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From certain angles, it might appear as if President Trump is having a tough month. He messed up the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, which he blamed on acts of vandalism no one has been able to stand up. The supreme court rejected both his bid to appeal against the $5m (£3.8m) civil judgment against him for defaming and sexually abusing E Jean Carroll, and his executive order to end birthright citizenship. And the war with Iran keeps rumbling on. And yet, after Trump’s mandatory financial disclosure report was released on Tuesday, headlines drew attention to the fact the president made more than $2.2bn in revenue in 2025 – more than three times what he pulled in the year before his inauguration. Contrary to appearances, perhaps everything is going exactly to plan.
It is always a question with Trump as to how much the wealth he has accrued in his second term in office is the spoils of strategy rather than the lucky result of his scattergun but industrial-scale hustle. Looking at the numbers in his financial report, one is reminded that before he became president, Trump piloted a series of failed businesses – six of which declared bankruptcy – and gave every indication of being a lousy businessman. It’s often pointed out that if Trump had simply invested the vast inheritance left to him by Fred Trump, his father, in a standard tracker fund, he would’ve made more money than through his lacklustre business career, and there’s nothing to suggest this was likely to change.
That was before his second presidency, of course. Now he and his children are sitting on top of a huge fortune, large parts of which seem to have come from sources with interests in sucking up to the president. As the New York Times points out, a large chunk of Trump’s $2.2bn windfall last year came from an investment firm with ties to the United Arab Emirates, which bought an almost 50% stake in his crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and which is part of an industry over which Trump has policy-making and regulatory influence.
Similarly, the report registers the smaller but still significant revenue streams generated by Trump’s side hustle in defamation and other lawsuits, including settlements with ABC ($16m), Meta ($24.5m) and Paramount ($16m) – legal proceedings which, it seems fair to assume, these media and tech companies may have had more appetite for fighting had the plaintiff not been the president of the United States with vast influence over their industries.
All of which leaves Trump in the strange position of, on the one hand, getting the thing he has always desperately wanted in life – genuine, unimaginable wealth – at a cost of the other thing he has always desperately wanted in life, universal admiration and applause. This trade-off is so morally neat it might’ve come from a fable, but that is where the US president currently finds himself. Rich but mocked; successful, if you look at his income, but an absolute turkey of a leader with a 39% approval rating and an image so tarnished that even Giorgia Meloni, the unpopular rightwing leader of Italy and former absolute lickspittle to Trump, has felt emboldened to have a crack.
As with most petulant personalities, it’s likely to be the small failures that niggle most with Trump. While his famous deal-making abilities continue to field poor results in the Middle East, the president seems to have turned himself inside out trying to explain away the algae currently blooming in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. It’s a tiny, irrelevant failure as these things go, but with optics so bad, so glaringly unmissable even to those with no interest in Iran – here is a man who can’t even keep the nation’s pond clean – he’s had to drum up endless wild stories to excuse it.
Likewise, Trump’s predictably terrible oversight of something called the Great American State Fair. You’ve probably not even heard of it, despite the fact it is going on right now on the National Mall in Washington DC, and has been advertised by the White House as a 16-day extravaganza to mark the country’s 250th birthday with “a world-class exposition”. Or, as it turns out, with an empty food hall, unpeopled exhibitions and television’s Dr Oz addressing a half-empty field in a setup that looks shonkier than that Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow.
It’s Trump’s reverse Midas touch, of course, which wrecks everything he touches outside his family’s crypto holdings and which, as support for him wanes even in his former strongholds, must be tearing his ego, divided as it is between the primary motivations of money and praise, clean in two. If only he were a character from fiction – an Elizabethan tragedy, say, or an episode of Captain Underpants – it would be fascinating and grimly hilarious to watch this play out.
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