Trump’s presidency is about making Trump rich again

US President Donald Trump struggled nearly all his adult life to win the respect of his wealthy peers.Trump inherited a fortune from his father Fred Trump in the 1970s. He focused on building middle-income and low-income housing as well as casinos, hotels and resorts.Bankruptcies plagued Trump. He went bankrupt for the first time in 1991 over his Atlantic City casino which defaulted on payments. In 1992, Trump declared bankruptcy again when two of his other casinos failed. During the same year, Trump’s Plaza Hotel in New York filed for bankruptcy.In the course of a 2016 presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump admitted to the four bankruptcies in 1991-92. But he left out two other more recent bankruptcies in 2004 and 2009. The Washington Post fact-checked him: “Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts filed for bankruptcy again in 2004. Trump Entertainment Resorts also declared bankruptcy in 2009.”Trump was also accused of following racist policies in his real estate business. The Guardian exposed a long history of Trump’s racist business practices: “In 1973, Richard Nixon’s Department of Justice sued the Trump family business for refusing to rent or negotiate rentals ‘because of race and colour’. It also charged that the company had required prohibitively stringent rental terms and conditions to black applicants and had lied about unit availability to keep black residents out. A then 26-year-old Donald Trump was the president of the company at the time.“Trump branched out from residential real estate into the casino business in the 1980s. Employees revealed a pattern of racism. A former Trump employee told the New Yorker that black staff were hidden from Trump when he visited the casino with his wife. ‘When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor’.”Trump beat Hillary to become the 45th US president in 2017, succeeding Barack Obama. Trump was still finding his feet in politics. He had never held a constitutional post and had no experience in governance at any level.But even in his first term, Trump signalled that commerce would drive his presidency. He appointed son-in-law Jared Kushner as US Middle East envoy. The opportunity of turning parts of the region into a real estate bonanza was first articulated by Kushner during long meetings with Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler.The Covid pandemic in 2020 cut short the Trump family’s multi-billion dollar real estate plans in the Middle East. They would, however, be revived within months of Trump’s second term as president. By May 2025, Trump’s family wealth had more than doubled to over $5bn. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/QH0Xv4Syvj8?si=KgjdkOm09pAHSzvJTrump’s crypto worldLast week, over 200 CEOs, crypto entrepreneurs and global celebrities attended a closed door ‘Crypto Ball’ dinner at Trump’s National Golf Club in Virginia. Each invitee reportedly paid $1.8mn for a seat at the table. The names of the attendees were kept a closely guarded secret.According to NBC News: “For weeks, President Trump’s meme coin project pushed a promotion: top holders of the crypto asset would get to attend an exclusive dinner with the president, and an even more select group of people would get to meet the president and receive a VIP tour. More than 200 people heeded the call, putting up an average of $1.8mn each to buy the $TRUMP coin. But it was unknown who the vast majority of the invitees were, and the White House wouldn’t say, leaving the 44-character identification numbers or aliases tied to their crypto wallets as the only public information about their identities.“The event was a spectacle: luxury cars snaked their way into Trump’s northern Virginia golf club as protesters lined the streets, denouncing the event as an unethical way for a president to make money or allow others to potentially influence him through the purchase of his meme coin.”Israel, Trump’s closest ally, was wrong-footed by Trump’s headlong rush into commercialising crypto (First Lady Melania Trump too has her own meme crypto coin $Melania). Trump recently closed billion-dollar deals in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia and Qatar, leaving Israel out of the loop.Trump has also pivoted away from what he pledged to accomplish geopolitically when he stepped into the White House on January 20.First, he promised to end the Russia-Ukraine war in one day. The conflict has defied resolution and Trump is on the verge of disengaging from peace talks with both Moscow and Kyiv.Second, Trump declared on March 3 that if Hamas did not release all Israeli hostages held in Gaza within 24 hours, there would be “hell to pay”. Nearly three months after that ultimatum, an estimated 50 Israeli hostages (20 of them confirmed alive) remain in Hamas’s custody in Gaza.Third, after imposing 145% tariffs on Chinese imports, Trump has been forced to cut them to 30% following a crash in US treasury bond prices.Fourth, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) run by Trump acolyte Elon Musk has been a failure. It had promised to cut “wasteful” government expenditure by $2tn. In reality, it has been able to cut less than 3% ($61.5bn) of that target, mostly from outdated and overlapping federal accounts.Increasingly frustrated, Trump has turned his attention to making money for the family’s sprawling business enterprises.Zach Witkoff, son of Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, a former businessman himself, has built a crypto empire within months through his firm World Liberty Financial. Pakistani investors are reportedly involved in the crypto venture. It partly explains why, following the India-Pakistan ceasefire, Trump said: “Pakistan has some excellent people.” Many seem to be his business associates. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/SC9JIwWWA28?si=ozTtibYZNdP-2wWnScorched earthMost don’t recognise Trump’s real intent. He knows he will be 80 years old in June 2026. In November 2026, midterm elections are scheduled to be held in both the Senate and the House of Representatives where Republicans have slender majorities.With Trump’s popularity plummeting, both Houses of Congress could flip to the Democratic Party, straitjacketing future Trump policies, including financial deals that benefit his family. Time is therefore running short, explaining Trump’s shift from solving the world’s problems to fixing his family’s fortune after decades of financial setbacks.Trump also knows that this is his second and last term as president. It won’t matter to him if he follows a scorched earth policy on tariffs with disastrous consequences for the US economy.It will be the next president’s problem.Read more from the author here.