On top of his self-dealing, taxpayers are spending billions
on his vanity projects.
Justin Glawe and Ava Shook
 |
Trump keeps giving Musk contracts. He'll
probably tell DOD to buy these pieces of junk |
On the same day his company won a $1.6 billion contract with
the US military, Elon Musk’s political action committee announced it
would spend $100 million to help Republicans win the November midterms.
In previous eras of American politics, such a development
might have caused even some Republicans to question whether the billion dollar
taxpayer payout to Musk’s SpaceX and the surge of campaign cash to help their
party win an election was a quid pro quo. In the waning years of the Trump era,
however, it was simply a Wednesday.
Musk needs government money to keep his company afloat.
Donald Trump needs Republicans to win in November so they can retain power in
Congress and stop Democrats from impeaching him. This is the very simple
anatomy of how government operates under Trump: give him money and he will help
you. Don’t give him money and he will harm you.
The nation’s largest companies are dumping cash into Trump’s
various political action committees and helping to fund his ever-increasing
portfolio of renovation projects in and around Washington DC. In return, those
companies are benefitting from massive government contracts, favorable policy
decisions from the Trump administration and the federal agencies it controls,
and even Trump’s public pumping of stocks that he
himself is invested in.
The line from giving Trump money to receiving favorable
treatment from his administration is straight and short, according to
the Wall Street Journal.
“If a company encounters an issue with the federal
government that comes to Trump’s attention, he will want to know how much money
the company gave, according to a person familiar with the matter,” the Journal
reported on July 30.
The private sector money flowing into Trump’s vanity
projects is also costing taxpayers. His ballroom is funded by hundreds of
millions of taxpayer dollars as well as private donations. In this way, we’re
all forced to fund Trump’s corruption.
A Public Notice-American Doom analysis shows that Trump is
spending nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars to fund his many renovation
projects. Meanwhile, Trump and his family’s digital currency companies have
raked in more than $2.25 billion during Trump’s second term, including as much
as $600 million from foreign interests, according to Democrats.
Trump’s foreign
licensing business has also exploded, bringing in $61
million last year alone. Another $50 billion in taxpayer dollars has gone
to government contractors who are helping to fund Trump’s ballroom, Sen. Chris
Murphy said
last month when he took to the Senate floor to detail Trump
administration corruption.
But the true cost to taxpayers for Trump’s construction
projects — as well as the historic profiting off his presidency — are likely
much higher than is currently known.
The values of mining deals tied to Trump family companies in
Kazakhstan and North Carolina could be massive, if not entirely known.
Taxpayers are helping to fund a mining operation in North Carolina benefitting
a company tied to Donald Trump Jr., thanks to a $1.4
billion loan and contract with the Defense Department. Companies tied
to Trump’s sons are also benefitting from roughly $1.6 billion in loans for a
Kazakh mining operation that the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are
also profiting from.
These are just a pair examples of corrupt deals made by
Trump and his family whose profits simply aren’t known publicly. There’s also
Trump Jr.’s investment company, 1789 Capital, which has seen unheard-of
returns of 200 percent on investments in AI and defense companies
benefitting from government contracts. In the past few years, the value of
assets managed by 1789 has exploded, from a few hundred million dollars to more
than $3 billion.
In addition to the $2.25 billion Trump and his family have
made off digital assets and the $61 million in foreign licensing deals, a
conservative estimate for the Trump family’s profits and asset growth in the
first two years of Trump’s second term is around $5 billion, according to a
Public Notice-American Doom analysis.
Democrats are now planning to dig into the Trump
administration’s runaway corruption. Last month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck
Schumer announced the formation of a working group to investigate Trump
administration profiteering. The hint of accountability emanating from the
possibility that Democrats will take power in the House (and maybe even the
Senate) is part of the reason Trump is so aggressively pushing the SAVE America
Act and other anti-voting measures.
“If people stop being outraged at what he is doing to enrich
himself, then I fear there is no going back,” Sen. Murphy said last month, when
he took to the Senate floor to detail Trump administration corruption. “The
White House will just become a place to get rich.”
Trump himself has openly admitted he has made no effort to
separate his private business interests from his presidency. Asked by the New
York Times in January why he has continued his private dealmaking
during his second term, Trump claimed that Americans simply don’t care.
“Because I found out that nobody cared,” Trump said. “I’m
allowed to.”
Endless money pits
Trump’s ballroom (which suffered
a setback in court yesterday) is costing taxpayers the most out of his
many projects. Estimates vary, but taxpayers could be on the hook for as much
as $800 million to complete the ballroom, bunker, and “drone port” that Trump
says will be part of the complex.
Combined with other construction and vanity projects, our
analysis shows Trump is spending as much as $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars.
Trump’s spending includes:
- $250
million on the Kennedy Center
- $60
million for his White House UFC event
- $58
million for city fountains
- $40
million for a planned “Garden of American Heroes” at the West Potomac Park
- $17
million for renovations to Lafayette Park near the White House
- $16
million for the reflecting pool
- $7.5
million for Eisenhower Executive Office building
- $26
million for new exhibits and upgrades at the Lincoln Memorial
- $5.1
million for re-gilding of Washington statues
- $2
million for renovations to the Rose Garden
- $1.3
million for renovations to the White House West Colonnade, including
$689,000 to import and install African granite
- $400
million to retrofit the new Air Force One, gifted from the Qatari
government, with even more spent on pilot training equipment as well as an
unknown amount of taxpayer funding from classified budgets
This $1.8 billion is simply the known cost
to taxpayers for projects to feed Trump’s ego. The cost of the proposed Arc de
Trump, the East Potomac Golf Course renovations, gold gilding and glued-on gold
wall accents all over the Oval Office, as well as renovations to multiple rooms
at the White House and columns there are not currently known.
In addition to costing taxpayers billions of dollars, many
of Trump’s projects are also funded by private donors, adding yet another layer
of corruption to the record profits he’s making as president.
Trump initially claimed the new White House ballroom would
cost $200 million. That quickly changed to $400 million before the Washington
Post found in
June that the ballroom was estimated to cost $600 million, with over half paid
for by taxpayers. The rest of the money has come from private donors taking
advantage of a historic opportunity to fund a presidential legacy project while
simultaneously having policy interests overseen by the Trump administration. In
other words, a bribe.
Among the 37 donors funding Trump’s ballroom are the
country’s biggest tech companies: Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google, as well
as the defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Palantir, crypto companies, law
firms, and the global manufacturing giant, Caterpillar. Trump claimed in
October that the ballroom is being “paid for 100 percent by me and some friends
of mine.”
Donations to Trump’s ballroom have paid off: since giving
Trump an unspecified amount of money, ballroom donors have benefitted from $50
billion in federal contracts, according to Sen. Murphy.
Private profits from public money
As Trump has blown $1.8 billion on construction projects,
he’s also been busy profiting off the presidency through stock purchases that
reek of insider trading, foreign licensing deals, crypto sales, and even the
stocking of Trump wine and cider in stores run by the Coast Guard.
While it’s not known how much Trump has truly made during
his second term, Democrats estimate the
range of profits to be from $2.25 billion to nearly $10 billion. Trump’s
foreign licensing business also reportedly made $61 million in 2025, a 900
percent growth since 2023.
Trump began this year by purchasing as much as $5 million in
Dell Computer stock. In May, the Department of Defense awarded the company a
$9.7 billion contract to provide software to the military — directly
benefitting Trump’s sprawling investment portfolio. Trump has repeatedly urged
Americans to buy stock in Dell, occasionally causing the company’s value to
spike.
Trump’s investments in Dell are among a stunning 21,000
individual trades made by him during his first year in office. Trump and White
House officials regularly claim that his investment portfolio is managed by a
“blind trust,” but that’s not the case. Instead, Trump’s sons have control over
his investments.
Trump has said that Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. can’t be
blamed if they make trades on his behalf with the benefit of insider knowledge
thanks to their proximity to the president.
“Almost anything they do, if they want to buy a truck, if
they want to buy, you know, if they buy an energy efficient truck, they have
inside information,” Trump said following news of his historic second-term
profits came out in June. “So it’s pretty tough in that sense.”
One of Trump’s brokerage accounts also purchased between $15
and $50 million worth of stock in TKO Holdings, UFC’s parent company. The
purchase was made in March, two weeks after the fight card was revealed for
the UFC
Freedom 250 fights on the White House lawn, and three months before
the event took place. TKO president and COO Mark Shapiro called the event “the
greatest earned marketing tool of all time.”
Purchasing and pumping stocks for companies that have
business with or are regulated by the federal government is par for the course
in Trump’s White House. Immigration hardliner and senior White House official
Stephen Miller is directly profiting off the massive expansion of the Trump
administration’s brutal immigration crackdowns through his investment in
Palantir. Miller, who constantly pushes to make life harder for immigrants,
owns as much as $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir, which in 2025 was awarded
a $30 million contract with ICE.
Trump is also making money off his draconian immigration
policies, owning stock in both GEO Group and CoreCivic, the nation’s two
largest private prison companies who have seen profits soar thanks to contracts
with ICE and other immigration agencies.
Trump’s sons are also profiting from the public money that
funds government contracts. Companies that the Trump boys have invested in
have, within a short time of those investments, been awarded government
contracts worth more than $6 billion. Trump himself has been helping out his
sons with their schemes, intervening to ensure that a company in which Eric and
Don Jr. are invested was awarded
a $620 million Pentagon loan.
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789
Capital, has also been busy making incredibly well-timed investments in AI and
defense sector stocks whose value has tripled in mere months, according to
the New York Times.
Meanwhile, World Liberty Financial, the crypto company run
by Eric and Don Jr., pocketed $187 million after selling a 49 percent stake to
Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a UAE government official and brother of
the country’s president. The sale took place just days before Trump’s
inauguration, raising ethics concerns among both Republicans and Democrats. The
deal also scored
$31 million for the sons of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to
the Middle East, who are co-founders of World Liberty.
If these deals weren’t enough, there’s more conflicts of
interest to be had: the $5 billion in on-paper wealth accumulated by World
Liberty in recent years is propped up by a $2 billion investment from convicted
Chinese money launderer Changpeng Zhao. Upon taking office, Trump pardoned Zhao
of his crimes, which allowed the crypto platform Binance to become a hotbed of
money laundering activity for the international criminal set.
The next generation is getting in on the grift as well: both
Trump and Lutnick’s sons are profiting
from a $1 billion mining deal with Kazakhstan after their fathers
helped to secure the agreement in September. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner,
is at the center of a web of conflicts of interest that overshadow his dual
roles as private sector real estate developer and White House peace negotiator.
With Trump’s corruption so blatant, Democrats have framed at
least some of their midterm messaging around holding the president accountable.
Democratic senators have already begun laying the groundwork
for congressional investigations into Trump’s corruption in 2027, with Schumer
and Sen. Alex Padilla introducing legislation that would create a federal
agency called the “Anti-Corruption Bureau” to investigate corruption by the
executive branch. The law would also allow for states and individuals to sue to
recover money earned through corruption committed by presidents, executive
branch officials, and government contractors. (The bill faces long odds even if
Democrats win control of both chambers of Congress in November.)
In promoting the legislation, Padilla said he favored the
creation of an entire government agency to address Trump’s corruption instead
of special counsels, like those used in the wake of Watergate and other
presidential scandals, because Trump’s corruption is so vast.
“Watergate was about a president trying to hide corrupt
activity,” Padilla said in remarks on July 30. “Donald Trump isn’t trying to
hide his corruption, like Richard Nixon was — far worse, he’s normalizing it,
or trying to. He and people around him are trying to convince the American
public, this is just how it is.”
Thanks for reading Public Notice. This post is public so
feel free to share it.
💪
Subscribe to PN 💪
