‘Outrageous’: Trump kids’ massive pay day revealed
As Donald Trump pushes the US closer and closer to a recession, his five children are using his time in office to make serious bank.
OPINION
I’m taking bets now – how long until Donald Trump puts his face on the money – the actual dollar bills?
Before Julius Caesar came along, coins just had a nice eagle or Greek god on them – right up until Rome’s answer to Kanye West had the brainwave to put his own mug on there.
So Trump on the twenty? Mark my words.
The president’s second term is really a story about money.
Because amid Tariff-geddon and Greenlanders buying up crash helmets, what is getting much less attention is that Mr Trump has been busy milking every dollar he can out of his time in office.
And his five kids?
With deals involving everything from a drone company to an Albanian real estate deal to crypto, bitcoin-mining and reaping billions of dollars of investment from Saudi Arabia, they are all up to their glaringly white veneers in using Daddy’s time in office to their own advantage
For Donald Jnr, Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany and Barron Trump, grossly and brazenly capitalising on their father’s presidency and flaunting their 0.01 percenter lifestyles is the name of the game.
So long, old, boring notions of probity and just quietly getting on with an average job at McKinsey – and hello to making themselves fresh fortunes to spend on $67 mahi mahi appetisers or reupholstering their private jets, in between finding the best Insta angles to get the Matterhorn in.
If only it had occurred to Sasha and Malia Obama to get in on a Serbian hotel development.
This week we got the most outrageous example yet, with Donald Jnr and Eric diving even further into the crypto world – only weeks after Mr Trump ordered that the US government buy up crypto to create a national stockpile.
Don’t be so cynical, I’m sure they’re unrelated events.
The brothers have revealed they are getting into bitcoin mining, after having announced plans in March to launch a US dollar-backed stable coin, all part of what the Wall Street Journal simply described as the Trump family’s “all-out crypto blitz”.
And it’s not just the young ‘uns. Mr Trump and his part-time wife Melania Trump launched their own meme coins around inauguration day, and his social media-yelling platform Truth Social has said it will invest hundreds of million in bitcoin.
What is a stable coin? Can I explain bitcoin in a sentence? Absolutely not, but what every expert, thinker and economist agrees on is that the Trump family seems poised to build their wealth like King Midas.
According to Bloomberg, Don Jr “has been particularly active in lining up business deals that could benefit from his proximity to power”.
He has spent the last few months swapping fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle for a blonder gal and taking on roles at companies that, what a coincidence, could make scads of money from the very policies being set by his dear old dad about everything from China to online betting marketplaces to Pentagon spending.
Don Jnr’s adjacency to the Oval Office has not exactly hurt his bank balance.
Take one example.
On November 27 last year, a drone manufacturer publicly named him as an adviser, sending shares in the company surging 249 per cent. The value of Junior’s stake in the company made him $2.48 million richer overnight.
Then there is a Trump in everything but name – Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner – who has managed to raise $4.5 billion from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates for his own investment fund.
The connections and relationships to pull in these huge sums of money, the New York Times has reported, were “built” when Mr Kushner served as an official White House adviser during Mr Trump’s first term.
The DC-to-dosh pipeline is a clear one.
In January, the Albanian government gave Jared and Ivanka the green light for two luxury developments off the coast.
The couple also have a $833 million hotel and condominium complex in Belgrade, which was secured “after years of secretive negotiations and involvement from Serbia’s political elite”, according to Politico.
But even the younger Trumps’ dealings are several Milky Ways away from normal First Children behaviour.
Tiffany Trump’s Instagram makes her life look like it was created by ChatGPT if it were given the prompt “blonde heiress, no obvious day job”.
In November, the same month as her father was re-elected, Tiff was bobbing around the Med on a boat that appeared to be about the size of a minor postcode.
Three weeks later, she was posting photos from Zermatt, using the backdrop of the exclusive Swiss ski resort to announce her pregnancy – and in March, more skiing.
One of these shots showed a Marie Antoinette-worthy spread of desserts so vast it would make Augustus Gloop cry tears of joy; meanwhile, the Trump administration has cancelled or frozen billions of dollars in food aid in the US.
One in five American children were already food insecure before Mr Trump announced his sweeping global tariff-a-thon.
According to the wonders of a Google search, a luxe chalet in Zermatt costs $507,000 per week in the high season, which is equal to the annual salary of nearly 10 non-college-educated Americans, who predominantly voted for her father.
Even baby Trump Barron has been busy doing some convention junking of his own, and is reportedly set to dive into the luxury real estate business.
Last year, at age 18, he formed Trump, Fulcher & Roxburgh Capital Inc with two former classmates.
They incorporated a business in Wyoming, then dissolved it after Mr Trump’s win – however, the team has said it will be relaunched in the coming months.
His parents both have meme coins – how long until he has one too?
If Trump senior is a hurtling vortex of mayhem and honey mustard sauce stains constantly out for himself, his kids don’t seem to have fallen far from the tree.
It now seems positively quaint that while George W Bush was working out how to spell “WMDs”, his twin daughters Jenna and Barbara were seen as shocking and oh-so-naughty, and were reportedly “a secret service nightmare”, with their bodyguards once having to take the man who later became Jenna’s husband to hospital after a Halloween party for drinking too much.
Imagine if, while their fathers were in office, Chelsea Clinton or Malia and Sasha Obama had done so much as a lucrative shampoo ad? The outrage from Republicans would have been deafening.
The outlier in the non-Trump first child stakes is black sheep Hunter Biden, whose laptop launched 1001 conspiracy theories.
The Trump kids seem to have gotten a free pass from conservatives to cash in on MAGA-dom while simultaneously still slavishly, rabidly pushing for Hunter and his aged Dell to be sent to some black site in the former Soviet bloc.
While the Trump kids are set to emerge from this term wealthier and with an even more elite NetJet status, regular Americans are about to hit severely tough times with a recession looking ever more likely.
After Mr Trump launched a nearly unthinkable global trade war last week with trillions of dollars wiped off global markets, the best-performing consumer stock on the New York Stock Exchange was a company that sells frozen potatoes.
Let them eat spuds – and let the Trump family’s cash registers ring.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
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