"I Don't Think about Americans' Finances"
He's too busy thinking about his own
Before the Trump meme coins, before the Trump Bibles, before the Trump gold sneakers, there was Trump steak and Trump vodka, Trump water, Trump University, Trump Airlines, and Trump Mortgage. Each one was launched with ridiculous amounts of fanfare. Each one went bankrupt. In the case of Trump University, it was sued and had to pay $25 million.
What is different now is that Donald is in the Oval Office. When a sitting president sells a product, the buyer is not just a customer. The buyer is potentially an investor. Selling products not only violates the Emoluments Clause, it also gives him a massive platform from which to sell those products, which in turn constitutes an unfair advantage. It is also highly unusual. The number of retail goods all previous presidents combined marketed to the American people is zero.
Donald’s financial disclosure ran 234 pages. Biden’s 2024 disclosure was 11 pages and consisted largely of conventional bank and retirement accounts. I want to provide some information on what Donald and his family have for sale. Every dollar figure listed here comes directly from Donald’s own federal financial disclosures filed with the Office of Government Ethics.
Watches brought in $2.8 million. They are operated under a license agreement with a company called The Best Watches on Earth LLC, which is registered in Wyoming. CNN investigated the so-called Swiss-made claim and traced the operation to a small Wyoming city.
Then there are the gold shoes and cologne, which have brought in $2.5 million. One day after a New York judge ordered Donald to pay $355 million in civil fraud penalties, he appeared at SneakerCon in Philadelphia to launch a line of gold high-top sneakers called They Never Surrender High Top. He also sells Victory 47 cologne for $99.
I do not want to know what that smells like.
Then there is the Trump Bible, which has brought in $1.3 million. An AP investigation found approximately 120,000 copies were shipped from a printer in Hangzhou, China. Religious books are exempt from tariffs on Chinese imports, meaning this Bible specifically benefits from that exemption while Donald wages a trade war against the country printing it.
There is a $1 million guitar, which makes no sense to me whatsoever. Then a coffee table book. That is all I have to say about that.
Then there are the digital trading cards, which have brought in $7 million and counting. Beginning in December 2022, Donald launched a series of digital trading cards, otherwise known as NFTs, at $99 each, featuring images of himself as a superhero, an astronaut, a cowboy, and a race car driver, all things he is not and never possibly could be.
Top buyers were offered golf rounds and private dinners with Donald at Mar-a-Lago. It would be interesting to know if any of that ever happened.
On June 16, 2025, which was the tenth anniversary of Donald’s first presidential campaign announcement, Don Jr. and Eric appeared at Trump Tower to launch Trump Mobile. The product, the T1 phone, is a gold Android retailing at $499, marketed as a patriotic alternative to Apple and Samsung, billed as being made in the USA. A monthly service plan called the 47 Plan would cost $47.45 per month.
So how is that going?
Here is what one customer had to say:
Hey, Trump supporter here. This goes out to Don Jr. and Eric. Where the —— is my phones? I ordered three, no, four gold Trump phones in the summer, told they’re going to be the best. Talked my son into ordering some. We heard they’re going to come out in September. Yeah, we can wait. September rolls around. No, it’s going to be November. November, no, it’s going to be the end of the year. They actually stopped taking orders for them in November. Now we can’t get any updates on them, but 590,000 people buying a phone at five or $600 each, add that up. Just the down payments of $100 is 60 million. Give me my phones or give me my money back.
As of May 2026, not a single customer who put down that $100 deposit has received the phone.
Back in August of last year, NBC News placed a deposit and called the Trump Mobile support line five times between September and November of 2025 after receiving no updates. Representatives told the outlet the phone would ship November 13, then December, then sometime in the first quarter of 2026. We are now past that point.
Journalist Joseph Cox attempted to place a deposit and found his card charged the wrong amount. No shipping address was ever collected, and delivery notifications promised in a confirmation email never came. He called it the worst experience he has ever faced buying a consumer electronic product.
The Trump Mobile website’s terms and conditions state that estimated ship dates and launch timelines are non-binding estimates only. Trump Mobile does not guarantee the device will be commercially released, that regulatory approvals will be obtained, or that production will commence or continue.
In April 2026, the terms of service were revised to state that paying a deposit does not constitute a completed purchase and does not create a binding legal contract. The “made in the USA” language was scrubbed from the website shortly after launch, and the phone is widely reported to be a rebranded budget Android device made in China.
Three days before Donald’s second inauguration, he launched a cryptocurrency called $Trump. It reached a market capitalization of approximately $15 billion within 24 hours. Two days later, Melania launched her own.
Donald’s family controls World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance platform. A fund linked to the Abu Dhabi government invested $500 million in it. Donald’s 2024 disclosure confirmed $57.3 million in income from World Liberty Financial alone.
Here is how Senator Chris Van Hollen explained it:
Today I want to zero in on just one piece of it here at home, and that is the Trump and Melania meme coins. These are the coins that Trump sold to retail investors, and he’s pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars from those sales, even as retail investors have lost billions on the Trump and Melania meme coins. And here’s the catch. Whether the value of these coins goes up or down, Trump makes money. In other words, the value of it could collapse entirely, but it’s the trades. And so what Donald Trump has been doing is trying to pump trades, because every time a trade is made, Donald Trump pockets a little bit of your money. He’s won hundreds of millions of dollars, even as people who trusted in him have lost billions.
That is the way it has always been. Donald’s corruption is well documented and has been for decades. No matter how many bankruptcies he declared, it was his investors who lost money. He always came out on top.
Currently, one of his most lucrative schemes is his personal meme coin. Since its launch, Donald has made over $200 million from it, while everyday Americans who invested in it have lost billions.
Chainalysis found that 764,000 retail wallets lost money on the Trump coin, while 58 wallets made over $10 million each. Reuters estimated the Trump Organization earned $802 million from crypto in the first half of 2025 alone.
Openly selling branded consumer products is not something presidents of the United States should be doing. Presidents should not be allowed to continue running private companies that benefit from the presidency. There is too much room for grift, for theft from the American people, and for undue influence.
If you do not think foreign actors are getting involved in these investments, you would be wrong. That leaves Donald open to corrupt influence and potentially bribery.
Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington called this operation an unprecedented monetization of the presidency.
Everything for him is transactional. The only value in being president is the value it affords him. Thanks to 78 million deeply misguided Americans, the presidency has become the most lucrative job Donald has ever had.
Merchandise royalties alone exceeded $10 million in 2024. Forbes estimated Donald’s net worth at $6.5 billion as of February 2026, significantly more than before returning to the White House.
This is all illegal. It is all unconstitutional.
Can we blame Donald for taking advantage of the fact that his party will not hold him accountable? Absolutely. But most of the blame belongs to the elected Republicans in Congress, who have no problem with the fact that the President of the United States is a thief.
Why would anyone think Trump thinks of anyone's finances but his own?
....and yet these Suckers will still vote MAGA.