Jared Kushner, A Party Flop and More Trump Grift.
It's been an epic display of protests, failures and evidence of grifts that even has MAGA weak at the knees.
Even the MAGA faithful are squinting now. I’m sure you can feel it at the gun shows and in the truck stops, the queasy dawn of the hairy eyeball, the flock beginning to grasp that they were never the congregation. They were the collection plate. This week the suspicion became a federal filing. Donald Trump’s mandatory financial disclosure landed at the Office of Government Ethics running 927 pages. Obama’s ran eight. Biden’s ran eleven. Honest men do not need a thousand pages. A thousand pages is not transparency. It is a fence’s inventory, notarized.
Begin with Big Daddy. Forbes had Trump at $2.3 billion when he won in 2024. It now has him at roughly $6.5 billion. Bloomberg says $7 billion. The fortune nearly tripled in under two years, growth the Washington Post called without modern presidential precedent, and not one dollar of it came from building, making, or improving anything. It came from renting out the American government by the hour. The filing shows $2.2 billion in income for 2025 alone, about $1.4 billion of it crypto, the ideal product line for a man who spent half a century selling things that do not exist. There is $635 million in royalties from the $TRUMP meme coin, a digital trading card with his own smirk on it. More than $500 million tied to World Liberty Financial token sales. And the tell, the detail that would get any other American a grand jury: days before the inauguration, an Abu Dhabi vehicle backed by the UAE’s national security advisor bought 49 percent of World Liberty for $500 million, washing roughly $187 million into Trump family entities. Shortly after, the administration approved advanced AI chip exports to the UAE over its own national security objections. The chips sailed. The money landed. Nobody blushed. Blushing is for people with shame, and shame, in this White House, was fired in week one.
Savor the purity of the meme coin racket. Trump skimmed fees on every trade whether the coin rose or fell. It fell. From $74 to under $2, a 97 percent cremation, with some 764,000 wallets left holding ash. His own voters bought the coin. He kept the vig. There is the entire presidency in one transaction: the faithful pay, the family collects, and the loss is somehow proof of the believer’s devotion.
The legacy properties hummed along as toll plazas. Mar-a-Lago took in $77 million, up 50 percent, as foreign leaders and CEOs learned that American policy now has a cover charge and it is payable in Palm Beach. Doral banked $121.8 million. And the media conglomerates paid tribute like pimps in church: $80 million in “settlements” from ABC, CBS, Meta, YouTube, and X, blue-chip corporations that ran the numbers and concluded that paying off the president was cheaper than being governed by him. The proceeds went to his presidential library and toward his new ballroom. Which brings us to Melania.
There is no East Wing anymore. The first lady’s traditional office. I doubt Melania cared. This first lady never wanted an office. She wanted a cash register with a view. The disclosure lists $10.7 million she was paid for licensing her own image to the producers of “Melania,” her Amazon documentary, part of a $40 million arrangement Jeff Bezos’s company struck with the wife of the man who regulates it. Another $6 million from NFTs, a 28-fold jump in a year, plus the memoir, plus her own meme coin. Call it $17 million, earned mostly by existing. Eleanor wrote a column. Jackie saved the antiques. Melania minted herself as a collectible and sold the supply into her husband’s second term. No first lady in the history of the republic has strip-mined the residence like this. It took her one year, and she barely had to appear in public to do it.
The big boys, Eric and Don Jr., once photographed beaming over a dead leopard in Zimbabwe, have graduated to prey that cannot run and does not bleed. Retail investors. They co-founded World Liberty Financial, which Forbes estimates has pumped more than $1.5 billion into the family accounts. Last August they rang the Nasdaq bell, wearing the leopard grins, to celebrate a deal in which a small public company bought $717 million of their tokens, routing about $500 million to the family. That company’s stock has since collapsed 93 percent and faces delisting. The Trumps were paid up front. The bagholders held the bag. This is not entrepreneurship. It is a receiving line with a ticker symbol. Don Jr. went from roughly $50 million before the election to roughly $300 million by Forbes’s December count, fattened by a partnership at 1789 Capital, whose portfolio company Vulcan Elements landed a $620 million Pentagon-arranged loan after the White House leaned on the process, per ProPublica. That used to be called procurement fraud. Now it is called Tuesday. Eric, per estimates in the business press, sits around $750 million, much of it from American Bitcoin, a venture that converts electricity and paternal proximity into money. Their official duty is running their father’s blind trust. The trust has 20/20 vision and a wire transfer department.
Then the prodigy. Barron is a sophomore at NYU’s Stern School of Business, phoning it in from the Washington campus, Forbes figures he has already pocketed around $80 million in cash. He is 20 years old. He out-earns his mother. He has never held a job. Other sophomores sell plasma to make rent.
Tiffany, the afterthought daughter, thought she had married into billions. The New York Times checked and found the Boulos billions were a Lagos fable. The family business distributes trucks and motorcycles in Nigeria. But in this family even the shallow end pays. Senate investigators want answers about a reported $100,000 her husband Michael pocketed for leveraging his father-in-law’s name to help a Saudi businessman recover seized assets, a starter grift, training wheels still on. His father, the truck man, is now the president’s senior advisor on Middle East affairs, because in this administration the org chart is a seating arrangement at a wedding.
And still, for sheer bravura, nothing touches Jared and Ivanka. The golden couple of two felonious fathers. Charles Kushner, convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering after hiring a prostitute to entrap his own brother-in-law, a crime so operatic even New Jersey gasped, is now, courtesy of a pardon, the American ambassador to France. Donald Trump carries 34 felony convictions. Their children found each other. Of course they did.
Jared’s origin story is the whole scheme in miniature: at 26 he overpaid $1.8 billion for 666 Fifth Avenue, an address Hollywood would reject as too obvious, nearly sank the family firm, and was fished out in 2018 by a Qatari-backed fund that prepaid a 99-year lease. That’s normal right?
Six months after leaving the White House Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund wired his brand-new firm, Affinity Partners, $2 billion over the objection of its own advisors, who rated his operation “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” Mohammed bin Salman overruled them personally. You do not pay $2 billion for an unsatisfactory fund manager. You pay $2 billion for a satisfactory son-in-law. By 2024 Affinity Partners had skimmed about $157 million in fees while returning nothing, nothing, to its investors, which in any other context is called a sinecure and in this one is called finance.
While Kushner moonlighted as the administration’s Middle East negotiator, he solicited money from the very governments across the table. By the end of 2025, Affinity Partners assets hit $6.2 billion per a congressional investigation. Forbes says he personally crossed $1 billion last fall. He earned it the family way.
And what does new dynastic money do with itself. It goes yachting. The couple spotted five miles of Albanian beachfront from a boat and decided one of Europe’s poorest countries owed them a resort, a multibillion-euro complex planted on Sazan Island and the protected Vjosa-Narta wetland, breeding ground for flamingos, seals, and nesting sea turtles. Bulldozers arrived before any public consultation. Anti-corruption prosecutors are investigating the land titles. Tens of thousands of Albanians now fill Tirana night after night, waving inflatable flamingos and banners reading “Albania is not for sale.” They call it the flamingo revolution. One boat trip united a country. Against them. A people who survived Hoxha’s bunkers took one look at the Kushners and headed for the streets. That is not politics. That is an immune response.
All of it unfolds while ordinary Americans pay the tab for a war nobody ordered, a war Trump was manipulated into by Benjamin Netanyahu, a fugitive wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. It caused an international crisis on a scale even Putin has not managed.
And how has America’s version of The Great Oz responded to the grumbling in the cheap seats. He threw himself a fair. The Great American State Fair, sixteen days on the National Mall for the nation’s 250th birthday, billed as a modern World’s Fair and staged by Freedom 250, an outfit his own White House invented. It has been a flop of civic proportions. The headline acts fled. The power failed on day one and the ice cream melted in the dark, a metaphor so perfect no columnist would dare invent it. The Ferris wheel buckled. Independent estimates put opening night at around a thousand people. Trump declared the venue packed to the brim with 45,000, then, insiders told CNN, raged privately at photographs of the empty lawn. He threw America a birthday party and America, checking its grocery receipts and its gas bill, stayed home.
Let’s not even talk about the cage fight or the reflecting pool.
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