Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

—Quote attributed to Justice Louis D. Brandeis, repeated often by editor/journalist Lewis Lapham in the last year of his life (2024).

On June 13, 2025, in compliance with the United States Office of Government Ethics (motto: “Preventing Conflicts of Interest in the Executive Branch”), President Donald Trump filed his “Personal Public Financial Disclosure Report” (OGE Form 278e, for those keeping score at home).

In theory he complied with all the requests to disclose non-government income of more than $200, assets in excess of $1,000, and outside income greater than $5,000, although by filing 234 pages of densely-typed statements Trump is playing a deception game, hoping that in a data dump of staggering proportions no one will notice how his presidency has become a Washington Monument to conflicts of interest.

Needless to say, in the section that asks him to list “Gifts totaling more than $480,” Trump did not write, “Undisclosed influence peddlers in the crypto industry gifted me millions of dollars by anonymously buying my $TRUMP memecoin, just as my hand-picked board and management at Trump Media & Technology Group awarded me (in exchange for nothing) shares in a public company now worth several billion dollars.”

Instead, for his crypto dealings, Trump reported $1,057,490 of income from “licensing fees from NFT INT LLC” but then added parenthetically “value not readily ascertainable”—even though elsewhere he discloses earnings from World Liberty Financial, Inc. (another crypto company) of $57,355,532.

That take sounds like a lot of money until you read the reporting in Forbes which estimates that in the last nine months Trump earned $390 million from the sales of World Liberty tokens and $315 million from hawking his memecoin (neither amount made it into the financial disclosure report).

I am guessing that the difference in the figures is what accountants call a “rounding error”.

In the world according to Trump’s filing, the president is just your average real estate developer billionaire with hotels, office towers, apartment blocks, and golf courses spread around the United States and the world.

Left out of the fine print in all 234 pages is Trump’s conception of the presidency as a hedge fund, in which there is one general partner—Trump—and endless feeder funds (MAGA suckers who lap up his coins and sneakers).

The report is also mum about who is throwing billions at Trump via Trump Media or his cryptocurrency three-card monte.

On the form’s pages labeled “Filer’s Positions Held Outside United States Government,” Trump lists only five titles, of which only two—Mar-a-Lago and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—are current.

According to Trump, his position as chairman of the board and director of Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) ended on March 22, 2024, when the company completed its reverse takeover of Digital World (basically a honey pot of about $230 million in cash).

What Trump discloses in the report (as if it was just normal business) is that the merger, plus the gift of some “Earnout Shares”, left Trump with 114,750,000 shares in Trump Media (more than 50% of the 220,000,000 then outstanding shares and control of the public company).

On paper, the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, dated April 7, 2014, holds Trump’s shares in Trump Media, but given that the TMTG board is a conglomeration of Trump family and Trump remittance men—such as Don Jr. and Devin Nunes—there’s no chance of the board wandering off the reservation.

In fact, in May of this year, the captive board of directors voted to issue 57,010,000 new shares (diluting Trump’s stake from 52% to 41%) at $25.72 a share.

In exchange, the company raised about $1.44 billion in new equity, and it raised another $1 billion in Convertible Senior Secured Notes (which absurdly pay no interest to their holders and can be converted into common stock at $34.72 a share, although the current share price is $18.50).

On top of this capital raising, the company invested the $2.44 billion proceeds into Bitcoin, and it registered a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (a long way from its declared business strategy to compete with legacy social media companies, such as the woke Facebook).

In other words, Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to raise $2.4 billion in a company that he controls from about 50 individuals and funds (this in the weeks following his predators’ ball at which he hosted the 220 largest investors in $TRUMP, his memecoin).

[Note: the guest list for the Trump memecoin dinner supposedly was made up of the largest investors in $TRUMP, but that’s a fiction. The anonymity of cryptocurrency wallets makes it impossible to identify the beneficial owners of crypto coins. Besides, the crypto bros who made millions from $TRUMP’s issuance sold their positions on January 20, 2025,........

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