Today, Explained - All the president’s side hustles

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Ethical concerns abound on the president's first big trip to the Middle East since reentering office. But if you really want conflicts of interest, take a look at his crypto projects. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. A billboard featuring President Donald Trump holding Bitcoin in Hong Kong. Photo by May James/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Donald Trump's in the Middle East doing the kinds of things you might expect a US president to do while in the Middle East. He's been shaking hands with leaders, posing for photos. Here's some Fox News coverage. All people in the Middle East have noticed. MBS is quite tall. The prime minister is quite tall himself. Donald's been doing diplomacy. He made a big announcement on Tuesday. I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions

against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness. And on Wednesday, Trump met with Syria's new president, Ahmed al-Sharah, a former al-Qaeda leader who used to be on the US terrorist, I might add. Young, attractive guy, tough guy. But while in the Middle East, and before he even got there, the president and his family have also been doing things you'd never expect a US president and his family have also been doing things you'd never expect a U.S. president and his family to do.

Making hotel deals, golf course deals, plane gift deals, crypto deals. All the president's side hustles on Today Explained. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer, so download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders.

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This show is for you. Bird's Eye View is coming May 16th. Follow the show on YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts. ["Bird's Eye View"] You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Eli Stokels. I'm a White House and foreign policy correspondent at Politico.

Okay, so help me set the stage for this trip to the Middle East this week because I read that even before President Trump showed up, his large adult sons were crisscrossing the region. What exactly were they doing? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, he hinted that this would be his first big trip hours after taking the oath of office. And his interest in the Middle East coincides with Trump Corporation, his sons, doing a lot of business in this region.

And so just in the last couple weeks, Eric Trump, he was in Doha, and the Trump Corporation is building, you know, several real estate ventures out there. They're looking at a Trump International Hotel project in Dubai. That's what brought Eric out there. There is another Trump branded beachside golf and luxury villa project in Dubai. That's what brought Eric out there. There is another Trump-branded beachside golf and luxury villa project in Qatar that is a multi-billion dollar project. And so, you know, these are things that are bringing the family a lot of money in licensing and managing fees, you know, slapping the Trump name on the side of a building. These are also

projects that have drawn a lot of investment from various entities in the region that have very close ties to these governments. And just to be clear here, when the Trump corporation is making multi-million-dollar, upwards of billion-dollar deals in the Middle East. Is Donald Trump benefiting? Yes, not directly, not immediately, but this money is enriching his corporation, right? He did not put any of these things in a blind trust or put up a firewall between his business interests

and his work in government in his first term or in his second. And he has said, well, my sons are running the company. I don't really have anything to do with it. But yeah, there is, I mean, to even say there's a thin line might be overstating it because, you know, we know how Trump operates and he's talking to his sons. He's talking to these people. He loves doing deals and whether those are side deals, whether they're related to real estate or cryptocurrency,

whatever, or whether they're more in the sort of government space. I know we're going to talk about the possible Qatari 747 gift to Trump. I could say, no, no, no, don't give us, I want to pay you a billion or 400 million or whatever it is. Or I could say, thank you very much. Those are all sort of benefiting Trump. And ultimately, the Trump family, the Trump corporation, they are making this money and clearly benefiting

from the fact that their father is president of the United States and someone that a lot of these, these countries that are willing to conduct foreign policy on almost exclusively financial transactional terms, they are more than willing to play ball, and that is benefiting the Trump family and the Trump corporation. I'm old enough to remember Donald Trump being very upset

that Hunter Biden may have been, you know, peddling deals off of his daddy's name. These emails show that Biden's repeated claim that he has never spoken to Hunter about his business dealings were a complete lie, was a total lie. But that's another story. Let's talk about the jet you mentioned. What exactly is going on?

Because I'm no presidential historian, but I'm struggling to recall a moment where a gift this large was being offered to a Happy to accept it American president. Yeah, I mean as as conservatives have pointed out You know critics would be wise to remember the Statue of Liberty pretty large In size was a gift from France to the city of New York That sits in New York Harbor, right? This is a bit different. Qatar has decided that one way to curry favor with this president is to float,

just giving the US government, giving President Trump a 747 jet, a tricked out double-decker $400 million Boeing jet, and that he would use it as Air Force One for the duration of this term. And Trump says this term only, it would be mothballed after and go to his presidential library even though there's actually no plans for a Trump presidential library yet, and all these things are very murky. But yeah, that's pretty unusual

and it has raised a ton of eyebrows, not just among Democrats or sort of ethical watchdogs, but even among Republicans who say, well, wait, wait, wait, we're gonna take an Air Force One donated from a foreign country in the Middle East and we're just gonna use it. That sounds off to a lot of people. Taking sacks of goodies from people who support Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Jazeera,

all the rest. That's not America First. Like, please define America First in a way that says you should take sacks of cash from the Qatari Royals. Okay, so everything we've talked about so far is just sort of setting the stage for this trip to the Middle East and setting, I guess, the possibilities for various ethical concerns and conflicts. What is the president hoping to accomplish broadly on this trip that he's on? Investment deals. I mean, that is not typically what has driven foreign policy by presidents prior.

That's been sort of an additional thing, not the main thing. Trump gave a speech in Riyadh on Tuesday to the investor conference there that was basically saying this region is great because of all the stuff you build and all the money that's here and we just want to do deals and we're not going to come here and lecture you about values. And so for someone who's pretty value agnostic like Trump, this is a perfect place to come and conduct this very transactional foreign policy.

The biggest thing that came out of the Saudi visit was a commitment of $600 billion in investments by the Saudis. We saw $142 billion defense package that was committed to. To build up the capacity of the Saudi armed forces. It also includes some investment in the United States, including 20 billion in AI data centers and energy infrastructure.

A total amount of $4.8 billion of Boeing 7378 aircraft that's formed from an airline leasing company in Saudi Arabia. The Emir of Qatar vowed to spend billions of dollars on US drones and Boeing jets. When he takes criticism about what his tariffs have done to the global economy, when he takes criticism about his economic stewardship broadly, what they always come back to is, look at all the money pouring into our country. That really is how he thinks about that. He thinks about the world in a very mercantilist way.

And so the Saudis, the Qataris, the Emiratis, they are willing to play that game, to do these deals, to give Trump, metaphorically speaking, the big cardboard check with a lot of zeros on it. And he likes that. The link is not ideology and democratic values, it's just kind of a pragmatism, a transactionalism, a mercantilism. Let's bring stability, let's make everybody rich. You know, he's found some partners in the region in pursuing that kind of a foreign policy. And ethical quandaries be damned? I mean, just to bring this back to where we started,

his kids show up first, make a bunch of deals. You're saying some of those deals are pretty close to, if not involving, foreign governments. And then the president rolls in, makes a bunch more deals, and also is dealing with those same actors in the process. Right. It's like, any questions? Any questions? Like, you summed it up.

That's right. I mean, these different things, I mean, look, the LIV Golf, we haven't even talked about LIV Golf, but that's the Saudi-back golf league. That's a real competitor to the PGA Tour. And it's run by the head of Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. You know, and what did they do? He hosted a tournament. He hosted a tournament for them at Doral in Florida. And frankly, what they're doing for golf is so great.

What they're doing for the players is so great. The salaries are going to go way up. And what happened? All of these people came to Dorerao, filled up the hotel, ate in the restaurant, sat out there on the golf course. So he has benefited from that and is clearly an ally of the Saudis as they, the government is sort of working in this private space,

but it's still the government. There's investors, Qatari investors who have invested in some of the Trump corporation projects over there. So they are working together in the sort of official space, and then they are working together in the private space as well. And that's just how he's going to run foreign policy. The ethical watchdogs can howl at the moon, but it's just, it's not going to stop him from operating this way.

Read Eli Stokles at politico.com. Eli was mostly talking about things we can track, but when we're back at Today Explained, we're going to talk about Trump's harder to track deals, the President's billion dollar crypto portfolio. Support for today explained comes from built rewards not BUILT but B I L T. Let's talk about points not point guards guards, not the pointer sisters, not the classic 1991 Keanu Reeves surf noir movie, Point Break. Shout outs to John Utah. Although if you do want to talk about Point Break, nobody's stopping you. Not enough people are talking about Point Break. They've let me spend this much of this ad talking about point break.

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His latest piece is all about how... The Trump family business has become crypto more than like, you know, Trump's stakes or the apprentice or any of the other millions of things that Trump has made his name on, right? The Trump brand has been gold for him for his entire career, but he's found something finally to really turn it into a digital gold mine. It's interesting you say that because we opened this show today focusing on the Middle East and we were talking about how the large Trump sons, although Barron's large too.

He's the largest. The older Trump adult sons have been crisscrossing the Middle East, making deals, golf courses, hotels, villas. But you're saying that's not even the crux of Trump Inc. anymore. It's crypto. It has become crypto. Yeah. Eric and Don Jr. are sort of on the crypto press circuit right now.

Yeah. You know, Maria, I never thought I'd fall into the world of crypto until every bank started canceling us for absolutely no reason whatsoever, other than the fact that my father was in politics. This notion of decentralized finance is obviously sort of very appealing to guys like me who've been debanked or haven't been able to get insurance or whatnot.

Both have kind of managerial director positions on some of these Trump-affiliated crypto companies that have been making Trump money in recent years. They've taken a lead role both on the managerial side and the sort of press tour side, as we've seen in the Middle East. And I mean, but most pertinent, I suppose, is to just talk about how much money is being made here. How much money is being made here? Well, well, initially, when Trump coin was introduced, sort of around the time of the inauguration, it accounted almost I think Axios estimated that was 89% of his total net worth within that first weekend, it's since crashed, as these meme coins tend to do.

But there was such a massive boom right after that introduction that I think it was, you know, we're talking tens of billions of dollars that were basically instantly printed into life. So Trump's meme coin was really a surprise to almost everyone in the crypto community. Trump had appointed a crypto czar, David Sachs. He sort of had tried to assemble a team of crypto experts to really roll out or maybe roll back crypto regulations in a sort of measured and sober way.

And then all of a sudden, he releases Trump the meme coin kind of out of the blue, while actually there was a crypto gala going on in DC for sort of Trump-affiliated crypto people to kind of out of the blue, while actually like there was a crypto gala going on in DC for sort of Trump affiliated crypto people to kind of celebrate the inauguration. It's that crypto, see? They let a real crip up in the crypto ball. Woooooo! Bang, bang. It was during that gala, while everyone was kind of pleasantly drunk and

chattering and not really watching their Twitter feeds that Trump decided to drop this thing. A meme coin is a cryptocurrency that originates from an internet meme or has some other humorous characteristic. Think Dogecoin. Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies, meme coins derive their price primarily from community hype and social media momentum. All of a sudden it shoots up tens of billions of dollars in crypto.

It was really just a chance to cash in on the hype surrounding the inauguration and also the possibilities of a second Trump term. Are there specific instances in which he's used the pulpit of the presidency to promote his meme coin or his crypto interests? Oh, constantly. He's constantly posting on Truth Social, like, if not directly by my coin. I don't think he would be so silly as to say my coin because that makes the link even more explicit than it already is. But he's constantly posting about, you know, promotional events tied to the coin. There's a Trump coin gala that I think has generated

over a hundred million dollars in terms of like extra, or people have spent over a hundred million dollars trying to get entry to the gala. The gala is an attempt to basically pump the price of Trump coin, get people interested in it. It's rare that he's not talking about his businesses on Truth Social. Truth Social.

I will make sure that the US is the crypto capital of the world. We are making America great again. So he had some NFTs back when NFTs were really kicking off, which were basically like digital collectibles tied to the Trump brand name. I'm doing my first official Donald J. Trump NFT collection right here and right now. They're called Trump Digital Trading Cards. It was something in the Trump playbook, right? He's been doing this for years,

putting the Trump name on something and then saying, here's a piece of me, right? You can now own a piece of the Trump name, put it in your home, in this case, like put it in your digital wallet. Each card comes with an automatic chance to win amazing prizes like dinner with me. I don't know if that's an amazing prize, but it's what we have.

Or golf, please. And then closer to his actual election, he unveiled World Liberty Financial, which is known as a DeFi firm. Basically, DeFi is decentralized finance. It's a broad sort of umbrella term for crypto protocols that do a lot of different things. It was really the first sort of intimation that Trump was going to start personally enriching himself by way of crypto companies, not just like by way of a few throwaway NFTs, right? Or by courting donations from crypto billionaires, but really by getting into the business himself.

And how does that go for him? How does he ramp it up? And who's doing it? Is it Trump ramping it up or is it Eric and Don Jr.? Well, that's an interesting question because so much of the value of these companies and it's not just World Liberty Financial, it's sort of the Trump meme coin.

There's a whole, there's American Bitcoin, which is a Bitcoin mining firm that's a more recent venture. All of these things are, they have some distance from Trump in the sense that maybe the directors are his sons, maybe some of the assets that accrue from these companies are, they accrue to a trust. Trump the man and Trump the business are ostensibly separated, but also one doesn't exist without the other, right? The value of Trump the business is nothing without the name Trump. Presidents have always been good at turning

the position of the presidency into money. I mean, look at Obama, right? Like Netflix deals, speaking fees. There's nothing new about wanting to get really rich off of being the president. It's a tale as old as time. That said, there's something really unprecedented and direct about what crypto allows you to do there.

It's saying, here's a direct, not just a direct financial path to the president, but like, here's a way to cash in on the biggest position in the whole world. When you think of Barack Obama and Netflix, or his like weird podcast with Bruce Springsteen and however much money he made for that, you're talking about stuff a president's doing

post presidency. How is Trump re-entering office complicated his crypto side hustle? Well, there's a huge amount of like security risk that comes with it, right? I mean, specifically from Trump, the meme coin, the fact that crypto is anonymous basically means that anyone can invest. In the case of Trump meme coin, there are like firms with ties to China that have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Trump coin. Firms that we don't really know much about,

but because crypto is kind of fast and loose digital money, anyone can buy in. And when you're buying into something that directly enriches the president, because Trump coin is so much of Trump's net worth, you're kind of getting his ear, right? You are saying, you know, we have campaign finance laws in this country for a reason. And the fact that you can basically, anyone in the world can personally enrich Trump by buying into Trump coin is sort of a shortcut.

It's a legal shortcut around those pesky campaign finance laws. Who's watching the hen house, if anyone? Well, I think to understand that question, you have to sort of go back and look how crypto has been regulated over the past sort of throughout the Biden presidency. Biden had appointed Gary Gensler as the head of the SEC, and he was largely seen as a pretty, pretty kind of lefty, pretty aggressive regulator, especially when it came to crypto. Right now, unfortunately, there's significant noncompliance, and it's a field which is rife with fraud, abuse and misconduct.

I mean, he had a background teaching a crypto class at MIT. He knew his stuff, and he kind of wanted to make an example of the crypto industry. And so now, Trump, fast forward to 2024, Trump is elected. As soon as he's inaugurated, basically he rolls back a huge amount of the investigations that were kicked off by Biden's SEC, Gensler's SEC, Lena Conn's FTC. These are like, these were, you know, they had a real track record for being very harsh on crypto. And now it's like a total free for all.

I mean, there are still regulations that the rules really haven't changed that much. It's just how they're enforced and they're being enforced a lot less harshly than they were during the Biden administration. As much as the industry and the good actors in the industry, of which there are many, have tried to say, look, crypto is a double-edged sword.

The fact of it's being kind of fast and loose and anonymous, there are a lot of really good qualities that come with that, but it's also enabled some of the worst in people and maybe the worst of Trump's impulses to really come to the fore. It has directly transmuted the Trump brand into money, and it has muddied a lot of those pathways. I mean, exactly what's worrying people on both sides

of the aisle about the cut or play in situation, like we've taken that to like a whole different degree with the sort of anonymous money situation stemming from Trump's crypto businesses. So it wouldn't surprise me if as that continues to come out and continues to be muddier and muddier, that people on both sides of the aisle start to react to that. Will Gottsagen's most recent piece for The Atlantic is titled The Real Trump Family Business

is Crypto. Read it at theatlantic.com. Victoria Chamberlain produced today. Jolie Myers edited. Laura Bullard was on Facts. Andrea Christensdottir and Patrick Boyd were on Sound. I'm Sean Ramesperm, this is Today Explained.