Name: 'Carnival of corruption': Report shows Trump milks presidency for badly needed bailout
Uploaded: 2025-07-04T07:57:32.000Z
Duration: 4 min 49 s
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Fourteen years ago, way before he rode down that escalator in Trump Tower, Donald Trump was the subject of a Comedy Central roast.

Comedians and other celebrities get together to tell the most insulting jokes they can think of about the roasty, all while that person sits there and has to just smile and take all the abuse.

Donald Trump sat there and smiled rather unconvincingly, I would say.

Well, person after person made fun of his hair, his weight, his sex life, his family, his budding presidential aspirations.

But apparently there was one thing that no one was allowed to joke about.

A writer for the event and one of the comedians who roasted Trump both said that Trump's one rule was, don't say I have less money than I say I do.

He's always been incredibly sensitive about the perception of his wealth.

And of course, we would all soon learn, too late as it turned out, that Donald Trump's image of immense business acumen, success and wealth is a mirage.

I mean, during his first term in the White House, the New York Times reported that far from being a self-made business genius, Trump got tens of millions of dollars from his father, blew through it all in a series of failed businesses, and that has vaunted real estate empire, has always been a black hole of financial losses, that he is constantly scrambling to keep afloat.

And now the New York Times is out with a new piece based on a review of 2,000, 2,000 of Trump's financial documents that shares some, I would say, pretty eye-popping insights into the roller coaster of Trump's financial circumstances.

I mean, the reporting reels that after his first term, Trump's financial situation only got worse.

At his signature Trump Tower in New York, the escalators are now roped off because they don't go anywhere.

All the luxury retailers that used to pay Trump rent are gone.

His office tower on Wall Street is a quarter vacant and its revenue is millions short of what he needs just for mortgage payments.

At Trump Tower in Chicago, 70,000 square feet of retail space has been empty ever since it was finished 16 years ago. 16 years.

Even when Trump sold his infamous DC hotel a couple years ago for an impressive sum, he still managed to lose money on the project.

Things were pretty grim, that's the point, for Donald Trump and his family business.

And then he won the presidency a second time and everything miraculously began to change.

He got multiple foreign licensing deals, including several in Saudi Arabia and several Saudi investments in his golf courses.

A parade of Trump-branded products from shoes to guitars to Bibles to fragrances to phones and, of course, the hard pivot to cryptocurrency, something Trump called a scam just a few years ago.

As The Times put it, many of the deals open multiple channels for anyone to funnel cash to a sitting president, often in ways that are untraceable.

We've all watched this carnival of corruption unfold and we have all marveled at the eagerness of the Trump family to use his office to line his pockets.

But what The Times reports is that we may be missing part of the story here.

If we see this all as just a gleeful money grab, bad as that is, of course, here's what they said,  An analysis by The New York Times of thousands of pages of internal Trump organization documents filed in one of the legal actions against him suggests a more urgent motivation for Mr. Trump's behavior, a need rather than simply a desire for easy money to keep his empire intact.

And, you know, it's bad enough to have a president who just seems to get a kick out of squeezing every penny he can from his office, but it's definitely worse to have a president who feels like he has to squeeze every penny he can from his office because his businesses are in such dire straits.

That's like the definition of being compromised.

I will tell you that Eric Trump, who runs his father's businesses, did give The New York Times a statement for this article.

He said in part this, Hard to argue that.

The Times reports that the new cash has already helped solve old problems.

So just remember, even as he is tanking the US economy, which he is definitely doing, even as he is ripping health care away from millions, he does still seem to have a knack for using his job to make money for himself.