On CNN, The New Yorker's David Kirkpatrick discusses his reporting that Trump is “pocketing off the presidency,” making at least $3.4 billion
Kirkpatrick: “It does make the question more pressing: If you're making a payment to them, do you have reason to believe that they're going to give you something in return?”
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From the August 13, 2025, edition of CNN's Inside Politics
DANA BASH (HOST): This week, the Trump family's crypto firm announced a $1.5 billion dollar digital coin deal, another investment in a venture that's already raked in millions for President Trump and his family. But crypto is just one of many ways the first family is making money: there are merch sales, a meme coin, social media platform, of course, real estate projects in the Middle East. It's a dizzying number of deals that leave a huge question, quote "The number, How much is President Trump pocketing off the presidency?" That is the title of the piece you see there in The New Yorker, where staff writer David Kirkpatrick tried to answer that question. And David joins me now. Thank you so much for being here. Did you get an answer to your question? What is the number?
DAVID KIRKPATRICK (NEW YORKER): I came up with the best answer I could at press time, and it was $3.4 billion dollars. Astonishingly, it's probably gone up since then.
BASH: Okay, so let's break down that eye-popping number. More than $3 billion with a B. Crypto, that's where you identify most of the profits. How much have the president and his family made in crypto, and how?
KIRKPATRICK: Well what's most remarkable is the number of transactions, the number of deals, the number of ways that the family has sought to make money. And I should tell you, when I set out my method here was first look at some stream of income and decide one, Is it coming from the presidency? Does it depend on the presidency? And two, how much are they made out of it? So in that category, Truth Social and the company that holds it, Trump Media and Technology Group, is definitely depending on the presidency.
In the last month, the biggest chunk of what I'm calling their money from crypto has come through Trump Media and Technology Group. It has a stock that is basically a kind of financial indicator of the mood about the president. It's a meme stock in other words — stock trades only on how people feel about the president. But they've taken that meme stock and they've swapped it for cash and Bitcoin. So they have $3.1 billion dollars of cash and Bitcoin on the books. The president holds 42% of that company. His share of that is, you know, more than a billion dollars. So that's a that's a $1 billion bump in his net worth just in the last couple of months.
BASH: Eric and Donald Trump Jr. responded to your reporting about all of this. They were on Fox this morning. I want to play what they said and get your response.
[START CLIP]
ERIC TRUMP: It is infuriating. We had nowhere to go. Capital One stripped 300 bank accounts from me, 300 in the middle of the night. We didn't have a damn choice.
DONALD TRUMP JR: Trump was the only guy that was actually a businessman before that. Are we supposed to stop running our businesses? Are we supposed to stop doing anything? He's not involved in these things. We are running those businesses as we have.
[END CLIP]
BASH: David.
KIRKPATRICK: Well, you know, those are those are points that the families made before in the first part, in a kind of a garbled way, what Eric Trump saying there is that they got into crypto because they feel they were blackballed by the big banks. What he's leaving out is the banks that stopped doing business with the family did so after the attack on the capitol of January 6th, and other banks did step in.
The other point that Don Jr. is making, which is that, you know, they're a business family, they should be able to stay in business. When I went through their income streams, I set aside all the money that's their old business, you know, the hotels, things like the hotel, all the deals that grew out of their old business. Okay, fine. You know, a lot of people might say they should have divested from that, but fine.
But I'm only talking about ways that they're trying to monetize the presidency, ways that in one way or the other, they're trying to cash in specifically on the fact that Donald Trump is in the Oval Office. Nobody's done that before. And that's what's so exceptional here.
BASH: That is such an important distinction. I'm glad that you differentiated between the fact that, as Don Jr. said, he was a businessman. Of course he was. And the businesses he had before he ran for office. And what they have done since.
Speaking of that, there are a lot of big real estate deals that you wrote about. There are smaller ventures as well. Private merch sales. In fact, you point out in your piece, you can buy a $40 MAGA hat here on his official campaign site, which that money goes to the campaign. Or you can buy it via the Trump organization for $55. That money does not go to the campaign. I don't think I realized that you can buy it on Trump or, you know, as part of his business, the clearly political merch.
KIRKPATRICK: Yeah, I was really dumbstruck when I realized that on his financial disclosure forms, disclosing his personal income, he's including sales of what looked like campaign merchandise, the kinds of things that were I, a Trump supporter, I would buy thinking I was supporting the MAGA cause and his candidates. But it's actually going into his own pocket. That's, I'm pretty sure, unprecedented.
You know what readers are going to want to know after they read the article is, you know, all these payments. Is any of them an effort to buy influence, a kind of quid pro quo? And those things are very, very hard to prove. But for me, the takeaway is that given the astonishing rate at which they're making this money, given the obvious zeal to make more money, it does make the question more pressing: If you're making a payment to them, do you have reason to believe that they're going to give you something in return?
BASH: David Kirkpatrick, just fascinating reporting.