General U.S. News4d ago
The disclosure of President Trump’s 2025 income — $2.2 billion, more than $1 billion of it from crypto — is shocking to the old DC establishment. But it’s not surprising. The numbers are categorically different from anything American public life has seen before, and the institutions meant to respond to that fact are largely failing to do so. Every source reached for a historical comparison, and every comparison collapsed under the weight of the current numbers. Norm Eisen, who served as President Obama’s White House ethics czar and is currently chair and co-founder of Democracy Defenders Action, called the filings “the most shocking presidential financial disclosures in the history of our country,” adding that “we’ve never seen a president exploit the presidency, exploit the White House in this fashion.” Even this veteran of tracking presidential ethics violations said he was “startled” by the “sheer scope and scale of the corruption here.” When Fortune asked him if he rolled up his sleeves with a hot cup of coffee to go through the filing, Eisen responded that “even the most highly caffeinated coffee beverage would not be enough.” He added that he needed a “stiff drink, it’s outrageous, it makes your blood boil.” (He later clarified that he did not literally have a stiff drink that morning, but would be having one to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.) Former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt reached back nearly a century for a comparison and still came up short. “We’ve had scandals in the past, and we’ve had Teapot Dome and on and on,” he told Fortune , referencing the famous early 20th-century corruption scandal involving President William Howard Taft. “But it was frankly nothing [compared to this]. It was small potatoes. This is gigantic numbers.” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Yale management professor, calibrated the scale against the last major presidential-family financial controversy to dominate headlines, arguing the current disclosures run “many thousand times beyond the worst suspicions ascribed to Hunter Biden.” And Rob Lalka, a Tulane scholar who studies the intersection of wealth and political power, situated the number against the office itself rather than against past scandals: “There are many perks that come with being president. He points to a network linking crypto investment to administration personnel: Peter Thiel, he notes, “was the first person to bet big on Trump in 2016,” and Thiel and former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks have both been active in crypto investing long before Trump, and later boosted JD Vance’s Senate run and vice presidential ascent. Gephardt’s explanation is more structural and less institution-specific: he traces the paralysis to voters themselves. “Congress is a reflection of the American people,” he said. “The people are deeply polarized, as polarized as I have ever seen them in my lifetime.” He attributed that substantially to social media algorithms optimized for engagement rather than consensus — “it’s a hate machine” — a dynamic he sees as the deeper structural cause beneath the institutional paralysis that Sonnenfeld describes at the congressional level. Eisen vowed not to go down fighting, treating the paralysis as a legal problem rather than a purely political one, and putting his faith in litigation. “Republicans in Congress should do something about it and they won’t because they’re afraid of him,” he said, “but the American people will make him pay … it’s all heinous and it’s going to be dealt with, if not by his congressional enablers, congressional republican enablers, then by the American people at the ballot box.” Noting that he had just prevailed in three Supreme Court cases in the last several days, Eisen argued that this is “very much like the other scandals that we have worked on and shut down,” noting Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for the Department of Justice, the Epstein files, he Kennedy Center renaming and the renovation of the reflecting pool as matters where his organization has moved the needle.
