Breaking News from Pod Save America - Trump's WORST Scams and Products As President

Episode Date: July 5, 2025

Trump’s latest financial disclosures are in — and they reveal a booming business in bad taste. From MAGA bibles to $400 watches and his own cologne, Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfeiffer break down his latest scams and shameless product peddling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Sophia Wilson, athlete and gold medalist, and this summer my wardrobe is being perfected with Abercrombie's newest drop. I'm a girl who loves jeans, and Abercrombie's new linen, blend denim has changed the game for me. They have that lightweight feel for summer. But the outfits I live in all summer are matching sets. They always look good and they give your wardrobe options. Spend the summer in Abercrombie, shop in the app, online, and in stores. All right, Dan, we recently got some fascinating new detail into you. Donald Trump's grifting in business interests that we wanted to share with you guys.

Listeners to the show probably understand that we think that Trump's corruption is kind of the linchpin to understanding everything he does. It drives his policies. It drives his travel. It drives his families travel. All the tariff negotiations happening behind the scenes have personal business interests kind of looming in the background. And so obviously that's disgusting and offensive, but it's also sometimes just so ridiculous that you have to laugh. So, Dan, I know you're going to love this. I'm sure I will. I put together a very quick Trump grifting pop quiz for you.

How does that sound? Nice. How did you get your information for this pop quiz? A lot of it from the New York Times, a lot of it from the bulwark. I actually looked at Trump's personal financial disclosure that he had to file for 2025 for 2025 per the ethics office, which is very long. It's like 220 pages or something. It's got a lot of money.

A lot of conflicts of interest, if you will. A lot of conflicts of interest in like random LLCs that you really have to dig into to understand. But first end, do you remember this? I'm proud to be partnering with my very good friend Lee Greenwood in connection with promoting the God bless the USA Bible. The Bible certainly is one of if I mean, it is the book. I get sent bibles by a lot of people. Where are all those Bibles anyhow now? Well, actually we keep them in a certain place, a very, very nice place. What's my first favorite book? The Bible. The Bible means a lot to me, but I don't want to get into specifics. You're an Old Testament guy or a New Testament?

Probably equal. Probably equal is one of my favorite lines from 2015, 2016. When was that? A lifetime ago. 2015 was the timestamp, I think, on the clip. So like I said, we now have Trump's financial disclosure forms for 2025. So we know how much he made selling the $75, Lee Greenwood Bibles.

Lee Greenwood is the gold guy who sings, God bless the USA. Dan, what's your guess for how much he made off these bad boys? So this is Trump's income, not revenue for the sketchy Bible company? Yeah, this is money that was on his personal form, so I assume that just means in his pocket. I would need to know more about the ownership structure of this to give you an accurate answer, but let's just play it by ear then. Let's say he made $3 million. Pretty close, $1.3 million. So I bet you're right.

There's like the greenwood split in there that kind of gets us closer to your number. What about Trump's watches? We have another clip for you. My new Trump watches, we're doing quite a number with watches, and the quality to me is very important. The Trump Victory Turbion. This isn't just any watch. It's one of the best watches made. It's a Turbion watch with almost 200 grams of gold and more than 100 real diamonds.

That's a lot of diamonds. I love gold. I love diamonds. We all do. Only 147 of these extraordinary watchers will ever exist in the world, and owning one puts you in a very exclusive club. Yep, very exclusive club of absolute idiots. So Dan, remember, the price tag on these watches ranged from $499 to $100,000. That's the 147 limited edition. Those are $100,000. Yes, and you know it was number one, DJT, President Trump. Obviously. You can be like him.

So that means he has 146 of them to sell. Yeah, that's right. That's right. How much do you think Mr. Trump made off of of Hawken Trump watches. So the real, like, kind of the Mendoza line here is 1.46 million. So this is once again his income. So we don't know what he's getting from the split. So if we were looking at raw revenue for the sketchy watch company, like the Mendoza line would be $1.46 million, right, to see if he,

but let's do, let's do this. Let's say he made $1.2 million. You know what? He made a little more than I would have expected. this one, $2.8 million hawking those absolute garbage watches. Okay, this is your final... I want to know how many of the original

$100,000 ones exist. I do too, and I want to know how many of them are currently in either Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, I would guess most, or Qatar. This is the final quiz question, and then we'll get into just talking about this stuff. So, Trump also sold sneakers, a

cologne, he sold perfume. The limited edition, fight, fight, fight, fragrance for men and women, could be yours for only $199. We have a quick clip here just to remind everybody what we're talking about. President-elect Donald Trump releasing a new product this weekend. On a post to Truth Social, he announced his new fragrance line titled, Fight, Fight, Fight. Yeah, the collection includes a cologne, a perfume,

both selling for about $199 on get-Trumpfragrances.com. This is not a joke. The website says the scent is your rallying cry in a bottle. rally and cry in a bottle, Dan. So the fight, fight, fight fragrance, again, was $199.

The sneakers were $499. We're bundling these because for some reason that's what the line item was on the first off financial disclosure form. Dan,

your guess about how much Mr. Trump made. I'm also curious. I don't know I'm focusing on the least important parts here, but was Trump fragrances. Not available,

so they had to go with get Trump fragrances? You know, you know, briefly get crookedmedia. com? Yes, before we pot.

I think the current URL from some, a porn aficionado in Arizona. Something weird, some very weird thing happened. There's a weird backstory. We're making news here. Yeah. I'd say, so this is perfumes and sneakers together. The sneakers were $500 a pop. I would imagine that the margins are quite high on a $500 sneaker.

I'm guessing you're right. Especially because most of this is pre-tariffs on whatever Vietnam, wherever these sneakers are made. Yeah, he could have screwed himself. Yeah. Let's say he made. $2.1 million. Wow, you almost nailed this one. 2.5 million. Very, very close. I'm going to say you win. He made $3 million off the Save America coffee table book. He sold a 45 guitar. I totally missed that.

That made him a million. There's NFT licensing and royalties for $1.157 million. The reason we're talking about this right now, the reason it feels relevant, Dan, though, is because the New York Times recently dug through thousands of pages of internal Trump organization records that were made public because of a bunch of lawsuits he was involved in. And the Times found that until Trump secured the Republican nomination, he was in dire financial straits. Trump's building in Lower Manhattan was not making enough to cover its mortgage. Trump's golf courses didn't have enough people playing to cover their costs. There was an appraisal of the Trump Doral course that found it was worth $297 million,

but Trump had spent $379 million buying and renovating it. And then there were the massive legal judgments against him, which I think today are total around $600 million. with interest that are still outstanding. So, Dan, you'll be shocked to learn that after Trump clinched the Republican nomination, everything kind of turned around. And the first thing that happened was Trump announced nine deals the Trump organization did in foreign countries in Vietnam, Serbia, India, Qatar, the UAE, and several projects in Saudi Arabia.

Dan, doesn't it seem quaint to remember all that talk about the emoluments clause back in, what, 2017, 2016? Yeah, we really did say the word emoluments on this podcast a lot. thousand years ago. Those were, those are good days. There was that guy who was the former ethics official who got fired, Walter Schwab, Walter Schwab. He did a lot of tweeting about emoluments. Yeah, it's just, it's really, we've crossed some sort of rubicon into a level where just corruption is normalized. Like, it's not even a big deal in the conversation around the things is. It's just to be assumed that Trump could be negotiating a deal with Vietnam, a trading

with Vietnam at the exact moment that his son is in Vietnam to try to get the government to move a bunch of people out of their farms so they can build a Trump resort golf golf resort there. Yes. Yes, that was an incredible story. I think Eric went there like a couple weeks ago. And in addition to, I think they're launching like opening a high rise or trying to secure the rights to a high rise in the capital. They're also booting a bunch of people out of their farms so that they can. build a golf course because that's exactly what Vietnam needs, some luxury golf course. Right in the middle of nowhere in Vietnam. Middle of nowhere.

And all of what we've discussed so far, though, is chump change compared to the Trump crypto business, which I don't know, Dan. For me, the crypto stuff worries me the most. Like at least we know that these projects in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and India are happening because it involves real estate and there's public records and documents and we kind of can learn about it in the press. but the crypto stuff is just completely happening behind closed doors. Yeah, there's no way of knowing who is giving him money and how much money they're giving.

I guess you could do some theoretical tracking of the movement of wallets on the blockchain, but in general, we have no idea. And if someone wants to bribe Trump, as people have done, right? Like Justin's son, the crypto guy who was under investigation, bought a shitload of World Liberty Financial coins, essentially put out a press release saying he had done so, and as soon as Trump won, the Trump administration dropped Justin SUDD's SEC investigation. And we say the same thing going on with the deal between potential,

this was what we know about, I guess, is the potential deal between finance, the very sketchy crypto exchange, which has pled guilty to a whole bunch of things in the United States. And the Trump administration is they're trying to get some sort of pardon or something that would allow the head, CZ, the guy who knows CZ, the head of that crypto exchange to do it. But on a day-to-day basis, people can buy and sell either WorldWee Financial or Trump meme coins as a way to put money in Trump's pocket.

And all they have to do is call someone in the White House or someone near Trump and tell them they did it. And Trump would know and they could turn around and do them a policy favor. Yeah. And I think that what's so remarkable about it is through these crypto companies, he turned literally nothing into billions of dollars of value. Like, for example, truth social, Trump's stake, according to the New York Times, is estimated to currently be worth about two. billion dollars, even though the company struggles to make $1 million per quarter in revenue. So $2 billion valuation struggles to make a million dollars per quarter. And that's the market cap of the public markets.

Yeah, I think so. I believe that was sort of like when they published it at that moment. That was the market cap. You mentioned World Liberty Financial, the crypto company has. The crypto coins that were issued to the Trump family from World Liberty Financial themselves are worth $236 million. And NBC News reported that Trump made $57 million in income from World Liberty. Again, this is just kind of vaporware.

It's like coins that give you, I think, an ownership stake in a company, but all the revenues still go to the Trump family. So there's really no reason financially you would own it unless you were just trying to curry favor. Now, and can you know, is it the world of big coins that you can't sell? Yes. Yes. So it's not even like you're buying something like equivalent to a piece of art or a baseball card or something that you could. then sell for more money, or even just like an actual gold coin, you are just giving Trump money. To what end?

No one's, it's not really clear why that is. Yeah. And yeah. And then, you know, the meme coins, at least you can buy and sell them. But Trump and his partners have made an estimated $320 million so far on fees from the sale of Trump and Melania meme coins, just fees. That does not include the value of their meme coin holdings. I think Trump owns like $8.000.

80% of all Trump coin, which I think present value would be worth billions. It's truly, truly disgusting. Yeah. I guess like where I'm at, just struggling to wrap my head around the reality that there's kind of like an earth to where Trump loses the 2024 election, possibly has to serve jail time, sees his businesses collapse because there's no longer, longer any reason for foreign governments to want to bribe him compared to where we are now, where this man is just riding rough shot over us.

Yeah, I wish you had not said that because now I'm going to think about nothing else for a very long period of time. Yeah, well, it's July 4th weekend. So, you know, it's the time to self-flage late. Yes, just a long weekend of thinking about what could have been different if the election had played out differently, if Merrick Garland hadn't waited years to begin the investigations of this. So that this clock, like there's a whole different world where Merrily Garland begins these

investigations. Oh, I don't know, right after Trump incites a violent insurrection on the Capitol, as you would normally do. Yeah. And then he is facing trial in 2022. Yeah. And so there's a resolution to that. And even if he doesn't go to jail, at least there's a full airing of what happened in a court of law and people are forced to testify under oath. Instead, Mary Garland did nothing, waited until he was bullied into starting investigation way too late by Liz Cheney and Adam Kinsinger on the work of the January 6th committee. And we never, none of those cases ever played out. A different world where the, like, if you just think back to the moment when the FBI was seizing classified documents out of Trump's poolhouse, like nuclear secrets, all those other things.

If that case ends up with almost any other judge on that panel, it probably goes to trial. Instead, you get Judge Aileen Cannon, Trump Funkie, who basically makes it go away for him based on a totally ridiculous legal theory. And then everyone just kind of was like, well, Trump's probably going to win, so we'll just let it go. And then it all disappeared. You do the same thing in Fulton County, right? Now I'm down a very deep, dark and unhelpful. I love it. I love it.

Where if we had not had the situation with Fannie Willis and the prosecutor on her staff and their relationship, that trial may start earlier. And you might at least end of that one because of Raccoeer trials or RICO trials are so extended. We could have gotten through that one. But you could have actually proceeded in some way, shape, or form. But none of those things happened. And here we are. So here we are talking about Trump scrifting again. And the reason we're doing it, folks are probably one of the way.

I think why we focus on this. And part of it for me is one thing that drives me crazy in politics, and you hear this a lot in kind of like the Manosphere podcast kind of ecosystem is, yeah, we know Trump is corrupt, but all politicians are corrupt. So why is this any different? At least he's doing it out in the open. Like I think that was a day Portnoy quote, the head of Barstle sports. He was like, you know, I don't know what Hunter Biden was doing in those meetings,

but I do know that, you know, Trump's hawk and meme coins in public. And I do think, I don't know if we can ever break through to. some of those people, but I do think helping them understand the scope and scale of the corruption and just how abnormal this is and how much is actually impacting policy decisions is a very important part of this piece. Because I think what Hunter Biden did was shady and unacceptable and never should have happened. But I don't think that he was in the room negotiating tariffs like, you know, like Eric Trump seems to be. I mean, it's not, I mean, it's not anywhere on the same level. And like there is a bunch of research and a lot of,

There's a strongly held belief among a lot in the Democratic consulting class. And this is not an unfounded belief. It is, as I said, based on research, that voters, and particularly the swing voters, the less politically engaged ones we're trying to get, are not particularly moved by arguments about Trump's corruption. My take on that is that that is both a product of us not making the case effectively and a sense that Democrats are not any better. Or at least maybe if they're not as bad as Trump, they're not good on these issues.

that we, and this is in part because we have run basically for years now as the staunch defenders of a broken political system that most voters see as corrupt. And if we could, like the thing I would tell any and every Democrat is come up with a reform agenda, particularly one that targets this exact type of corruption that targets the influence of rich people and corporations in government when you have, you know, whatever is a half dozen billionaires in Trump's administration making decisions on policy that gives that puts more money in their pockets, that if we had an agenda, like that, they cracked down the revolving door that said that no one in our party was going to take

corporate pack and lobbyist money, we would at least have the credibility to make that argument. Right now, you can't separate the efficacy of the argument from the credibility of the messenger. Right now we have a credibility problem. That's absolutely right. Yeah. In 2006, Democrats ran hard on these kind of reform issues and were really successful for a variety of other reasons, the Iraq war, et cetera. But it was a very important piece of that kind of policy plank. So I guess what we're saying is that this Independence Day, Democrats to clear your independence from big money in politics and PACs and lobbyists and all this bullshit and just be a little smarter about this stuff. Great way to wrap it all together.

That's it for us today. Thank you for watching this POTSafe America episode on YouTube. As you guys know, we are trying to build a progressive media powerhouse here. And when people go to YouTube and they search for political news, right now what they're finding is right wing crap like Ben Shapiro, T.P. USA, et cetera, et cetera. And not, you know, what we're trying to help do here is get them good, credible, accurate information from progressive perspective. And when you subscribe to POTSave America, you help us do that. So thank you for doing it. Bye, everyone.