How everyday Americans are forced to fund Trump's corruption
On top of his self-dealing, taxpayers are spending billions on his vanity projects.
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On the same day his company won a $1.6 billion contract with the US military, Elon Musk’s political action committee announced it would spend $100 million to help Republicans win the November midterms.
In previous eras of American politics, such a development might have caused even some Republicans to question whether the billion dollar taxpayer payout to Musk’s SpaceX and the surge of campaign cash to help their party win an election was a quid pro quo. In the waning years of the Trump era, however, it was simply a Wednesday.
Musk needs government money to keep his company afloat. Donald Trump needs Republicans to win in November so they can retain power in Congress and stop Democrats from impeaching him. This is the very simple anatomy of how government operates under Trump: give him money and he will help you. Don’t give him money and he will harm you.
The nation’s largest companies are dumping cash into Trump’s various political action committees and helping to fund his ever-increasing portfolio of renovation projects in and around Washington DC. In return, those companies are benefitting from massive government contracts, favorable policy decisions from the Trump administration and the federal agencies it controls, and even Trump’s public pumping of stocks that he himself is invested in.
The line from giving Trump money to receiving favorable treatment from his administration is straight and short, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“If a company encounters an issue with the federal government that comes to Trump’s attention, he will want to know how much money the company gave, according to a person familiar with the matter,” the Journal reported on July 30.
The private sector money flowing into Trump’s vanity projects is also costing taxpayers. His ballroom is funded by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars as well as private donations. In this way, we’re all forced to fund Trump’s corruption.
A Public Notice-American Doom analysis shows that Trump is spending nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars to fund his many renovation projects. Meanwhile, Trump and his family’s digital currency companies have raked in more than $2.25 billion during Trump’s second term, including as much as $600 million from foreign interests, according to Democrats. Trump’s foreign licensing business has also exploded, bringing in $61 million last year alone. Another $50 billion in taxpayer dollars has gone to government contractors who are helping to fund Trump’s ballroom, Sen. Chris Murphy said last month when he took to the Senate floor to detail Trump administration corruption.
But the true cost to taxpayers for Trump’s construction projects — as well as the historic profiting off his presidency — are likely much higher than is currently known.
The values of mining deals tied to Trump family companies in Kazakhstan and North Carolina could be massive, if not entirely known. Taxpayers are helping to fund a mining operation in North Carolina benefitting a company tied to Donald Trump Jr., thanks to a $1.4 billion loan and contract with the Defense Department. Companies tied to Trump’s sons are also benefitting from roughly $1.6 billion in loans for a Kazakh mining operation that the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are also profiting from.
These are just a pair examples of corrupt deals made by Trump and his family whose profits simply aren’t known publicly. There’s also Trump Jr.’s investment company, 1789 Capital, which has seen unheard-of returns of 200 percent on investments in AI and defense companies benefitting from government contracts. In the past few years, the value of assets managed by 1789 has exploded, from a few hundred million dollars to more than $3 billion.
In addition to the $2.25 billion Trump and his family have made off digital assets and the $61 million in foreign licensing deals, a conservative estimate for the Trump family’s profits and asset growth in the first two years of Trump’s second term is around $5 billion, according to a Public Notice-American Doom analysis.
Democrats are now planning to dig into the Trump administration’s runaway corruption. Last month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced the formation of a working group to investigate Trump administration profiteering. The hint of accountability emanating from the possibility that Democrats will take power in the House (and maybe even the Senate) is part of the reason Trump is so aggressively pushing the SAVE America Act and other anti-voting measures.
“If people stop being outraged at what he is doing to enrich himself, then I fear there is no going back,” Sen. Murphy said last month, when he took to the Senate floor to detail Trump administration corruption. “The White House will just become a place to get rich.”
Trump himself has openly admitted he has made no effort to separate his private business interests from his presidency. Asked by the New York Times in January why he has continued his private dealmaking during his second term, Trump claimed that Americans simply don’t care.
“Because I found out that nobody cared,” Trump said. “I’m allowed to.”
Endless money pits
Trump’s ballroom (which suffered a setback in court yesterday) is costing taxpayers the most out of his many projects. Estimates vary, but taxpayers could be on the hook for as much as $800 million to complete the ballroom, bunker, and “drone port” that Trump says will be part of the complex.
Combined with other construction and vanity projects, our analysis shows Trump is spending as much as $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars.
Trump’s spending includes:
$250 million on the Kennedy Center
$60 million for his White House UFC event
$58 million for city fountains
$40 million for a planned “Garden of American Heroes” at the West Potomac Park
$17 million for renovations to Lafayette Park near the White House
$16 million for the reflecting pool
$7.5 million for Eisenhower Executive Office building
$26 million for new exhibits and upgrades at the Lincoln Memorial
$5.1 million for re-gilding of Washington statues
$2 million for renovations to the Rose Garden
$1.3 million for renovations to the White House West Colonnade, including $689,000 to import and install African granite
$400 million to retrofit the new Air Force One, gifted from the Qatari government, with even more spent on pilot training equipment as well as an unknown amount of taxpayer funding from classified budgets
This $1.8 billion is simply the known cost to taxpayers for projects to feed Trump’s ego. The cost of the proposed Arc de Trump, the East Potomac Golf Course renovations, gold gilding and glued-on gold wall accents all over the Oval Office, as well as renovations to multiple rooms at the White House and columns there are not currently known.
In addition to costing taxpayers billions of dollars, many of Trump’s projects are also funded by private donors, adding yet another layer of corruption to the record profits he’s making as president.
Trump initially claimed the new White House ballroom would cost $200 million. That quickly changed to $400 million before the Washington Post found in June that the ballroom was estimated to cost $600 million, with over half paid for by taxpayers. The rest of the money has come from private donors taking advantage of a historic opportunity to fund a presidential legacy project while simultaneously having policy interests overseen by the Trump administration. In other words, a bribe.
Among the 37 donors funding Trump’s ballroom are the country’s biggest tech companies: Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google, as well as the defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Palantir, crypto companies, law firms, and the global manufacturing giant, Caterpillar. Trump claimed in October that the ballroom is being “paid for 100 percent by me and some friends of mine.”
Donations to Trump’s ballroom have paid off: since giving Trump an unspecified amount of money, ballroom donors have benefitted from $50 billion in federal contracts, according to Sen. Murphy.
Private profits from public money
As Trump has blown $1.8 billion on construction projects, he’s also been busy profiting off the presidency through stock purchases that reek of insider trading, foreign licensing deals, crypto sales, and even the stocking of Trump wine and cider in stores run by the Coast Guard.
While it’s not known how much Trump has truly made during his second term, Democrats estimate the range of profits to be from $2.25 billion to nearly $10 billion. Trump’s foreign licensing business also reportedly made $61 million in 2025, a 900 percent growth since 2023.
Trump began this year by purchasing as much as $5 million in Dell Computer stock. In May, the Department of Defense awarded the company a $9.7 billion contract to provide software to the military — directly benefitting Trump’s sprawling investment portfolio. Trump has repeatedly urged Americans to buy stock in Dell, occasionally causing the company’s value to spike.
Trump’s investments in Dell are among a stunning 21,000 individual trades made by him during his first year in office. Trump and White House officials regularly claim that his investment portfolio is managed by a “blind trust,” but that’s not the case. Instead, Trump’s sons have control over his investments.
Trump has said that Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. can’t be blamed if they make trades on his behalf with the benefit of insider knowledge thanks to their proximity to the president.
“Almost anything they do, if they want to buy a truck, if they want to buy, you know, if they buy an energy efficient truck, they have inside information,” Trump said following news of his historic second-term profits came out in June. “So it’s pretty tough in that sense.”
One of Trump’s brokerage accounts also purchased between $15 and $50 million worth of stock in TKO Holdings, UFC’s parent company. The purchase was made in March, two weeks after the fight card was revealed for the UFC Freedom 250 fights on the White House lawn, and three months before the event took place. TKO president and COO Mark Shapiro called the event “the greatest earned marketing tool of all time.”
Purchasing and pumping stocks for companies that have business with or are regulated by the federal government is par for the course in Trump’s White House. Immigration hardliner and senior White House official Stephen Miller is directly profiting off the massive expansion of the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdowns through his investment in Palantir. Miller, who constantly pushes to make life harder for immigrants, owns as much as $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir, which in 2025 was awarded a $30 million contract with ICE.
Trump is also making money off his draconian immigration policies, owning stock in both GEO Group and CoreCivic, the nation’s two largest private prison companies who have seen profits soar thanks to contracts with ICE and other immigration agencies.
Trump’s sons are also profiting from the public money that funds government contracts. Companies that the Trump boys have invested in have, within a short time of those investments, been awarded government contracts worth more than $6 billion. Trump himself has been helping out his sons with their schemes, intervening to ensure that a company in which Eric and Don Jr. are invested was awarded a $620 million Pentagon loan.
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, has also been busy making incredibly well-timed investments in AI and defense sector stocks whose value has tripled in mere months, according to the New York Times.
Meanwhile, World Liberty Financial, the crypto company run by Eric and Don Jr., pocketed $187 million after selling a 49 percent stake to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a UAE government official and brother of the country’s president. The sale took place just days before Trump’s inauguration, raising ethics concerns among both Republicans and Democrats. The deal also scored $31 million for the sons of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, who are co-founders of World Liberty.
If these deals weren’t enough, there’s more conflicts of interest to be had: the $5 billion in on-paper wealth accumulated by World Liberty in recent years is propped up by a $2 billion investment from convicted Chinese money launderer Changpeng Zhao. Upon taking office, Trump pardoned Zhao of his crimes, which allowed the crypto platform Binance to become a hotbed of money laundering activity for the international criminal set.
The next generation is getting in on the grift as well: both Trump and Lutnick’s sons are profiting from a $1 billion mining deal with Kazakhstan after their fathers helped to secure the agreement in September. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is at the center of a web of conflicts of interest that overshadow his dual roles as private sector real estate developer and White House peace negotiator.
With Trump’s corruption so blatant, Democrats have framed at least some of their midterm messaging around holding the president accountable.
Democratic senators have already begun laying the groundwork for congressional investigations into Trump’s corruption in 2027, with Schumer and Sen. Alex Padilla introducing legislation that would create a federal agency called the “Anti-Corruption Bureau” to investigate corruption by the executive branch. The law would also allow for states and individuals to sue to recover money earned through corruption committed by presidents, executive branch officials, and government contractors. (The bill faces long odds even if Democrats win control of both chambers of Congress in November.)
In promoting the legislation, Padilla said he favored the creation of an entire government agency to address Trump’s corruption instead of special counsels, like those used in the wake of Watergate and other presidential scandals, because Trump’s corruption is so vast.
“Watergate was about a president trying to hide corrupt activity,” Padilla said in remarks on July 30. “Donald Trump isn’t trying to hide his corruption, like Richard Nixon was — far worse, he’s normalizing it, or trying to. He and people around him are trying to convince the American public, this is just how it is.”
That’s it for this week
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WHY is it so hard for Democrats to get the message across?
The blatant hypocrisy, corruption and illegality emanating from the executive branch calls into question the received wisdom by which most of us were raised. The notion that working hard and playing by the rules was a lie from the beginning is now the crux upon which all else will be measured. It's mind boggling and extremely disorienting. I am struggling to hold onto values I have held my entire life. Being lied to is my number one line in the sand over which no person or entity may cross.