The Presidency for Sale: How Trump Turned the Oval Office Into His Biggest Payday

From scrambling to cover his legal debts to raking in billions through meme stocks, crypto schemes, and foreign licensing deals, the second Trump term is a profit plan with nuclear codes

Back in 2017, the Trump family’s self-dealing still wore a fig leaf. Mar-a-Lago memberships doubled overnight, campaign events just happened to land at Trump resorts, and foreign dignitaries sipped cocktails in the lobby of the Trump D.C. hotel while pretending they were there for the chandeliers. It was brazen, yes, but still dressed in the polite tuxedo of Washington’s well-worn “access politics.” This was the stage Max at UNFTR has dubbed the soft grift, monetizing proximity, bending norms, and treating the presidency like a high-end hospitality suite for the ultra-wealthy.

The second term discarded the tuxedo. The grift grew teeth, muscle, and its own accounting department. What emerged was an integrated profit engine in which the presidency itself became the lead product and the federal government acted as an involuntary business partner. Policy, regulation, foreign affairs, nothing was immune from being repurposed as a sales tool. Deregulation in finance and crypto didn’t just serve an ideological agenda; it directly boosted the value of ventures the family owned. Endorsements issued from behind the Resolute Desk doubled as infomercials. Foreign policy stopped being an exercise in statecraft and started looking like an international client-relations tour, complete with luxury real-estate deals worth over $100 million in projected profit, a Qatari-owned Boeing 747-8 “gift” valued between $367 million and $400 million, and Emirati crypto buys that happened to land alongside geopolitical concessions.