Planet Money
Before President Donald Trump’s first term, he was in a “tight spot” financially, according to New Yorker writer David Kirkpatrick. At the start of his second term, David says, Trump was in an “even tighter” spot. But after just six months into his second term, Trump’s financial situation started looking really good.
David has done a full accounting for what the family has been up to, and even using conservative estimates, David says Trump and his family have made almost $4 billion dollars “off of the presidency,” in just about a year.
Today on the show: we look at every new business and business deal and financial transaction that David says likely would not have happened if Trump wasn’t the president of the United States. And we stop at the most innovative ways Trump and his family have made all that.
Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift. / Subscribe to Planet Money+
Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts. ??Listen to our playlist on Federal Reserve independence here.
Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.
Today’s episode of Planet Money was hosted by Sarah Gonzalez and Mary Childs. It was produced by James Sneed, edited by Jess Jiang, and fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Robert Rodriguez engineered it. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices
-
The potato-shaped loophole in free trade
Ever since free trade opened up between the US and Mexico in the 1990s, trillions of dollars of goods have been going back and forth between the two countries, from cars to strawberries to MRI…
-
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
If you believe the hype, translators will all soon be out of work. Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of the language learning app Duolingo, doesn’t think AI is quite there… yet. In this interview,…
-
The Rest of the Story, 2024
After the gift exchange comes another great holiday tradition: returns season. Once again, we are joining the fun in our own Planet Money way. We are returning to stories from years past to see what’s…
-
The Indicators of this year and next
This year, there was some economic good news to go around. Inflation generally ticked down. Unemployment more or less held around 4-percent. Heck, the Fed even cut interest rates three times. But for a lot…
-
The habitat banker
Our planet is in serious trouble. There are a million species of plants and animals in danger of extinction, and the biggest cause is companies destroying their habitats to farm food, mine minerals, and otherwise…
-
How sports gambling blew up
Sports gambling isn’t exactly a financial market, but it rhymes with financial markets. What happens on Wall Street somehow eventually also happens in sports gambling. So in the 1980s, when computers and deep statistical analysis…
-
A Nobel prize for explaining why there’s global inequality
Why do some nations fail and others succeed? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, three economists formed a partnership that would revolutionize how economists think about global inequality. Their work centered on a powerful…
-
Worst. Tariffs. Ever. (update)
The Smoot Hawley Tariffs were a debacle that helped plunge America into the Great Depression. What can we learn from them? Today on the show, we tell the nearly 100-year-old story of Smoot and Hawley,…
-
There Will Be Flood
Windell Curole spent decades working to protect his community in southern Louisiana from the destructive flooding caused by hurricanes. His local office in South Lafourche partnered with the federal government’s Army Corps of Engineers to…
-
George Soros vs. the Bank of England
As people learn more about Donald Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, one story comes up over and over: a legendary trade that he played a small part in while he worked at George…