Trump Surfaces and Crashes Out at Presser

Donald Trump held a press conference in front of a newly acquired Qatari 747—a plane gifted to him by Qatar and refurbished at taxpayer expense for over a billion dollars—and the event quickly became a showcase for the central tension of his presidency: the gap between his claims of patriotic leadership and the evidence of personal enrichment, incompetence, and foreign entanglement.

The presser was supposed to be a victory lap. Instead, reporters pressed Trump on his latest financial disclosures, which show he made close to two billion dollars from crypto and stock trades—21,000 individual trades, a volume that implies near-constant activity. When asked how he could profit so heavily while in office, Trump deflected: "Well, you know what, because the stock market's going up. Everybody's profiting. If you have a 401k, how's your 401k done? It's about up 85%. Thank you, President Trump. So we're all profiting." He then claimed his money is managed by institutions in what he called a "blind account," adding, "I purposely never speak to any of the people that run the money." The chart shown during the segment contrasted his 21,000 trades against every other modern president, who made virtually none.

The Qatari Jet and the Cost to Taxpayers