The Midas touch

Donald Trump’s self-enrichment has many precedents in political history — but it may yet test the tolerance of American voters for private gain while in public oice, write Harold James and JC de Swaan

Financial Times UK

11 Jul 2026

JC de Swaan is a lecturer in the economics department at Princeton University and a partner at Cornwall Capital. Harold James is

professor of history and international relations at Princeton University

These days Donald Trump is a modern Midas, turning everything he touches into

gold. His personal wealth accumulation while in oce is unparalleled in recent US

history, as is the blurring of public and private interests during his presidency.

Barely a month passes without fresh reports of some new domestic or foreign

scheme for self-enrichment.

Sovereigns and dictators have always blended personal interest with those of the

nation — that is, in a sense, their prerogative. Liberal democracies exist precisely to

prevent such amalgamation, through legal and constitutional constraints, institutional oversight and the force of civic norms. Yet it is occurring in America under

Trump.

The president made at least $2.2bn in his rst year back in oce, more than triple

his reported income the previous year, with signicant additional wealth accruing

to his family members. Such gains dwarf those of any previous president. His amazing stock-buying spree, with some 22,000 transactions in 2025 worth between$461mn and $1.4bn according to the FT, shows the extent to which he has apparently bound up his own fortunes with those of the country in a moment of generalised nancial exuberance.

Trump rode to victory in the 2016 election on a crusade to “drain the swamp”. He

told supporters he would curb special-interest inuence and purge the federal government of entrenched bureaucrats. In his second term, he supercharged that mission with the frenzied programme of cuts enacted by the so-called Department of

Government Eciency. Yet even as he attacked one form of excess, he ushered in

another centred on his own private gain.

In American history, Trump is a singular gure in many respects. The US tradition

has long held its ocials to a standard of probity — the self-denying servant of the

republic, from George Washington’s resignation of his military commission to

Jimmy Carter’s recusal from his peanut business.

Many presidents left oce worse off nancially than when they entered. Washington set the tone by initially refusing a salary. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison

both depleted their own capital to fund state dinners and receptions, Jefferson leaving oce in debt. By the mid-20th century, Harry Truman’s near-destitute status in

retirement impelled Dwight Eisenhower to create the presidential pension.

Norms have since evolved. Most presidents since Gerald Ford have built considerable wealth from paid public engagements and published memoirs. Yet they

refrained from monetising the presidency while in oce. In his second term,

Trump stands out for agrantly doing so. He has kept ownership of the Trump

Organization in a revocable trust rather than selling it or putting it in a blind trust,

handing day-to-day control to his sons Donald Jr and Eric.

The arrangement does not breach any legal requirement, but it broke with past

presidential behaviour. Jimmy Carter is often cited as the gold standard of ethical

conduct, having suffered nancially as a result of placing his peanut farm in a blind

trust — the business was eventually sold. Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Bill

Clinton and George W Bush also put their assets into blind trusts. Barack Obama

and Joe Biden had no major business holdings.

At rst, Americans showed openness to Trump retaining ownership while stepping

back from management: a December 2016 Bloomberg survey found that 69 per cent

of respondents considered requiring him to sell all his business interests “goes too

far”. Trump actually lost wealth during his rst term, his Forbes net worth estimate

down by more than one-third by its end.Naturally, as Trump himself argues, his wealth could rise while in oce independently of any action on his part — driven by market gains (the S&P is up 25 per cent

since the start of his second term) and by organic business growth, as customers

and partners are drawn in by his constant media exposure and the prestige of the

oce. During his eight years in oce, Barack Obama is estimated by Forbes to have

made $10.8mn, largely from royalties for books published before his presidency.

Yet a signicant portion of Trump’s second-term gains come from active dealmaking through entities formally separated from but economically linked to him:

memecoins launched days before his inauguration, licensing agreements and stock

trades. According to his 2025 nancial disclosure released last week, he earned

nearly $1.2bn from crypto deals alone last year.

The volume of deal announcements involving business interests tied to Trump and

his family is dizzying. They span Trump Organization real estate ventures in Qatar,

Saudi Arabia and the UAE; a cryptocurrency platform; and venture and private

equity funds associated with his sons. Several involve statelinked entities and some

have occurred alongside favourable US policy shifts towards the countries in question.

The perceived conicts extend to his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s reported efforts to

solicit investments for his private equity fund from the same foreign governments

he faces in sensitive Middle East negotiations as a peace envoy. While no evidence

of a quid pro quo has surfaced, the appearance of conicts of interest is hard to

ignore. Supporters say Trump has not been found guilty of any corruption and that

his family’s dealmaking is no evidence of wrongdoing.

The Trump experience has an odd precursor in British history — one that profoundly shaped the thinking of the American republic. Britain had been wracked by

the South Sea Bubble, which burst in 1720. The South Sea Company was a political

enterprise, a Tory initiative to rival the Whig innovation of the Bank of England,

built on bribing parliamentarians with stock. After the collapse its directors were

prosecuted and expropriated.

The South Sea collapse discredited Tory corruption, but what then emerged was a

Whig alternative. Robert Walpole built his reputation by warning against the

bubble; after the collapse he protected the monarch, George I, and developed a proposal to restructure the company and consolidate government debt. He became Britain’s rst de facto prime minister and developed an extensive patronage system

alongside a programme of massive self-enrichment.His family prospered with him: his brother handled money for overseas British military and diplomats; two sons held Exchequer posts. His stately home at Houghton,

Norfolk, was crammed with masterpieces. He covered himself in satin and piled on

diamond decorations. He gave spectacular banquets.

Walpole defended himself by asserting that corruption was the natural state. In one

of his greatest parliamentary performances, when successfully blocking a demand

for more frequent elections, he simply noted that “There may be some bribery and

corruption in the nation; I am afraid there will always be some.”

His critics — Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay — accused him of debasing public service by amplifying its capacity for personal enrichment. Pope

observed that “Nothing is sacred now but villainy.”

Trump’s obsession with personal loyalty, his relentless pursuit of nancial gains by

shattering norms, his air for monetising public power and the aunting of his

wealth all echo Walpole’s persona — with Mar-a-Lago serving as a modern stand-in

for Houghton Hall.

During his tenure Walpole accrued, by some measures, the modern equivalent of

several hundred million dollars. A generation later, the American revolutionaries

perceived their treatment by George III’s emissaries as a direct extension of the

Walpolean system of corruption. The constitution they drafted was written to prevent its recurrence through the separation of powers and robust checks and balances.

Political scientists Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon argue that Trump’s transactional approach to policymaking is better understood as primarily driven by personal interest — in effect turning the country into a kleptocracy — rather than any

coherent conception of US national interest. But that may be too categorical.

Most historians consider Walpole primarily driven by strong political objectives —

maintaining Whig supremacy, entrenching the Hanoverian dynasty against the Jacobite challenge, keeping Britain out of continental wars — with his enrichment

integral to his governing style but not its primary purpose.

Similarly, many of Trump’s policies reect deep convictions: that immigration is

eroding the fabric of US society, that foreign allies have eeced the country. His

monetisation of oce appears opportunistic rather than systematic, typically running parallel with his convictions — an alignment that allows supporters to stay on

board.Much of the wealth that Trump and his family have generated comes from cryptocurrency, which he derided as a “scam” as late as 2021. His pivot, beginning in 2022,

coincided with the availability of large capital pools backing a friendly candidate.

By 2024 he was promising to make America the “crypto capital of the planet”.

That policy line was consistent with his longstanding distaste for regulation. Yet the

enmeshed interests are taking a toll even among his base: a May 2026 CoinDesk survey found that 59 per cent of Republican voters disapproved of a senior government ocial having personal crypto business dealings, and 62 per cent of all Americans distrust the Trump administration to provide crypto industry oversight.

In modern times, Trump becomes less singular when the lens broadens to foreign

democracies. Andrej Babiš, the current Czech prime minister, shares a similar prole: a rightwing populist billionaire who entered politics to ght corruption and the

establishment, has stirred conict-of-interest concerns with his conglomerate Agrofert — the country’s largest recipient of EU agricultural subsidies — and has been

dogged by accusations of hiding ownership of a farm to illegally claim EU subsidies.

Babiš has encouraged the Trump comparison, with supporters wearing “Strong Czechia” caps in Maga’s signature red. The comparison falls short in one respect: Babiš

announced placing Agrofert into a blind trust before returning to power, meeting a

condition set by President Petr Pavel — a step Trump has notably not taken.

Self-enrichment in oce is not the exclusive domain of the right — consider

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, president of Argentina from 2007 to 2015, now

serving a six-year prison sentence under house arrest for steering overpriced public works contracts to a businessman with close ties to her family. Nevertheless, the

closest modern analogy is another rightwing populist, Silvio Berlusconi, who dominated Italian politics for almost three decades and served as prime minister three

times between 1994 and 2011.

Like Trump and Babiš, Berlusconi entered oce as a wealthy businessman whose

political identity was tightly linked to his persona as an outsider crusading against

the elites, uniquely t to x the country — with vast wealth cited as a shield against

corruption. He retained full ownership of his sprawling empire, including Italy’s

dominant commercial broadcaster, creating avenues for suitors to seek favour by

purchasing advertising on his TV channels — a practice with parallels in foreign

dignitaries staying at Trump’s DC hotel, lobbyists taking club memberships and corporate donors contributing to the White House ballroom fund.

Echoing Trump’s pressure on his Department of Justice and the court system, Berlusconi pushed for “ad personam” laws on false accounting and the immunity oftop oce-holders. Unlike Trump, however, his wealth shrank over his three terms,

largely due to the global nancial crisis’s impact on Mediaset.

Corruption alone rarely triggers a political downfall. Berlusconi’s came from a loss

of market condence during the Eurozone debt crisis; his 2013 tax fraud conviction

expelled him from the Senate, but only after he had already lost power. Historian

Timothy Snyder has argued that corruption drives incumbents from oce only to

the extent that people link it to their own wellbeing. Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat

in Hungary’s April elections was compounded by high ination, stagnating growth

and unease over his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Viktor Yanukovych’s ousting

in 2014 combined outrage over extraordinary personal enrichment with anxiety

over Ukraine’s pivot towards Russia.

Like Walpole and Berlusconi, Trump and his family make little effort to conceal

their self-enrichment. Earning more money, even while in oce, may be a way to

demonstrate that he remains at the top of his game, bolstering his carefully cultivated image as a successful businessman.

Ethics experts point out that few, if any, of his actions are illegal in the absence of

evidence of a quid pro quo. This has to do with the history of US nancial scandals:

in reaction to major ethical breaches, safeguards have been added over time to

tackle political patronage, graft at the departmental level and hidden campaign

money. But the system is ill-equipped to deal with a president who retains a global

real estate and hospitality business while family members launch investment funds

and crypto ventures that can be funded by virtually anyone globally with minimal

scrutiny.

The president and vice-president are exempt from the main federal conictofinterest statute prohibiting other federal employees from participating in government activities that could affect their own nancial interests. The Supreme Court’s

2024 immunity ruling further insulates ocial acts within the president’s constitutional sphere.

None of the well-known instances of self-enrichment in previous administrations

centred on the president himself. Andrew Johnson’s administration was tainted by

the proliferation of wellconnected intermediaries securing pardons for former Confederates, but there is no clear evidence that Johnson enriched himself. Ulysses S

Grant’s Whiskey Ring of 1875 implicated his personal secretary and agents of the

Internal Revenue Service, not the president. Watergate targeted power preservation, not personal enrichment. The Warren G Harding administration’s Teapot

Dome scandal — the textbook case studied in US high schools — centred on about$400,000 of illicit benets to interior secretary Albert Fall, the equivalent of roughly

$6mn-$7mn today.

Trump has swatted aside concerns about his recent gains, insisting that “everybody’s proting”. In an interview with the New York Times this year, he noted that

he had prohibited his family from doing business in his rst term, which he perceived as unfair, adding: “I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.”

Maga supporters largely agree. In the latest YouGov poll, 93 per cent of Democrats

perceive Trump as corrupt versus 10 per cent of Republicans; on average, 54 per

cent of all adults share that view. The issue appears peripheral to the revolution

that Trump supporters believe he is ushering in, with press coverage dismissed as

evidence of hyperventilating Trump derangement syndrome. Some seem genuinely

perplexed that it should be discussed at all.

Others bristle at selective attention. Why not focus on the real scandal — welfare

fraud — as illustrated by the more than $250mn of Covid child nutrition funds

stolen by a Minnesota non-prot? The point has emotional and political weight,

given the hundreds of billions of dollars lost to fraud across all federal spending

annually, as estimated by the Government Accountability Oce, a non-partisan

watchdog. The 18thcentury analogy is Walpole’s construction of a new political

order around a claim to be combating Tory corruption.

The Democrats’ focus on Trump does not mean they have a claim to a monopoly on

ethics. Clinton pardoned Marc Rich after receiving a $450,000 donation to his presidential library from Rich’s ex-wife. Hunter Biden took a lucrative board seat at a

Ukrainian energy company — a eld in which he had no experience — while his

father steered US policy towards Ukraine. The husband of House Speaker Nancy

Pelosi has drawn scrutiny for trades that generated stock returns signicantly in

excess of the index. Still, these examples pale in comparison to Trump’s wealth

accumulation — as does the scale of the best-known historical nancial scandals

across US administrations.

Will this become a decisive electoral issue? No easy linkage with living standards

can be made at this stage. A questionable gift of a jet from Qatar may inuence US

treatment of that country, but will not measurably affect American voters’ daily

lives. The full impact from freewheeling crypto regulation may not surface for

years.

Yet the issue is rising as a priority concern — Navigator Research, a Democraticaligned pollster, now tracks it as nearly tied with ination and the cost of living as

the top issue across 67 battleground districts. In midterm campaigns, Democrats areconverging on a message that ties affordability to alleged presidential corruption.

Rahm Emanuel, a prospective 2028 presidential candidate, has described the topic

as a “gem”. Several Senate candidates have made it a major theme, including Jon

Ossoff in Georgia and James Talarico in Texas.

If a nancial bubble collapses, then Trump would be as deated as the stock market. But if the exuberance continues, it will drive prices higher. If ination persists,

the disparity between most Americans’ dwindling purchasing power and the

extraordinary wealth being generated by the Trump family and its connected partners is bound to loom larger — a message that could well resonate by election day.