Bitcoin mines, Saudi deals, a luxury jet—since his first term, Trump and his family have been accused of brazen profiteering through a wide range of schemes. David D. Kirkpatrick tallies up an estimate of how much they’re really making. Plus, Marc Fisher on D.C.’s nonexistent crime emergency. And, then:

Dear Reader,

In 2016, the initiation fee to join Mar-a-Lago, the private club owned by Donald Trump, went for a hundred thousand dollars. As of last fall, it was set to go up to a million.

When it comes to the art of turning public office into personal profit, President Trump is, as one ethics-reform advocate put it, “a unicorn.” He and his family have proved unusually adept at finding ways to make money off the Presidency, whether by selling “Gulf of America” hats for fifty dollars apiece or signing eye-popping business deals in the Persian Gulf.

Returned to power in Washington, Trump and his family seem to have grown only more brazen. And yet the size of their monetary gains that can be linked directly to the Presidency has thus far remained largely unknown. We know that the Trump family is richer than it was when the President first took office, but by how much?

In other words: What’s the number?

For our latest issue, the investigative reporter David D. Kirkpatrick does the math, adding up disclosure forms, public statements, and other receipts. Kirkpatrick set out to create a fair, dispassionate tally of Trump’s two terms so far. The resulting report is the most thorough accounting yet of the extent of the profiteering by the First Family.

Kirkpatrick’s work is illuminating. Some of the more commonly cited examples of possible corruption, like the former Trump International Hotel in Washington, situated just blocks from the White House, probably haven’t fattened the Trumps’ wallets at all. (Estimated gain: $0.) That private jet given by Qatar was a nice perk, but offers only relatively modest value. (Estimated gain: $150 million.) The family’s most lucrative ventures by far, Kirkpatrick reports, can be found in their various crypto investments. (Estimated gain: $2.37 billion.) Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said, “The claims that this President has profited from his time in office are absolutely absurd.”

Kirkpatrick’s final estimate is an astonishing $3.4 billion. He writes, “I was struck by the frantic, almost desperate pace of the Trump family’s efforts, as though they’re afraid to miss any opportunity. . . . They’ve sought those payments eagerly, and at a speed suggesting that they badly want—or need—the money.” This “thirst for cash,” he writes, “makes questions about conflicts of interest all the more pressing.”

Our subscribers make reporting like this possible. If you aren’t already one, I hope that you will consider joining us today.

As ever,

David Remnick
Editor, The New Yorker

President Trump is deploying the National Guard in Washington, D.C., and taking over the city’s police force for the next thirty days.

How bad is it? “This is troops-in-the-streets, shades-of-authoritarian rule bad,” Marc Fisher, an associate editor and columnist at the Washington Post, told us. “Legally, it’s not quite as bad,” he said, pointing out that the President does have the authority to control the National Guard in D.C. and temporarily take over the city’s police department during an emergency. However—“this is where it gets ugly,” Fisher said. There is no clear emergency in this case: violent crime in D.C. reached a thirty-year low last year, according to the U.S. Attorney, and is down twenty-six per cent in 2025 compared to 2024, based on statistics from the Metropolitan Police Department. “The Administration,” he said, “is making this move by—forgive me—trumping up a crime emergency where one doesn’t exist.”

As the stock prices of Big Tech companies continue to rise and eye-popping I.P.O.s reëmerge, echoes of the dot-com era are getting louder. It’s been more than a quarter of a century since that bubble burst—is this one next? John Cassidy reports »

P.S. Annie Proulx, who is almost ninety and has a new story in this week’s issue, told our fiction editor that she hopes to continue writing until she “irrevocably cannot.” Inspiration, she says, comes from Irish short-story writers and from “watching that continually amazing and puzzling creature, the modern human and his/her/their world.”