NYT estimate reignites debate over Trump family profits (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: It's been clear that the president and his family have been profiting hugely during Mr. Trump's first year in office. But today, the New York Times editorial board published an estimate of just how much they've raked in over the past 12 months. By their accounting, it's at least $1.4 billion. Now, that includes income from licensing Trump's name, overseas real estate projects, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars from investments in cryptocurrencies, the money that Amazon paid Melania Trump, the family for a documentary about Melania Trump. New York Times investigative reporter Russ Buettner is here. It is staggering, a figure of nearly $1.4 billion. I mean, it's closer to $1.5 billion. It's incredible. Did it surprise you?

[00:00:43] Speaker 2: It's absolutely shocking. I think it's been shocking every month. I mean, I studied Donald Trump's finances, including obtaining his tax returns with some colleagues for over a 20-year period. And this amount is really greater than the sum total of everything he made from his inheritance, from being on The Apprentice, and from all the licensing deals while he was on The Apprentice.

[00:01:04] Speaker 1: It's more than he ever made in his whole life, essentially.

[00:01:06] Speaker 2: I think those things were his big profit centers because his business performance was uneven. So those three things that require really his golden days, this is more than that all in one year.

[00:01:18] Speaker 1: This is just the first year. It seems like there's no reason why, I mean, they're open for business.

[00:01:25] Speaker 2: They're open for business and they've been expanding things on a regular basis, especially into cryptocurrencies. They recently just transformed their social media company into a Bitcoin repository company, which is a cryptocurrency. And now they're moving that into some sort of power generation company. But they are just rapidly trying to gather every sort of business that they can to monetize this period.

[00:01:50] Speaker 1: The brazenness of it is remarkable. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Donald Trump Jr., I don't think the club that Donald Trump Jr. set up in Washington, which is like a private members club, which essentially kind of promises access for paying members of the club to government officials and cabinet secretaries. That wasn't part of this.

[00:02:10] Speaker 2: That's not part of this, no. And that really seems kind of quaint compared to what they're doing in cryptocurrencies, where it looks like over the last year, they've personally pocketed the family and a few partners. Some were in the neighborhood of $800 million or more. That's unheard of wealth for them.

[00:02:27] Speaker 1: And there's linkage, a lot of linkage between the businesses and, you know, places the U.S. is actually involved in doing, you know, U.S. foreign policy and, I mean, U.S. interests.

[00:02:39] Speaker 2: Yeah. And a lot of this money comes, the cryptocurrency money comes to them anonymously. We don't know. The public can't figure out who it is. Most of it comes from overseas entities. You can tell that from the exchanges it goes through. And a lot of it, as you said, comes from countries where they have a real interest in it. There's been some direct conflicts, especially with a big deal that came through the United Arab Emirates. They decided to use a Trump cryptocurrency to pay for a $2 billion investment.

[00:03:05] Speaker 1: Which is, I mean, no, very few people would have chosen to use that particular cryptocurrency.

[00:03:12] Speaker 2: It was brand new and struggling and unproven. And they did that. That will put about $80 to $100 million a year in the pockets of the Trumps. And within a few months, within a few weeks, actually, Trump decided to overturn a policy that had long rejected the UAE's pleas to get AI computer chips from us because they were thought to be too close to China. He just did away with that and then pardoned the fellow who was on the other end of the deal. So there's like two conflicts in one deal.

[00:03:41] Speaker 1: It's remarkable. Russ Buehner, it's in the Times today. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Expanding on the conversation, another data point. President Trump gave the crypto industry its biggest policy win last July. When he signed a bill, he was pushing to federally regulate a type of cryptocurrency called stablecoins.

[00:04:00] Speaker 3: I pledged that we would bring back American liberty and leadership and make the United States the crypto capital of the world. And that's what we've done. So the golden age of America is upon us. And with today's signing, the future of crypto and the crypto industry, the U.S. dollar working together because they really are hand in hand, is going to be stronger and bigger and better than ever before.

[00:04:24] Speaker 1: This raised conflict of interest concerns given President Trump and his family's vast crypto holdings. Joining me now is journalist and co-founder of Lift Our Voices, Gretchen Carlson, also CNN political commentator, Anna Navarro, and David Urban. Gretchen, do the numbers, I mean, do they fall into the category of, you know, shocking, not surprising?

[00:04:43] Speaker 4: One million, 10 billion, I mean, no, not necessarily surprising. But here's my take on this. I don't think his base cares about this because he was already a billionaire on paper at least. When he originally won the first election, they didn't care about that. They didn't care about it the next time around. More importantly, he floods the market with so many news stories on a daily basis that this story has a hard time gaining traction when you're taking over Venezuela, potentially invading Greenland and have ice in Minnesota. And more importantly, I think that the majority of Americans right now are thinking about the economy. They're thinking about how they're going to afford their groceries at the store the next day. And so, you know, I think Americans are exasperated by everything else that's going on and it's only been one year. And I'm not sure that this is the kind of story that people care about. Anna, do you think people care?

[00:05:39] Speaker 5: I think some people care. I think what was different with this story from the New York Times today is that we have heard, you know, trickles of information. We've heard about the cryptocurrency. We've heard about the Melania documentary on Amazon. We've heard about the real estate deals outside of the country. But to see it all together and see that it amounts to almost $2 billion.

[00:05:58] Speaker 1: I mean, people claim they claimed when it was Hunter Biden on a board for Burisma or selling paintings.

[00:06:05] Speaker 5: Right. Which is like a pittance, right? I mean, you're literally talking pennies in comparison to what this grift is. They've turned, the entire Trump family has turned, the White House and the presidency and not just the Trump family, also some of his cabinet members into the home shopping network and they are figuring out how to exploit that presidency to line their pockets. I think it is particularly galling and disgusting for him to be claiming that affordability is a hoax. Well, of course it's a hoax for him because he's out there hawking everything he absolutely can while regular Americans don't have that luxury now, do they?

[00:06:43] Speaker 1: David, the New York Times editorial board writes, it's impossible to know how often Mr. Trump makes official decisions in part or entirely because he wants to be richer. That is precisely the problem. I mean, I remember the president didn't like when the Obamas got a deal with Netflix after they left the White House. Melania Trump has a deal while she's in the White House with Amazon. Yeah.

[00:07:05] Speaker 6: So Anderson, just a couple of data points here. Shame on the New York Times for not crediting Bernie Sanders with this. Bernie Sanders had an Instagram post about three and a half weeks ago chronicling this, showing that the Trump family has increased their net worth by about 273 percent, talking about Bitcoin and these exact things. A couple other data points, Anderson. Newsweek cites that during the first Trump presidency, Trump's net worth went from $3.5 billion down to $3.7 billion to $2.5 billion, so he lost $1.2 billion during the first presidency. And Trump is a piker, a piker compared to two prior presidents in the amount of money they made. Bill Clinton, when Bill Clinton entered office, this is an after office. This is during his presidency. Bill Clinton entered office with $1.2 million in the bank. When Bill Clinton left office, he had $120 million in the bank. That is a staggering 9,990 percent increase, 9,990 percent increase. When Barack Obama entered the White House, he had $1.3 million. This is all publicly disclosed. He had $1.3 million in the bank. He left the White House with $40 million. That's a staggering 5,500 percent increase in his net worth, yet no one was wringing their hands. There was no New York Times expose on Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, the Trump family.

[00:08:37] Speaker 1: What foreign governments were in the deals with that the money was coming from foreign governments that you could cite?

[00:08:43] Speaker 6: Well, you know what, Anderson, interestingly, if you look at the ownership of all these book publishing companies, Simon & Schuster and others, they're all owned by foreign entities. So it's very convenient that all these guys get giant book deals with books that sit in warehouses that are never sold, but yet they're all owned by foreign entities. If you follow money, Anderson, it's pretty easy to find out, right? It may not be as clear as this, what you're alleging is happening in this administration, but it's happened in every administration. And to find that this is shocking somehow, while the Clintons and Obamas and everybody else did it, nobody blinked an eye.

[00:09:19] Speaker 1: But David, the level of brazenness of this, I mean, look, I understand they got lucrative book deals and the parent company, you know, maybe there's foreign owners from these publishing houses, but I mean, I'm not sure of the quid pro quo that you're alleging. It certainly seems like, I mean, Ana, do you think this is the same thing?

[00:09:41] Speaker 5: Well, also, listen, what happened after Bill Clinton and after Barack Obama was Joe Biden. And we all saw his son get raked over the coals and get scrutinized, which I think was the right thing for Congress to do. The problem that we have here is that Congress has abdicated its duty to provide a check and balance, to provide any oversight. And that in turn has left Donald Trump and those around him unrestrained, and they have taken that lack of restraint and turned it into billions of dollars of grifting.