How much money President Trump and his family have made
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 30.5K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David has done a full accounting for what the family has been up to, and even using conservative estimates, David says Trump and his family have made almost $4 billion dollars “off of the presidency,” in just about a year.
Today on the show: we look at every new business and business deal and financial transaction that David says likely would not have happened if Trump wasn’t the president of the United States. And we stop at the most innovative ways Trump and his family have made all that.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 0:06.1 | We are one year into President Donald Trump's second term, and some things are really different this time around. |
| 0:12.7 | Going over some math to be all up to date. |
| 0:15.5 | That's New Yorker reporter David Kirkpatrick. |
| 0:18.6 | Now, if while as we go through this, I turn pages, is that a problem? |
| 0:22.9 | No. No, I think we actually like that sound. Oh, is that right? Okay. All right. Okay. Fine. |
| 0:26.6 | David has been doing the near impossible task of following every new business and business deal and financial |
| 0:33.6 | transaction that Trump and his family have made this past year, and in the first term. |
| 0:38.4 | And he's noticed this shift. |
| 0:39.8 | You know, in the first term, they said voluntarily, we're not going to do any hotel or other business deals overseas, because that would be bad optically. |
| 0:48.6 | That's gone. That's out the window. |
| 0:50.6 | This term, they've done deals all over the place overseas. |
| 0:56.3 | In the first term, we actually said, |
| 1:03.2 | we're not going to do any, any foreign deals. That's Donald Trump Jr. talking. And the reality is it didn't stop the media from constantly saying, you're profiteering anyway. It was like, we stopped |
| 1:08.8 | entirely. So this time around we said, |
| 1:16.5 | hey, we're going to play by the rules, but we're not going to go so far as to stymie our business forever, lock ourselves in a proverbial padded room, because it almost doesn't matter. They're going to |
| 1:22.4 | hit you no matter what. So effectively, they've just said, since we're going to get criticized, |
| 1:27.4 | we might as well take the money and run. |
| 1:29.4 | And that's when they've started making money kind of hand over fist. |
| 1:32.4 | And it's not just foreign hotel deals or other investments from abroad. |
| 1:35.7 | It's crypto, merch, President Trump's social media platform that he makes official White House announcements on. |
| 1:41.8 | In fact, it's hard to find a case where they've turned down an opportunity to make money |
... |
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