Donald Trump Pimps the Presidency to the Tune of More Than $3.4 BILLION….

At the start of Donald Trump’s first term, he promised that he and his family would never do anything that might even be “perceived to be exploitive of office of the Presidency.” By contrast, his second term looks rapacious. He and members of his family have signed a blitz of foreign mega-deals shadowed by conflicts of interest, and they’ve launched at least five different cryptocurrency enterprises, all of which leverage Trump’s status as President to lure buyers or investors. Ethics watchdogs say that no other President has ever so nakedly exploited his position, or on such a scale. Trump recently explained to the Times why he cast aside his former restraint: “I found out that nobody cared.”

Is Trump right about the public’s nonchalance? Last summer, I tallied how much money he and his immediate family had made off his high office. My method was conservative. It seemed unfair to begrudge Trump the profits from the many businesses he owned before entering the White House. So I excluded from my calculation preëxisting hotels, condos, and golf courses, along with plausible extensions of those long-standing businesses. Likewise, Trump is hardly the first President to trade access or potential influence for political fund-raising, and he generally cannot spend such money on personal expenses, so I set that aside, too. Lastly, I left out funny-money assets he couldn’t readily cash out without setting off a fire sale that would eviscerate their value, such as his shares in the company behind Truth Social, his social-media platform.

Even excluding all that, by August, the Presidential profiteering reached $3.4 billion. (You can review my judgments in the article, “The Number.”) And since then the First Family has kept busy. The end of Trump’s first year in office seemed an opportune time for an update. Did the family business slow down or speed up for the Trumps?

Many investors and consumers understandably distrust cryptocurrency and digital finance. Crypto heists are alarmingly common, and the best-known uses of digital currency are money laundering and casino-like financial speculation. President Trump himself, before his most recent campaign, maintained that Bitcoin “seems like a scam” and that crypto “can facilitate unlawful behavior.” But an association with a sitting President can furnish a valuable credibility boost. Think of the premium that investors will pay for U.S. Treasury bonds compared to notes from some little-known bank. That appears, in a nutshell, to be the Trump family’s strategy with crypto.