Recently, Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to just 33 percent, the lowest of his presidency. Last week, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll exposed one reason for this drop: most Americans believe that Trump is inappropriately profiting from his role as president in his second term.
It’s easy to see how people are coming to that conclusion.
After his first term, Trump complained that he got “absolutely no credit” for turning over control of the Trump Organization to his sons and putting limits on what kind of business they could do—especially with foreign entities. Even before he was re-elected in 2024, it was clear he had no intention of going through the same motions this time around. Instead, he seems to have leaned into using his power and status to increase his family’s wealth.
Much of it has come from a crypto company formed two months before his re-election in 2024 called World Liberty Financial. The firm is led by Trump’s sons and the sons of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s frequent golf partner turned Special Envoy to the Middle East.
Almost immediately, the company received massive investments from foreign governments with sovereign wealth funds—most notably the UAE, which “invested” $500 million in World Liberty, enough to secure a 49 percent stake. Another UAE fund backed by sovereign wealth had previously invested more than $200 million in an investment fund controlled by Jared Kushner.
Throughout this term, Kushner and Trump’s sons have made a lot of money on foreign land deals—especially in the Middle East—and by partnering with firms like 1789 Capital that are investing heavily in firms that have just so happened to benefit a lot from regulations changed and government contracts awarded under this second Trump administration.
On top of that, Trump has received an absurd amount of money and assets from plutocrats and foreign governments in the form of “gifts” for his future presidential library in Florida. The most famous contribution to Trump’s library was the $400 million luxury Boeing jet from the Qatari royal family. But it’s also been a way for many others—from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik and the attorney general of Florida to Paramount and Meta—to effectively buy their way into the president’s good graces.
But the library is not the only way major corporations are purchasing goodwill from the country’s ruling family. For instance, many—including Apple, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and Amazon among others—have contributed millions of dollars to Trump’s new ballroom fund. And Amazon, going further, also paid $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, with well over half of that money going directly to the First Lady.
In total, the Trump family is estimated to have made over $2 billion since Trump returned to office. And that’s, of course, focusing exclusively on personal wealth. The president has also been unusually shameless in flexing his power to protect and expand the fortunes of well-connected people and firms he likes.
It is understandable why most Americans find this upsetting, especially after Trump launched a war that predictably raised gas prices for a population already struggling with a years-long inflation crisis. A mere decade after he first won the presidency by selling himself as a billionaire who was too rich to be bought off by special interests, Trump is visibly using his power to make his own family richer while his policies leave most American families worse off.
But the key word there is visibly. Because the truth is that, despite what establishment Trump critics want us to think, Trump did not bring this kind of “corruption” to the White House; he’s just not trying as hard to hide it. This is what states do. And it’s what they have always done.
That’s not a particularly controversial observation if you go back far enough in history. It’s widely understood and accepted that, for thousands of years, political power was used to enrich the kings, pharaohs, and emperors who wielded it, along with the aristocrats, religious authorities, and warlords who helped them maintain that power.
As it’s popularly understood, that peaked in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the rise of absolutism and—its economic counterpart—mercantilism.
States were using their perceived power to create “companies” that were explicitly state-backed monopolies. And then the two would work together, using state power and the monopoly’s special legal privileges to attain as much wealth as they could at the expense of everyone outside of their small privileged bubble.
Again, this is not that controversial to point out. However, as most of us were taught in school, this was supposed to have come to an end with the so-called liberal revolutions.
The people were tired of the government taxing them and warping markets on behalf of state-backed companies, so they rose up and overthrew these absolutist monarchies and replaced them with democratic republics that ensured the government would finally, and forever, work exclusively in the interest of the people. Or, at least, that’s what the current political class wants us to believe.
But the truth is, these revolutions were only a temporary reprieve from the expropriation. The popular conception of the liberal revolutions is largely accurate when it comes to the beginning or early days of these movements. But in every case, the old absolutist regime was simply replaced by a new ruling class that adapted to changing popular conceptions of state legitimacy and then carried out its own self-enriching schemes.
As Ryan McMaken laid out last week, that happened almost immediately with the French Revolution—which has, unfortunately, greatly held France back in the centuries since. In the United States, though, it took quite a bit longer.
For the better part of a century after the American Revolution and the Patriots’ victory in the war to secede from Britain, the United States was truly that—a loose union of countries with very weak governments. Most Americans lived under political conditions that bordered on statelessness, which helped turn the US into one of the wealthier regions in the world.
However, that began to change under Abraham Lincoln, who—by going to war to prevent states from leaving the Union—transformed the US from a union of independent states into one single large state, with provinces confusingly called states.
That laid the groundwork for the real betrayal of the revolution which would come later.
It began with the so-called Progressive Era when, under the guise of popular reforms that were purely in the public interest, the heads of industry began maneuvering and lobbying to use government power to protect their market share and hamper future competitors.
With that, the government was fully back to warping markets to benefit well-connected and, now once again, legally-privileged companies. All that had been required for the ruling class to carry out the same basic expropriative scheme from the days of absolutism was a new legitimizing myth.
The scheme was accelerated at first by Woodrow Wilson, who greatly expanded federal power during WWI and, even more crucially, signed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913—surreptitiously bringing a European-style central bank to the US. Then FDR used the Great Depression—itself a result of the Federal Reserve’s credit expansion—as an excuse to do away with nearly all limits on how the federal government could intervene in the economy, freeing the political classes to enrich themselves and their friends even more.
Finally, the period of financialization that took place primarily throughout the term of former Fed chair Alan Greenspan helped bring about the situation we find ourselves in today.
Through government regulations, often going back decades, nearly every industry is warped in favor of the companies and firms already on top—healthcare, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, energy, air travel, food processing, higher education, big tech, and more.
And, through the government’s near-total control over the monetary and banking system, attained over time by the Federal Reserve, the political class is able to help greatly enrich the financial sector with a steady stream of easy money, favorable regulations, and massive bailouts whenever the artificially- and unsustainably-boosted market enters correction territory.
And finally, of course, there are all the “private companies” that get all or most of their revenue directly from the government, such as the so-called defense contractors.
All in all, the current American ruling class has been able to build and maintain a political order that moves far more wealth into their own pockets and the pockets of their well-connected friends in various industries than the mercantilist regimes of the past could have ever dreamed of.
But it wasn’t built in a day. It took a long time, a lot of patience, and the careful management of public perception. The only way an ongoing political wealth transfer from the broader population to a small, privileged elite of this caliber is possible is if a sufficient portion of the population truly believes these laws and regulations are not only legitimate, but are actively benefiting them. That is an especially delicate balance to strike with a people who pride themselves on their ancestors’ opposition to government tyranny.
But, except for a few cracks that have emerged in the last twenty years or so, the American establishment has managed quite well.
Then, along came Trump.
In this second term especially, Trump has shown almost no interest in being a good team player and hiding his self-enriching actions behind some vague but effective appeal to the public good.
Make no mistake, the political establishment is truly furious that Trump is so blatantly using the presidency to enrich himself and his family. But that’s not because they’re opposed to using state power in that way—that’s essentially all they do. Their problem with Trump is that he risks giving away the game. He simply doesn’t care about hiding it.
It is, therefore, imperative, from the establishment’s perspective, that Trump’s actions are seen by the public as a rogue president corrupting what had been a sound federal government.
Trump, of course, deserves no sympathy or support for what he’s doing. But if the American people accept that the corruption begins and ends with him, then the truly corrupt will have won.
