official deal, but somehow within weeks, an investor group that includes both of those Trump's sons ends up with a stake in this little known mining company. So if I have that correct, Eric, help me understand how the Trumps would have even gotten in on this, because the deal at this point is not public yet, correct?

14:10Yeah, that's right. It's not public until the middle of October 2025. So there's really almost no public way to get into this deal unless you have connections or knowledge of the players that were involved in it. And we repeatedly asked the partners involved, how did you first become aware of this opportunity? Who told you? And they won't give us a straight answer. They say, well, we have nondisclosure agreements that we can't say how we first learned that this deal was even available.

14:39We still don't have a solid answer as to how the Trump sons and their partners got linked up with this deal. I mean, one of the things that Trump sons have repeatedly emphasized to us is that they're passive investors in this project. But by the end of last year, they and their partners have lined up access to one of the most valuable tungsten metal sites in the world, something that multiple countries wanted access to and that the president and commerce secretary helped them secure.

15:08It's an incredibly valuable site. There's something like 80 billion dollars worth of tungsten sitting in the ground and they now are in a position to exploit that We'll be right back Okay, so at this point in the story Eric the Trump family is invested in a company that's got this as you said highly coveted deal to mine for tungsten this all important mineral for national security and the economy I have kind of a basic question though, which is how risky Is this whole endeavor to the investors, including the Trump sons? There's a good chance that the investors are going to make a fair amount of money on this deal, assuming that the federal government comes in and actually provides the financing. And that's because if the mine is a success, then they'll make money off of the tungsten that they produce. They can sell it. But even if they don't mine a single ton of tungsten, the mining company that the Trump sons and their partners invested in, that's a public company.

16:24And so they could potentially still make a boatload of money by just selling stock to people who think that there's money to be made here. And so there's a lot of value and a lot of money that they can make even before the mine opens. Wait, so okay. So even if they do not dig a single ton of tungsten out of the ground, what you're saying is that there could be a situation where the investors, including the Trump sons, could still make a ton of money out of this. That's right. I mean, that's what investment analysts who track the mining sector, tell me, is that most of the profits in the mining sector are made when you discover the metals and you get a permit to mine them. It's not the long, hard, dirty work of actually digging out of the ground.

17:08That's a low margin. The big profits are when you make the discovery and that's the stage that the Trump sons and their partners are invested in right now. And suddenly you could see that the stock takes off and becomes much more valuable and then you can sell those shares and walk away and you haven't even dug a single ton of tungsten. Do we know exactly how much money the investors and in particular the Trump sons could potentially make? We actually don't because we don't know how big their stake is.

17:36And my impression is they are a minority stakeholders. They own a very small share of the overall deal. But I mean, what the overall mining company has said is that they think that there's as much as $80 billion worth of tungsten in the ground there to dig out. And they're only talking about a project that's gonna cost $1.6 billion to actually do. So that's a big margin, assuming that they can get all that tungsten out. But the fact of the matter is that since our story came out, the stock of the company that's associated with this mine has actually gone down. And there's a lot of scrutiny right now of this deal. There's also a question mark as to whether or not they're going to get the federal funds. We've heard in fact from some people inside the federal government, they're quite skeptical of this deal and that their arms are being twisted by Lutnik who wants to get it done. So how much profit is going to be made here? It's still a bit of an open question. And we have actually kind of disturbed this process a little bit by bringing transparency to it.

18:32So maybe not the sure thing it looked like a few months ago. You mentioned also, though, Eric, that it wasn't just the Trump family. You also mentioned that the Lutnik family stood to benefit. How specifically are they involved in all of this? So Howard Lutnik, before he was Commerce Secretary, he ran a company called Cantor of Fitzgerald. And Cantor is an investment bank that helps private companies raise money. And one of the business sectors that it works in is critical metals.

18:59And so Howard Lutnik's sons have taken over Cantor helping run the company and they have seen just a huge growth in the number of critical minerals deals because Howard Lutnik and Trump are driving all this federal funding into it. It's like a huge hot sector right now because of the policy choices the United States government has made. And so Cantor Fitzgerald has now been super busy helping these private companies raise money and it's making millions of dollars in fees off of these capital raises. And that includes one of the partners involved in the Kazakhstan deal. So at the same time as the Trump sons through their partnership are invested in the Kazakhstan deal, the Latinx sons are helping one of the partners in that deal raise over $200 million. And getting millions of dollars, as you said, in fees for it. That's right. So both the Trump and Latinx families are profiting from this policy initiative. And we have been talking really just about one huge project in Kazakhstan

19:57But what we found by looking at securities filings is that there are 14 companies that are in a position to get federal financial assistance or have permits pending before the Commerce Department that also have financial linkages to either the Trump sons or the Lutnik sons. And these 14 companies are lined up to get as much as $8.9 billion from the federal government to help them build mining operations in spots around the world.

20:23And so simultaneously, you have the dad's setting policy that benefits these companies and the son's in business making money off of these same companies. It's just kind of an arrangement that we've never seen before on the scale in American history. Wow. Okay. What if the Trumps and the Latinx said in response to all of your reporting? Mostly we've heard from the Trump family and they feel like our coverage has been unfair and that they are simply passive investors in this deal.

20:51We got a statement from Don Jr. Spokesman. Don is a lifelong businessman and investor who tends to invest in companies that align with his America First worldview. He does not interface with anyone in the federal government on behalf of any company that he invests in. And Cantor's comment to us is that, yes, they do help these companies raise private dollars to get into the mining space, but they're not involved at all in the negotiations over getting federal assistance.

21:19so they don't touch what Howard LaTnick is doing. But yes, they're helping some of these same companies raise private capital. Okay, I understand that the optics of this do not look great. And if you're a person who cares about conflict of interest, you will not like what you were hearing in this episode. But you explained, Eric, all the reasons why the United States needs critical minerals, why it needs tungsten. So beyond this looking bad, is there an actual harm here besides that?

21:49I mean this is an important American priority and it is good that the Trump administration now and that the Biden administration before it were focused on finding a way to get access to these metals that are essential to the US economy. But there's a lot of risk involved as well because you've got to pick the right partners that you're putting money into to pursue these metals. And are these companies really capable of producing the vital ingredients for American manufacturing or are these simply entrepreneurs that see an opportunity to make money and that don't actually have the experience or the willingness to pursue it for the years that it's going to take to be successful miners. And, I mean, with this, these are vital to the future of the United States and our competitiveness, our military defense. And we're betting enormous amounts of tax dollars in backing these companies. Huge risk, I mean, for the taxpayers, for every single person in the United States. So it's really important that

22:46The outcomes here are determined by who's the most capable of actually successfully mining these sites and not simply who's the closest to the president or who stands the profit the most. Eric, we started this conversation with you explaining that it was hard to find parallels for the president in other leaders and you had to go as far as Turkey and Russia. I wonder though if there's any way to put the suns into context.

23:12Right. I mean, when I spoke to the presidential historians, I asked them to give me examples that, you know, any kind of comparison and anything they came up with seemed trivial. I mean, they cited, for example, George W. Bush, who was on the board of an oil company when his dad, George Herbert Walker Bush, was president, or Billy Carter, the brother of Jimmy Carter, endorsed a beer called Billy Beer when his brother was president of the United States.

23:38Our Hunter Biden, who, when his dad was vice president, was working as a consultant and board member to a Ukrainian gas company and also as a consultant to some Chinese companies, brought incredible scrutiny. But we're talking that dollar amounts were trivial compared to what the Trump sons are now seeing here.

23:57You know, Eric, I am reminded of something that President Trump said to our White House team in an Oval Office interview earlier this year. In your first term, your family agreed not to conduct business abroad. Now it's doing so all over the world. Why the reversal? Well, because I got no credit in the first term. He basically said that he didn't get any credit in his first term for avoiding conflicts of interest, which, by the way, he didn't avoid them, but that's what he said.

24:20His point, though, was basically the gloves are off on the second term. Like, I didn't get credit for what I thought I deserved credit for, so I'm not even going to try anymore. I didn't do deals. I could have done so many deals. And so why now? Because I found out that nobody cared. And nobody even cares. And it's that last part that I am really interested in, the who cares part of this. And I wonder, Eric, how you would answer that.

24:46I've heard the same thing from Eric Trump directly is the outrage that the investigations that happened even after they, from their perspective, went to some extent to try to limit the conflicts of interest during the first term. And this time, they're just unrestrained. Any opportunity that they want to pursue to make money, they're pursuing aggressively any place in the world. So why do we care? Why are we spending the time digging into this? Because it's disturbing to the American tradition.

25:15where we are not a country where there's a mixing of the financial interest of the government officials and the financial benefit that comes from their actions. Both Democratic and Republican administrations throughout American history, there have been efforts to separate the financial interest of the first family from the actions that the president is taking. And we aren't seeing that here. Eric, I understand why people should care argument that you're making, but I do wonder if you think people actually do care.

25:45Especially as we look toward the midterms, there are just so many issues on voters' minds. And I just wonder if something like this is really going to register in any significant way. It's a bit of an open question. I think that the true Trump-devoted voter sees this guy as someone who has always made money and they celebrate his money making. But then there are others who look at how much money that Trump family has brought in $2.2 billion that Trump has in his financial report from 2025. And they're startled by that. And at the same time, particularly, that there are almost a million people who came in behind Trump at his urging and bought into one of his cryptocurrency coins. And they lost almost $4 billion on that bet following Trump's lead. So that's a lot of pissed off investors, honestly, many of whom are Trump followers.

26:43I've also heard from some industry executives from the energy sector who are saying, you know, they're wondering whether or not they should partner with the Trumps in new business ventures because they don't want to end up being subpoenaed if the Democrats take the House of the Senate and we could have two years worth of oversight hearings trying to dig into all these deals and was there any malfeasance. So to some extent, the midterms will be an answer to this question of do people really care?

27:17Eric Lipton, thank you so much. Thank you, Rachel, for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Hey, everyone. It's Graham Platner here. On Wednesday night, Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine and a one-time star of the Progressive Movement, suspended his campaign. We believe that for the movement to continue, it can't be me. And for that reason, We are suspending campaign operations. Platner had faced intense pressure in recent days to step aside after a woman had accused him of rape. This is incredibly difficult because I know that some will think it's an admission of guilt and it most certainly is not. His departure upends one of the year's most important senate races and it creates enormous uncertainty.

28:22But as parties outlook in Maine, where Democrats believe that defeating Senator Susan Collins or Republican is crucial to their efforts to reclaim a Senate majority. The Maine Democratic Party will hold a convention to choose a new nominee by July 27th. And the United States launched a fresh round of strikes against Iran on Wednesday, just hours after President Trump cast out on the ceasefire between both countries. To me, I think it's over. I don't want to deal with them anymore. There's scum.

28:53Washington and Tehran had each accused each other of violating the terms of the already fragile agreement, reached in part so that transit could resume in the Strait of Hormuz. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a waste of time dealing with them, they're liars. Shipping traffic in the Strait has once more come to a halt, driving oil prices to their highest levels in two weeks. Today's episode was produced by Adrian Hurst, Eric Krupke and Diana Nguyen. It was edited by Annie Minof, Rachel Questor, and MJ Davis-Lynne, and contains music by Alicia B. YouTube, Dan Powell, Rowan Numisto, and Diane Wong, and our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.