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Will Ragland: Hey, look. $1.8 billion could cover free school meals for a year for 2.2 million kids, right? It could have covered the SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] benefits this month for nearly 10 million people. This is a massive amount of money that could cover the Pell Grants for 560,000 kids for a year. When it comes to ACA [Affordable Care Act], it could cover 250,000 ACA marketplace plans for a year. And it is over 10 percent of the total cost of the Gateway Project that he canceled—this is the tunnel project between New Jersey and New York that they canceled mid-shutdown.
So, this is a big piece of money. And let’s not kid ourselves: Money in politics has been around forever, sure. Special interests have tried to curry favor with politicians for as long as I can remember. But the scale is just unprecedented.
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Colin Seeberger: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to “The Tent,” your place for politics, policy, and progress. I’m your host, Colin Seeberger. That was Will Ragland, vice president of research at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
We wanted to take a break from the busy news cycle to talk about an issue that we don’t think is getting enough of the public’s attention: Donald Trump’s unprecedented profiting off the presidency.
The Center for American Progress recently released a new tool looking at how much cash and gifts Donald Trump and his family have earned off of the presidency since he was reelected last November. The new tool, called “Trump’s Take,” is a real-time financial tracker looking at the flows of cash he’s been able to amass every single day over the course of the last year. So far, we’ve tracked more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts Trump has received since he was reelected.
Will and I broke down why this should matter to the American people and what’s being done about it. And stick around after the interview, because we could all use a moment of joy as we gear up for the holidays—and I have the scoop on this year’s go-to holiday cocktail.
Will Ragland is the vice president of research at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. He previously served in the Department of Education and worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
Will, welcome to the pod, bud.
Ragland: Good to see you, Colin.
Seeberger: So, I wanted to have you on because you have been furiously working over the course of the past several months to build a new tool for the Center for American Progress that tracks just how much money, just how much gifts, the president and his family have made since he was reelected last year. It’s called Trump’s Take. Tell us a little bit about this new tool.
Ragland: So, this new tool is tracking how much cash and gifts he’s brought in since the election. And don’t get confused about the political donations or PAC money or money coming in for even the ballroom. This is cash and gifts that his family has personally made since the election. And just recently, we surpassed $1.8 billion.
Seeberger: Whew.
Ragland: Yeah. Most of this is primarily coming from three crypto ventures he set up that really are places where people can curry favor, dump some cash in a bucket, and see what they might be able to get out of it, especially for foreign actors. And we’ve seen this most recently with Changpeng Zhao, the Binance CEO who was pardoned recently and is a major player in his stablecoin and the money that’s coming in there.
Three months ago, we really wanted to figure out a way to track this in real time. And we figured out a way not only to track it and update it frequently, but to do it in real time based on blockchain updates. So, any transaction that hits the blockchain that’s related to these three crypto ventures we’re able to grab and track in near real-time.
So, when you look at our tool—which you can find at trumpstakecounter.org or on our homepage, americanprogress.org—you’ll see a ticker that looks a lot like the national debt clock of the amount of cash and gifts Trump’s brought in since the election.
So, we’ve worked really hard on it. Very proud of it. And I’m hoping that it gives people some context about exactly what’s going on and how much money he’s brought in and maybe some of the favors that this money’s helped curry.
Seeberger: Yeah, I mean, we’re talking about cash and gifts. This isn’t just paper wealth that’s living in an account somewhere collecting dust. This is real cash, real income, that the president has been able to derive off the presidency. $1.8 billion is a whole lot of money. I think it is really hard for the lay person in this country to really appreciate just how much money that truly is.
Can you help break down for us, perhaps for us average Joes, a little bit just how much money we’re talking about that the president’s making every single day? I think a lot of people have been watching. Millions of families have had to go without paychecks, or the government shut down. Folks have been, I think, rightly outraged at the fact that the administration’s been ripping food assistance away from low-income families.
At the same time, he’s been making all this money. What message do you think that sends to people? That Trump’s like, “We’ve got no money for food assistance. We got no money for lowering health care premiums.” And yet, he’s got a pretty good deal here, does he not?
Ragland: I mean, yeah. Look, $1.8 billion could cover free school meals for a year for 2.2 million kids. It could have covered the SNAP benefits this month for nearly 10 million people.
This is a massive amount of money that could cover the Pell Grants for 560,000 kids for a year. When it comes to ACA, it could cover 250,000 ACA marketplace plans for the year. And it is over 10 percent of the total cost of the Gateway Project that he canceled—this is the tunnel project between New Jersey and New York that they canceled mid-shutdown.
So, this is a big piece of money. And let’s not kid ourselves: Money and politics has been around forever.
Seeberger: Sure.
Ragland: Special interests have tried to curry favor with politicians for as long as I can remember. But the scale is just unprecedented.
The fact that the amount of money he’s made in cash since being reelected …
Seeberger: In one year.
Ragland: Yeah, in one year … could cover free lunches for 2.2 million kids is just astounding. So, we try to put this in context in any way we can. Because the big numbers are big numbers, and it’s kind of hard to think about it unless you put those trade-offs in place.
Seeberger: So, you mentioned crypto. I know you said that it is responsible for about two-thirds or so of the amount of income that the president has brought in over the course of the last year. Can you tell me exactly sort of how this is working? How is it, frankly, facilitating corruption at the White House?
Ragland: Yeah, so these things are—I really think of it like this: He set up a bunch of money buckets for different audiences to put money into, and a lot of times, what comes out the other end is a pardon, an investigation dropped, or regulatory relief for policy changes that benefit a particular special interest.
So, the primary one was the one I mentioned. The most recent one is this pardon for this crypto CEO who owns Binance, who’s been a big part of his crypto ventures, paved the way for it, and is responsible for his steadiest stream of income. He gets a pardon. And not only does he get the pardon; this pardon paves the way for his business to again do work and business in the United States, which was banned before, which is currently banned. And you know this pardon will help pave the way for that.
Seeberger: Because he pled guilty to facilitating money laundering for terrorism activities, right?
Ragland: Not only that. I mean, his company and his executives bragged about this. This was a selling point for Binance, right? They bragged about it in internal documents, about this being the place for drug deals to happen.
Seeberger: Human trafficking.
Ragland: Human trafficking. And they pled guilty for it. He went to prison, and Binance was barred from doing business here. And now, that’s looking like it will change. When you look at something like the ballroom, he’s raising $300 million to build a ballroom. I can’t think of that many ballrooms that cost anywhere close to that. But be that as it may …
Seeberger: But with Trump, it’s got to all be gold-plated, baby.
Ragland: Yeah. So, you look at these donors, and a lot of them are corporations, many of which swore off political donations after January 6, said we’re going to suspend political donations after what we saw happen and this president working to completely tear down our democracy.
Now, a lot of these same corporations are donating to build this ballroom to curry favor. There’s a lot in the tech and crypto industry, but one that I like to point out is Union Pacific. So, Union Pacific is a railroad company. They’re looking to merge with Norfolk Southern. They would be pretty much the railroad company in the United States, the railroad corporation. These two companies in Norfolk, Southern in particular, were responsible for massive train derailment in Palestine, Ohio, one in which there were a lot of concerns about how this could have happened and the regulatory rollbacks that happened during the first Trump administration.
I think that the only reason why Union Pacific is probably giving this money here: Appearances don’t look good. They’ve got a merger that could be denied by this government, and they’ve also got a bunch of safety and regulatory provisions that they would like to see roll back so that they can make their bottom line larger and increase profit.
So, you’re seeing this over and over again, this open transactional. You see it with the tariff regime. This entire policy set up by this administration is: “What are you going to give me in return for whatever policy, whatever pardon, whatever government position, and whatever investigation dropped?”
There have been dozens of investigations dropped on the crypto industry, for instance. And the Department of Justice has eliminated their crypto enforcement agency. They put a crypto-friendly head of the SEC [U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission] in charge. We’re seeing this over and over and over again. And while this is nothing new, unfortunately, especially post-Citizens United, the scale and the enrichment of the Trump family personally is nothing like I’ve ever seen.
Seeberger: You’ve brought up the Changpeng Zhao pardon. And if you can, walk folks through specifically how this related to an official action by the Trump administration. This doesn’t just have implications for the president’s personal wealth, but the fact that Binance ended up playing a huge part in a chip deal between the United States and the Emiratis earlier this year.
Really, this is trading to the benefit of the president personally in ways that have consequences for America’s national security, does it not?
Ragland: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, let’s look at the Qatari plane, too.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Ragland: He gets a $400 million plane from Qatar, and lo and behold, we recently find out Qatar gets an Air Force facility on an air base in Idaho. Not only that, they get a security deal that’s very NATO-esque for Qatar specifically. And this is a country that during his first term, he had accused of helping terrorist regimes.
So that, along with what we’ve seen with Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao and the benefits that he’s been able to give to him through and paid for by your taxpayer dollars, is really concerning.
Part of the way that he’s enriching himself off this deal I find fascinating, too. Basically, an investment firm wanted to invest in Binance, and they used his stablecoin to make that payment. Now, that payment was worth $2 billion. And that sits in reserves, in a stablecoin reserve. This is Trump’s stablecoin. And every day that that money sits in reserves, that interest is what the Trump family, in part, profits from. So just putting it in their pocket every day, they’re making at least $90,000 from that—every day, $90,000 from that one deal alone.
He’s also been a big part of the creation of the stablecoin and World Liberty Financial platforms. So not only has he helped set up a deal that enriches him every day; he played a key part in building the actual token and platforms.
Seeberger: So, you brought up the deal-making that seems to be going on, or at least the appearance of deal-making, between a lot of major corporations here trying to curry favor with the administration. You name-checked some of them. But it seems to me like we really have entered a new era of pay-to-play presidential politics. Is this all legal?
Ragland: Well, I think we’ve got—well, first and foremost—there was a massive Supreme Court decision last summer, Trump v. United States, which basically lets the president off the hook for any official action that he takes.
So, anything that’s tied to an official action, there’s a lot of flexibility there, a lot of leeway there that the Supreme Court gave the president himself. There’s also a lot of gray areas. There’s a lot of opaqueness. As long as the disclosure is there, in a lot of cases, there’s not a lot of work in terms of the law that can really hit him on some of this.
Unfortunately, we have a Congress that has given up on oversight of this administration.
Seeberger: You’ve got to try in order to give up, Will. They aren’t even trying.
Ragland: Yeah, exactly. And then, he’s gotten rid of a stable of inspectors general, whose job it is to look at this type of corruption. One of his first acts as president was to suspend the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which he did for 180 days. And they’ve reinstituted that enforcement with a very business-friendly scheme that requires Trump loyalists at the Department of Justice to approve any investigations that move forward on this.
So even where there are laws on the books that would enforce this and prevent this type of corruption, that enforcement is not where it once was.
Seeberger: It’s been neutered.
Ragland: Yeah.
Seeberger: So, I think it’s pretty clear that Congressman James Comer, head of the Oversight Committee, he may be out to lunch or on an extended vacation if you look at the last few months.
But say that Democrats are successful in next year’s midterm elections, they retake the House of Representatives, Congressman Robert Garcia ends up becoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
What should a Democratic House majority—what would you set as some priorities for them, if you were advising them? What would you say they should be prioritizing in terms of looking into this apparent corruption and personal profiting off the presidency by Trump? Where should they be training their focus?
Ragland: So, there’s a lot there. But there are three big things I would focus on if I were chair of the Oversight Committee. And these are three things that impact everyday Americans.
One, are the consumer protections that have gone away and are going away and are benefiting the wealthiest corporations that we have, whether they be caps on credit card late fees, increases on Medicare Advantage rates, the ability to not have medical debt count against your credit score. There are a lot of nuts and bolts, pocketbook issues that have gone away because of favors for some of the wealthiest among us. So, I would look first and foremost at some of the consumer protections that have gone away, maybe not as a result of some of this pay to play.
The second would be national security. I’m really concerned about the number and amount of foreign funds flowing through into some of his crypto ventures that are pretty opaque. We don’t know a lot about them. But we do know that a good number of transactions have happened in some countries that are adversaries, including Russia, North Korea, and Iran. So that would be No. 2. I think there are some real concerns there.
And I think the third is what are we going to do about the ability to regulate and protect people who are everyday investors in crypto. I think that crypto on its own could be a force for good. It could be something that could be very transparent and could be something that protects people’s privacy. Those could all be good things.
But right now, your everyday crypto investors are getting taken advantage of by these big wealthy whales who come in and “pump and dump,” create these pump-and-dump schemes, and take advantage of people that want to have some faith in crypto. We want to take part in the digital currency world.
So those three things are what come top to mind. The corruption with Trump has been there a lot, but I think what people really care about is how this impacts them and their wallets and safety.
Seeberger: Yeah, and safety, no doubt. No doubt. We like to end these interviews on a positive note when we can, and I’m curious to get your take on beyond what a Democratic House Oversight Committee should be looking into, what can we do about cracking down on this apparent corruption? What laws or regulations would you recommend, or steps would you recommend, a future Congress take in order to reign in some of this stuff, beyond just shining sunlight on it?
Ragland: This is an issue that is very popular among a broad swath of Americans, right? This is 80, 90 percent approval territory. People want money out of politics. They’ve wanted it for a long time. So, I think there are a couple of things that I would start with.
One is prohibiting stock trading by members of Congress, top leaders in the executive branch, including the president, Supreme Court. They should put all of their money in a blind trust that should not be trading off of insider knowledge, period, the end. It’s happened on both sides. I think almost everyone in America could get behind it. It needs to stop, period. I think that could start to build more of a trust in the institutions that are supposed to service every day.
Seeberger: Yeah.
Ragland: And two, I think we’ve got to start thinking about ways that we can hold our elected leaders accountable. Again, especially the president being able to cloak yourself in an official act so you can do anything you want to, no matter whether it’s within the letter of the law or not, is something that I think Congress is going to have to deal with.
Supreme Court had its say. I think Congress is going to have to say, “No, we’re going to make this crystal clear in the letter of the law that presidents can be held accountable.”
Seeberger: Nobody’s a king in this country.
Ragland: Yeah, exactly. And yeah, I think that would start and give us a little bit of a foundation to do even more. There’s a big menu of good government reforms that have been on the table for a long time. I’d love to get special interests out of the business of raising money for electeds. I think there’s a lot of things there that could be done. But those first two would build a big foundation and start to build that trust again with the American people and their elected leaders.
Seeberger: Well, we appreciate all the work that you have put into producing this tool. I think it is really exciting, and I think it does so much to help crystallize for folks all the headlines that are coming in every single day of the corruption, what it’s meaning for the president, for his family. Can you remind us again where can folks check it out?
Ragland: Yep. You can go to trumpstakecounter.org, or you can go to our homepage, americanprogress.org, and you’ll find it there.
Seeberger: Awesome. Thanks, man. Appreciate you joining us on “The Tent.”
Ragland: Yeah, thanks Colin. It’s good to be here.
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Seeberger: All right, folks. That’s going to do it for us. Please go back and check out previous episodes.
Until then, the holidays are here. Thanksgiving is only a few weeks away. So, I wanted to make sure that you have a go-to festive holiday cocktail as you get together with friends and family.
This holiday season, I went to a wine and cocktail bar up near me, and I was treated to a wonderful festive cocktail. Of course, I’m talking about an apple cider mule. You’ve probably heard of a Moscow mule made with vodka. This one was made with whiskey, had ginger beer—of course, because it’s a mule—fresh lime, fresh apple cider. Delicious.
You’ve got to serve it in a copper mug. You’ve got to have some crushed dice, not a big block. It’s a festive season. Throw in a cinnamon stick. Throw in some rosemary, if it’s what your heart desires. But, pretty good, folks. You’re going to want one, so make sure to give it a whirl.
We will come back, share some more thoughts on holiday cocktails and food over the course of the coming weeks. Because I know you’re all getting your recipes together for potlucks or maybe a big Thanksgiving dinner. So, we’ll chat more in the coming weeks. But until then, hope you all enjoy a festive cocktail or a mocktail, whatever you so please, and we’ll talk to you next week.
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Seeberger: “The Tent” is a podcast from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. It’s hosted by me, Colin Seeberger. Muggs Leone is our digital producer, Kelly McCoy is our supervising producer, and Mishka Espey is our booking producer. Hai Phan, Olivia Mowry, and Toni Pandolfo are our video team.
Views expressed by guests of “The Tent” are their own, and interviews are not endorsements of a guest’s perspectives. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.