Just how corrupt is Donald Trump? A New York Times columnist, this week, tried to quantify that question.
In a column titled “Trump Holds the American People in Total Contempt,” columnist Jamelle Bouie notes that “to say that President Trump is corrupt is to somehow understate the size, scope, and magnitude of his corruption.”
Bouie goes on to note that, per NPR’s reporting, Trump and his family members have profited from the presidency to the tune of $4 billion.
By Jamelle Bouie
“The president and his family have leveraged his office to the tune of nearly $4 billion.”
from branded cryptocurrency. Investors include large corporations, foreign nationals & state actors hoping to curry favor .https://t.co/SgdH4pnuNY— Mia Farrow (@FarrowMia40582) April 22, 2026
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“They have received hundreds of millions of dollars from a network of branded cryptocurrency assets. Investors include large corporations, foreign nationals and state actors hoping to curry favor with the administration,” Bouie writes in the Times. “One such actor, according to The Wall Street Journal, was Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother and national security adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates. Tahnoon’s investment fund purchased a half-billion-dollar stake in the Trump family’s crypto fund, World Liberty Financial, just days before Trump’s second inauguration. Tahnoon has since successfully lobbied the White House for Emirates access to America’s most advanced A.I. chips, with a large portion going to Tahnoon’s A.I. company.”
The corruption also extends to pardons of all sorts of figures convicted of all manner of bad crimes, all of whom have left a long list of corrupt figures essentially indebted for life to Trump.
Then there are the building projects.
“Trump’s various projects — his monuments to himself — also appear to be little more than state-sanctioned opportunities for graft. The president has collected hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy donors and large corporations for his proposed ballroom, presidential library and triumphal arch,” the columnist writes. “Tens of millions of dollars marked for the library are unaccounted for, according to a report in The New Republic.”
But Trump’s planned gambit with the IRS may be his most brazen act yet.
“Last but far from least is the president’s $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S., for damages for leaking his tax returns to the public in 2019 and 2020. According to a recent news report, lawyers for the president are in talks with the I.R.S. to settle. This is tantamount to presidential looting of the Treasury, little different than if Trump had stolen the money outright,” the columnist writes.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
