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- Trump's 3-Continent Rush To Profit Hs Few Parallels
Trump's 3-Continent Rush To Profit Hs Few Parallels
As Sons Promote Deals to Enrich President, White House Claims 'No Conflicts."
Matt Davis
May 05, 2025
Morning. Today’s front page news is that the Houston Rockets went out in the NBA playoffs last night to the Golden State Warriors in an elimination game. I was too anxious to watch it live so I’m watching it in the background now as I prepare this morning’s newsletter. I love going to sleep without knowing the score and then waking up to it, either way. It feels like getting hold of a cheat code in a video game!
From what I gather the younger team just didn’t have it down the stretch against a maturer, more battle-tested team. Jimmy Butler just scored a three with two seconds left on the shot clock. Draymond Green has been knocking ‘em down, too. First quarter! What a joy. Also, New York looked like a Seurat painting on Friday:
Phwor
But I realize you’re here for the news. Guess what? Donald Trump is still corrupt!
The Times dispatched investigative reporters Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany to uncover the extent of it. Donald Trump has dispatched his two older sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric to pursue a blitz of moneymaking ventures to capitalize on their father’s name and power, the story reports. And: “It is a rush to cash in that involves billions of dollars with few precedents in American history.”
The story rounds up the ventures:
A luxury hotel in Dubai. A second high-end residential tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Two cryptocurrency ventures based in the United States. A new golf course and villa complex in Qatar. And a new private club in Washington. In many cases these new deals promoted over the last week will personally benefit not only Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., but also President Trump himself.
That all sounds pretty corrupt to me. It also sounds like a great argument for having a bunch of kids, too, don’t you think?
“Challenge everything,” said the brochure for the new $1 billion, 80-story Trump International Hotel and Tower planned for Dubai, where units went on sale for the first time at prices reaching $20 million apiece, after a giant party held in Dubai this past week to honor Eric Trump and the new project. “Stop at nothing.”
Indeed. Also in today’s paper is the encouraging and uplifting news that Trump told Meet The Press he didn’t know whether immigrants on U.S. soil are entitled to due process rights, and of course, his slashing of LGBTQ health studies by $800 million. Aka Make America a Dictatorship Again, and Make America Dead Again, for short.
But sure. Challenge everything, especially the fifth amendment. Stop at nothing, especially killing gay people. Got it. My favorite Donald Trump anti-gay story is the time he got Mar-A-Lago fumigated after throwing a “sorry you’re dying of AIDS even though you’re actively fighting AIDS provision in the Reagan administration” birthday party for his long-time lawyer Roy Cohn, incidentally. These people are just insane.
I’m just wondering whether it’s corrupt, though, for Trump to be actively profiting off his reputation to make money as president?
“There’s nothing like it,” said Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University historian who has written books on Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald R. Ford, addressing the financial conflicts of interest that have emerged in Mr. Trump’s second term.
The White House has said there are no ethics issues or conflicts of interest because Mr. Trump’s sons run the businesses. That’s even though Mr. Trump’s financial disclosure report shows he still benefits from most of these ventures. The two Trump sons lashed out at the reporting by the Times, saying predictable things about “building the most iconic projects on earth, and admittedly, rather amusingly, taking a swipe at Hunter Biden who sold paintings while his father served as president.
“It’s laughable that the left-wing media thinks that I should lock myself in a padded room while my father is president and cease doing what I’ve been doing for over 25 years to earn a living and provide for my five children,” Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement to The Times. “However, if I did do that, I guess I could always take up painting, which I hear can be quite lucrative.”
Well played, Donald Jr.
That’s an open goal, and you scored.
Incidentally, today’s paper also carries a story about how Biden’s staff decided against a cognitive test in early 2024. These Democrats, man. They really don’t make it easy on themselves, huh?
A New York Times article that month included an interview with David Axelrod, the former adviser to President Barack Obama who has become one of the party’s elder statesmen.
Mr. Axelrod said that Mr. Biden “looks his age” — then 79 — and that he was feeding a narrative that he was no longer up to the job of being president.
“The stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue,” Mr. Axelrod said.
That comment prompted an angry call to Mr. Axelrod from Ron Klain, then Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, according to the book. Mr. Klain wanted to know why Mr. Axelrod was fueling doubts about a Democratic president who was on track to begin a re-election campaign.
“There’s no Obama out there, Axe,” Mr. Klain told him, the book recounts. “Who’s going to do it if he doesn’t do it?”
Repeat after me: AOC 28!
What I absolutely hate about the Dems is that sure, Donald Trump is horrifically corrupt. But the Dems are also horrifically corrupt. They just think they’re perfect, and honestly, that’s why a majority of Americans prefer Donald Trump, right now. In my guts I hate that it’s true but the number of useless, corrupt leftists I’ve encountered in this country makes me weep. It’s a popularity contest over there and I hate those almost as much as I hate Donald Trump. Ask me to pick a side in that context, and I’m reluctant to do so. But even the right-wingers in Washington think there’s a good way to get people like me off the fence. It’s to nominate the “bartender from the Bronx.”
Seurat painting, eat your heart out.
Meanwhile the Trump family is also opening a new club called “Executive Branch.” 🤦🏻♂️
At $500,000 a person, the private membership club is slated to open by this summer in Georgetown in a sprawling, but defunct, restaurant called Clubhouse. It will feature two bars, a lounge, a restaurant and boardroom — re-creating the role previously served by the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where donors and acolytes of the president gathered until the family sold it off after Mr. Trump’s first term.
I want to be shocked but again, in the context of everything else I’ve said in the article so far, the brazenness of all this still makes me chuckle. Go hang out at the Executive Branch with the Winklevoss twins, people. Or: Kill yourself. I realize the two options are equally appetizing. The story also rounds up some of the other waxworks and gargoyles (lobbyists, crypto bros) who are lining up to get in.
David Sacks, who is a crypto adviser to Mr. Trump and another founding member, said the goal is not to create a venue for access. Rather, he said in a recent podcast, “we want a place to hang out in D.C.” for the “younger, hipper, Trump-aligned Republican.”
It’s true that these people do have to hang around somewhere and I’d prefer it if they didn’t end up anywhere near you or me.
Then there’s more about the Trump memecoin, real estate deals with the Saudi government, and in Dubai:
“They always arrive at the word ‘yes,’ which is a beautiful thing,” Eric Trump said while in Dubai this past week, saying that it took only a month to get the required real estate permits from the government there. “They do it quickly.”
They do arrive at the word ‘yes’ in the United Arab Emirates, very often. Especially if the question is “should we torture dissidents?” Then again it’s slightly better than Saudi Arabia where they also get to yes when the question is “should we chop them up?”
Then there was a crypto conference in Budapest. But at this point you’re tired of hearing about it. And that’s exactly the point. It’s what they want. So: Thanks for letting me read the newspaper so that you don’t have to.
Say, is there a story that might cheer me up a bit?
Oh, sure. Read this rather charming profile of retiring investor Warren Buffett, whose method of investing is “deceptively simple,” the reporters note. One thing that’s notable about it is, his approach to making money is almost 1000% the opposite of Donald Trump’s. When he was called to testify before Congress about the trading scandal at Salomon Brothers, in which he was a major shareholder, Mr. Buffett delivered a “steely message to the firm’s employees,” the story reports. “Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding,” he said. “Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.”
To be fair it’s possible he could also have helped avoid the firm’s reputational damage if he’d paid a bit more attention to the way they were breaking the law on the trading floor but still. He’s hokey. He’s from Nebraska. And more importantly, can you imagine Mr. Trump saying anything similar to anybody, ever?
“Warren Buffet represents everything that is good about American capitalism and America itself,” Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase $JPM ( ▼ 0.42% ) said on Saturday.
Not quite everything, Jamie. But okay. Values-wise, quite a lot. And is that a perfect, wonderful thing? Not exactly. But I suppose that if you forced me to pick a side, again, I’d pick Warren Buffett’s.
Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.
Standard disclaimer: I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. I’m also doing a five-minute video version of this, each weekday morning at around 9 a.m. (depending on how long it takes me to read the newspaper). If you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn (you can always watch the recording later). If you subscribe to my Youtube channel it’ll also send you a notification when I’m “going live.”