By the time you finish reading this sentence, Donald Trump is a few hundred dollars richer.
Give it a minute and he’s cleared what you’ll spend on a summer holiday. By the end of the day he’s banked around $4m.
That’s what the average American family earns in 45 years of getting up, clocking in and paying the bills.
Because the 47th President has turned the White House into the world’s most lucrative grift.
That isn’t a typo and it isn’t hyperbole. In his first year back in the White House, Trump added about $1.4bn to his fortune, according to Forbes
A working lifetime, every morning, before his first Diet Coke.
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I worked on Kamala Harris’ campaign, so feel free to knock a few points for bias. But these aren’t my numbers. They’re from the same experts who have continually counted the President’s net worth – and that he’s previously even criticised for underselling his earnings.
When Trump started running again he was worth about $2.4bn. He’s now worth around $6.5bn. He has, in effect, nearly tripled his money by becoming leader of the free world.
In America, they are raised on a story about the highest office in the land being about duty. About Service. Sacrifice. God, country, family. The president being the one who gives the most to their country and takes the least from it.
Trump has quietly rewritten the whole thing into a single word, said three times: me, me, me.
When he leaves office, even though he can’t be pursued for his ill-gotten gains, we need to change the rules so that self-enrichment on this, or any scale, can’t happen again.
Most of the increase in Trump’s coffers came from crypto – a memecoin and a family firm called World Liberty Financial that barely existed before he ran. Days before his inauguration, an Abu Dhabi fund poured $500m into it, sending roughly $187m towards Trump family entities.
Shortly afterwards, his administration waved through the export of advanced AI chips to the UAE. Funny how these things turn out.
And as Trump got richer, it was Americans who often got poorer.
Reuters estimated that while Trump and his sons made at least $2.3bn from their main crypto ventures, the ordinary punters they lured in lost almost exactly the same.
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He didn’t conjure that wealth from thin air. He moved it, out of hundreds of thousands of small pockets and into his own.
The most galling bit is that almost none of this is illegal.
Every other person in the federal government has to steer clear of decisions that fatten their own bank balance. They have to declare interests or excuse themselves from any conflicts of interest.
The president – whoever they are – has always been exempt.
Past occupants of the office squared that circle by locking their wealth in blind trusts and looking away, aware of how bad even the perception of feathering their own nest would look.
Jimmy Carter famously handed off the peanut farm that had been in his family for generations.
Trump looked at that tradition, in his first term and again in his second, and binned it.
So here is the question nobody seems ready for. What happens when he finally goes?
The tempting answer is nothing. Exhale, pour a drink (or several) and be grateful it’s over. That would be the single biggest mistake his opponents could make.
Yes, part of me wants to simply forget it and move on.
Count what the presidency made him, and take it back. An exit tax on presidents. A leaving fee for the world’s most expensive tenant. But a law aimed at one man by name is what lawyers call a bill of attainder, and the constitution forbids it. So tempting as it is, we have to park that fantasy.
What can’t be parked is the clean-up. Because the lesson of the last few years isn’t really about one uniquely shameless man. It’s that the rules were always held together by good manners, a sense that public service was just that, not an attempt to make yourself richer.
Past presidents, both Democratic and Republican, no matter their other failings, chose not to profit from an office that never actually stopped them from doing so.
Trump has shown every future occupant exactly how far you can push those boundaries, and if you want it, how much is lying around, unguarded, for the taking.
Which is why being the party of decency and restored norms won’t cut it.
Decency has been mugged. The White House has been looted. The Presidency has been desecrated.
When Democrats get their turn again, the job isn’t to wag fingers, tut and tidy up.
It’s to come in swinging. Ram through laws that actually stop a president cashing in on the office, force them to hand their businesses to someone independent so they can’t profit from their own decisions, and – this time – make it hurt when they don’t.
Make the next Trump impossible, not just a bad memory.
Right now, this isn’t doable. A Supreme Court that handed presidents sweeping immunity has bolted the door. The man who benefits most is holding the pen. The whole machine, top to bottom, is built to protect the people picking the lock.
Anyone who cares about democracy must hold onto the fury they currently feel. Forget the fleeting relief of him leaving. We need a clear-eyed determination that nobody gets to do this again.
If the only response to a president making $1.4bn off the job is to be glad he’s gone, then he didn’t just get rich. He wrote the manual. And someone slicker, quieter and more careful will read it. Perhaps sooner than we realise.
You can finish reading now. He just made another few thousand bucks in the meantime.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk.
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