Originally published June 7, 2025. Rewritten and expanded August 29, 2026.
Asked in January what he had learned since returning to office, the president gave the most honest answer of his second term. “I found out that nobody cared.”
He was talking to the New York Times about the guardrails — the ethics norms, the disclosure regimes, the quaint idea that a president shouldn’t be selling things. Nobody cared. So he stopped pretending. In July, asked on CNBC about the billion-plus dollars his family has pulled out of crypto ventures his own administration regulates, he said “there’s nothing illegal, there’s nothing wrong with it,” and volunteered that his children have “inside information” on “almost anything they do” by virtue of the presidency. He has bragged about killing the investigations into his own industry: “You’re lucky I’m president!”
That is the tone now. Not denial. Not deflection. Ownership.
For years, Republican lawmakers and right-wing media outlets frothed at the mouth over Hunter Biden’s laptop and fabricated tales of Burisma “corruption” — stories so thoroughly debunked that the FBI informant who invented them, Alexander Smirnov, went to prison for his lies. The GOP knew the Burisma bribes were fake Russian disinformation from the start, yet they weaponized these fabrications to launch impeachment proceedings and relentlessly smear the Biden family. Meanwhile, they’ve maintained a deafening silence about the brazen, documented, and ongoing Trump corruption stench emanating from the convicted fraudster‘s second presidency. Maryland Representative and House Judiciary ranking member Jamie Raskin called it a “gangster state.” And that was before the president chartered his own bank.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking in its audacity. While Republicans manufactured outrage over phantom millions supposedly flowing to the Bidens — money that never existed, deals that never happened, corruption that was entirely fictional — they’ve turned a blind eye to the very real, very documented flood of cash pouring into Trump’s coffers from foreign governments, cryptocurrency schemes, and pay-to-play access deals that would make a banana republic dictator blush.
What follows is not speculation, not innuendo, not the fever dreams of political opponents. This is a meticulously documented catalog of corruption so vast and shameless that it dwarfs anything previously seen in American presidential history. And the numbers have changed by an order of magnitude since I first wrote this list. In June 2025 the headline figures were $346 million across two inaugural committees and a $400 million airplane. Fifteen months later: $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency income booked on his own sworn financial disclosure, a single month with 1,051 trades in his personal brokerage accounts, a federal bank charter granted to his family’s crypto firm by a comptroller he appointed, and roughly $1 billion drained out of the National Park Service to pay for monuments to himself. The presidency has been converted into a personal ATM with all the subtlety of a smash-and-grab robbery, and the alarm has been disconnected.
The Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920s served as the quintessential symbol of government corruption for decades — over a mere $7 million worth of bribes to Interior Secretary Albert Fall. It was eclipsed and replaced by Watergate, shortly preceded by the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew over the discovery of his $300,000 operation that funneled cash stuffed into plain envelopes by bag men into the White House. Trump’s corruption represents a quantum leap beyond even these watershed moments in terms of sheer orders of magnitude, as well as the brazen manner in which the heists are being conducted in broad daylight.
The same party that spent years screaming about imaginary Ukrainian energy company bribes and fantasy Chinese business deals has remained conspicuously silent as their standard-bearer openly auctions off American foreign policy, drops federal investigations for donors, and literally sells dinner invitations for millions of dollars. The cognitive dissonance would be comical if it weren’t so dangerous to our democracy.
What is an example of political corruption in the United States? You cannot find a bigger collection of brazen examples. This is the story they don’t want you to focus on — the real corruption, the documented grift, the unprecedented monetization of the American presidency happening right before our eyes. Here is where it stands as of late August 2026.
1. The President’s Own Brokerage Account
This is the newest theater and the hardest one to explain away, because the documents are signed by him.
- On August 22, 2026, the Office of Government Ethics released the president’s periodic transaction report for June. One month. 1,051 transactions, worth between $78.1 million and $263.1 million. He signed it himself on August 12.
- An index fund is one line on a disclosure. That is the whole test. On May 15, 2026, Eric Trump said on X that the family’s assets were “invested in a blind trust by the largest financial institutions in broad market indexes.” Four days later a Trump Organization spokesperson told the New York Times the family has no “role in selecting, directing, approving, influencing or soliciting specific investments.” The White House now says the accounts run on “computer-based model portfolios that automatically replicate recognized indexes, such as the Schwab 1000.” Those are not the same explanation. Broad-market index funds produce single line items; direct index replication produces thousands of individual trades. Both cannot be true, and across four months and three explanations nobody has named a single manager.
- The June filing shows a purchase of $15,001 to $50,000 of SpaceX on June 23 — eleven days after the company priced the largest IPO in American history at a $1.77 trillion valuation. Algorithms replicating an index do not get in line for an IPO allocation.
- The same filing shows Palantir sold twice in June — including up to $1 million on June 18 — and bought three times, including $100,001 to $250,000 on June 24. On August 4, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg signed a memo directing up to $243.9 million to Palantir without competitive bidding.
- Ten days before the filing dropped, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Robert Garcia sent the president a 17-page letter enumerating more than 30 transactions that overlap official government actions, each footnoted to a row number in his own filing and a specific
.govannouncement. The hard, primary-source counts from his own filings are 3,555 transactions in the first quarter of 2026 and 1,051 in June — an average approaching fifty trades for every day the markets were open, which is more trading than all 535 members of Congress did in 2025 combined. (The letter also cites an outside analysis putting 2025 at more than 14,000 trades worth up to $1.06 billion; Bloomberg’s tally of the same filing says 21,000. Those are estimates, not filing counts, and they should not be blended.) - A sample of the overlaps: a purchase of up to $5 million in Axon Enterprise roughly two weeks before ICE posted a $220 million contract notice for some 17,800 Tasers written to a specification only Axon can meet. Purchases of NVIDIA and AMD on January 6, shortly before the administration announced changes easing chip sales to China. Four purchases across BNY Mellon and Robinhood in March, before Treasury designated BNY as the government’s financial agent for the Trump Accounts program and Robinhood as its trustee.
- Their deadline for answers was August 28, 2026.
