Eight years ago, if you wanted to line the first family’s pockets, your choices—while ethically unprecedented—were limited. There was only so much you could spend on hotel rooms or Mar-a-Lago fundraisers. Fortunately for foreign governments, megacorporations, and anyone else with an agenda, the Trumps have diversified.
“It’s a whole different scale than it was in 2017,” observes Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, who says President Donald Trump and his underlings “seem to believe that the American people don’t care. They’re not making much of an effort to hide any of this stuff.”
The options for paying tribute to the president, his kin, and the MAGA movement are now legion. There are even exciting new opportunities to protect your business by reaching a “settlement” with the leader of the free world. Or you can just hand over a 747 for him to use as Air Force One, as Qatar did. Best of all, these creative funding methods might not even be against the law—especially for Trump. (Thanks, SCOTUS!) So here’s your guide to participating in the brave new Trumpworld of executive enrichment.
- Who pays: alleged fraudsters, speculators, MAGA diehards
- Who benefits: the Trumps
- Corruption meter: to the moon
As the “Bitcoin orange” Trump-branded watches ($799) indicate, the 47th commander in chief is the “Crypto President.” Last year, Trump rolled out his own crypto firm, called World Liberty Financial. After Trump won, crypto investor Justin Sun bought $75 million worth of WLF tokens, with more than $50 million of that potentially going to the Trumps, according to Bloomberg. Shortly after Trump took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission—which had accused Sun of fraud in a federal complaint—agreed to pause its lawsuit while the parties pursued a “potential resolution.” That was one of more than a dozen lawsuits and investigations targeting crypto firms that the SEC reportedly backed off from after Trump took office.
Foreign governments can get in on the action, too. A state-backed United Arab Emirates firm, for instance, recently agreed to use a Trump-affiliated digital coin in a multibillion-dollar deal—a move that, according to the New York Times, could hand the Trump family hundreds of millions of dollars.
Savvy investors can also purchase $TRUMP, a meme coin the president launched just before his inauguration. A billion $TRUMP coins will ultimately be made available, though a company affiliated with the Trumps will own many of them—so if demand causes the price to rise, the Trumps theoretically get wealthier. The coin’s value rocketed past $70 before inauguration, then immediately crashed. But in April, it ticked up to more than $15—after the coin’s official website offered dinner with Trump at his DC-area golf club and a “VIP White House Tour” to the top $TRUMP holders. (The White House tour offer quickly disappeared following an uproar.)
This week, Sun identified himself as the top $TRUMP investor. He declared his excitement to attend the president’s “Gala Dinner as his TOP fan” and “discuss the future of our industry.” Sun now holds $18.6 million worth of $TRUMP, according to CNBC. If you can’t match that, don’t worry: $MELANIA coins go for less than a buck.
- Who pays: hungry rich people
- Who benefits: MAGA Inc.
- Corruption meter: overdone, with ketchup
This is a simple one—you don’t even have to invest in $TRUMP coins. Business leaders can now simply pay $5 million for one-on-one meetings with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Wired reported. If that’s too rich for your blood, there’s a cheaper option—donors can pony up $1 million each for a small-group “candlelight dinner” with the president.
“This exorbitant level of payment for presidential access raises serious concerns about the possibility of corruption by candlelight,” Jon Golinger, a transparency advocate with Public Citizen, told USA Today. For those who recall the five-alarm scandal generated in the ’90s when the Clinton administration rewarded major campaign donors with overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom—well, clearly, that was a more innocent time. Trump’s ethical outrages are so numerous and brazen that these meals have barely registered a blip.
The dinners are organized by MAGA Inc., a super-PAC that backed Trump’s 2024 campaign—and that also has spent tens of millions of dollars to cover Trump’s personal legal expenses. A “source with direct knowledge of the dinners,” however, told Wired that “it’s all going to” Trump’s future presidential library. Then again, the $400 million Qatari jet supposedly will, too.
- Who pays: cowardly law firms
- Who benefits: “deserving organizations and individuals”
- Corruption meter: $1,000 per hour
Trump has turned his vendettas against law firms that cross him into executive orders that threaten their ability to operate. When firms have fought back, judges have blocked Trump’s “unprecedented attack” on the rule of law. But some of the country’s wealthiest firms have made a different choice—accepting humiliating “settlements” with the president and promising tens of millions of dollars in free legal work for causes he supports.
Paul Weiss was the first to capitulate, agreeing to provide $40 million in pro bono work in support of what Trump described as “the Administration’s initiatives.” From there, the price skyrocketed. Skadden inked a preemptive deal for at least $100 million in free legal work. Then five more firms cut deals for $100 million to $125 million apiece.
Trump hopes to “use these very prestigious firms to help us out” on projects ranging from his trade war to protecting the coal industry. “Big Law continues to bend the knee to President Trump because they know they were wrong, and he looks forward to putting their pro bono legal concessions toward implementing his America First agenda,” Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has said.
- Who pays: networks and media platforms
- Who benefits: the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library
- Corruption meter: actually malicious
For years, Trump has filed lawsuits over news coverage he dislikes. Many of these cases have been thrown out of court. But after the 2024 election, some of the world’s most powerful media companies decided to fork over millions of dollars rather than fight back. It began in December, when Disney agreed to give $15 million to Trump’s presidential library foundation to settle a dubious defamation claim against ABC News.
Then Meta, Facebook’s parent company, agreed to pay its own $25 million library tribute to settle a lawsuit Trump brought after the platform banned him following the January 6 insurrection. “It looks like a bribe and a signal to every company that corruption is the name of the game,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted. X—now controlled by Elon Musk—soon followed, settling a similar case for $10 million.
Paramount executives reportedly believe that settling a Trump lawsuit against CBS, which it owns, would ease the path to a lucrative merger with Skydance. Paramount, which so far hasn’t surrendered, called the case an “affront to the First Amendment…without basis in law or fact” in a March court filing.
Trump is also leveraging his control of the Federal Communication Commission to demand “the maximum fines and punishment” for CBS. “They should lose their license!” he declared.
In a letter to Paramount’s chairperson Monday, Warren and other lawmakers charged that the company appears to be trying to settle the lawsuit and “moderating the content of its programs” in an effort to win FCC approval for the merger. “If Paramount officials make these concessions,” the lawmakers wrote, it might amount to an illegal “quid pro quo.”
- Who pays: Jeff Bezos’ Amazon
- Who benefits: Melania
- Corruption meter: I don’t really care, do U?
When the Washington Post spiked an already written Kamala Harris endorsement last year, its owner, Jeff Bezos, wanted to make one thing clear: There was “no quid pro quo.” Yes, he acknowledged, the head of Blue Origin—a Bezos company that competes for billions in government contracts—met with Trump the day the paper killed the editorial. But that was just an unfortunate coincidence.
“When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of the Post,” Bezos conceded. “Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive, or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials.”
Indeed. In December, after Melania Trump had pitched a documentary about herself to Amazon’s film studio, Bezos had dinner with the incoming first couple, according to the Wall Street Journal. Amazon later agreed to pay a whopping $40 million to license the film; 70 percent of that goes directly to Melania. An Amazon spokesperson said the dinner “was separate from any discussions” about the film. “We licensed the upcoming Melania Trump documentary film and series for one reason and one reason only—because we think customers are going to love it,” the spokesperson said.
- Who pays: foreign governments
- Who benefits: Jared Kushner and family
- Corruption meter: intercontinental
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kusher advised his father on Middle Eastern matters during the president’s first term, with questionable results. But that work likely helped Kushner win hundreds of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and a United Arab Emirates fund for a private equity firm he launched after leaving the White House.
Kushner’s company, Affinity Partners, also landed lucrative development deals with the governments of Serbia and Albania. He’s building a luxury Trump- branded property in a former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense building, empty since NATO bombed it in 1999. And in Albania, Kushner plans to construct a luxury resort on an island once used as a military outpost.
Those deals were reportedly brokered by Richard Grenell, who forged ties with both governments while serving as Trump’s special envoy in the Balkans. Both countries want US help joining the European Union despite long-standing corruption challenges, among other issues.
Grenell is now Trump’s envoy for special missions, a global portfolio that could make him a valuable friend for any enterprising foreign government.
- Who pays: foreign governments, moneyed interests, thirsty politicians
- Who benefits: the Trump Organization
- Corruption meter: rates vary seasonally
When he took office in 2017, Trump refused to relinquish ownership of his business empire, which offered obvious opportunities for those with means to enrich him. That hasn’t changed. He still owns nine hotels, 18 golf courses, four commercial real estate properties, six estates, and a real estate brokerage. In his first term, these properties took in tens of millions in revenue—including a $15.8 million condo sale to a woman linked to Chinese military intelligence and a $13.5 million mansion sold to an Indonesian politician and businessman (who is developing two Trump golf resorts).
Trump no longer owns the Washington, DC, hotel that served as a clubhouse for Republican lobbyists and foreign leaders in his first term. But Trump’s other hotels—like one in New York that saw a huge revenue boost in 2018 hosting the entourage of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—are still going strong. The Trump Org says it plans to open 10 new properties, including a hotel in the UAE’s Dubai and a golf resort in Oman.
The White House claims the Trump family’s businesses don’t create conflicts of interest because “the president’s assets are in a trust managed by his children.” But that trust isn’t blind, so the president can still know who’s helping him—and his kids—get richer.
- Who pays: Saudi Arabia
- Who benefits: the Trump Organization
- Corruption meter: quadruple bogey
Sure, you could buy a club membership and some Trump-branded golf accessories. But if you really want to help out the president, bring him a whole tournament. That’s what Turkish Airlines—in which the Turkish government controls a 49 percent stake—did when it hosted a tournament at Trump’s course outside DC during his first year in office.
After the January 6 coup attempt, the PGA distanced itself from Trump. But the Saudi sovereign wealth fund–owned league LIV Golf rushed to embrace Trump, hosting numerous tournaments at his courses around the United States. The latest took place in April at Trump’s National Doral Golf Club in Miami—just as Trump’s tariffs were crashing the stock market.
Trump claims the tournaments are “peanuts” to him financially, but industry experts say each one is a multimillion-dollar deal for his businesses. In a deposition in 2023, Trump bragged that he could sell his Turnberry course in Scotland to LIV Golf for “a fortune,” though he declined to say whether such an offer had actually been made.
- Who pays: corporate giants, foreign-controlled firms
- Who benefits: Trump’s inaugural committee
- Corruption meter: black-tie optional
Trump isn’t the first president to accept corporate contributions for his inauguration, but the scale is unprecedented. Meta and Amazon weren’t shy about their huge donations of $1 million each—the public obsequiousness was the point.
Pilgrim’s Pride, owned by a subsidiary of Brazilian meat company JBS, gave $5 million. In April, JBS—which has a history of scandals and legal problems—won SEC approval to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, a longstanding company goal that the agency had previously blocked. A spokesperson for JBS told Forbes that the inaugural donation was not related approval of the stock listing.
Syngenta—an agribusiness giant that is owned by a Chinese government–controlled firm and is currently fighting a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit—kicked in $250,000. In February, the SEC dropped a lawsuit against crypto platform Coinbase, which gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
Coinbase, Pilgrim’s Pride, and the SEC didn’t respond to questions from Mother Jones; Amazon noted it also gave to Joe Biden’s inauguration, and Syngenta said it works “with both sides of the aisle.”
The money helped Trump—who reportedly kept close tabs on who paid up—raise more than $200 million for lavish inaugural events. Any surplus can be transferred to a political committee or his eventual presidential library.
Inaugural committees also offer opportunities for presidential enrichment. In 2022, for example, Trump’s previous inaugural committee paid $750,000 to settle a lawsuit accusing it of overpaying Trump properties that hosted events.
- Who pays: investors, companies, club members
- Who benefits: Don Jr.
- Corruption meter: thicker than water
While serving as a Trump Org executive, the president’s eldest son has also launched a series of anti-woke ventures. He’s a partner at 1789 Capital, which invests in conservative companies, and he’s slated to join the board of online firearms retailer GrabAGun. Don Jr. doesn’t have an official White House job, but he’s touted his influence over administration personnel decisions and MAGA politics. He recently traveled, twice, to Serbia—where Kushner and the Trump Org are developing a hotel—and lent his support to the country’s embattled president.
For moguls who aren’t ready to do a deal with Don Jr., there’s now a more direct way to send him and his business partners money—an exclusive, invite-only DC club called “Executive Branch” that reportedly costs more than a half-million dollars to join. The plan, according to Politico, is “to ensure the C-suite crowd can mingle with Trump advisers and cabinet members without the prying eyes of the press and wanna-be insiders.”
Arthur Schwartz, an adviser to Don Jr., downplayed his influence in the White House but declined to respond in greater detail when asked whether his activities create ethical problems. “Write your ridiculous story. Literally no one cares,” Schwartz said via text. “We don’t actually give a fuck.”
