‘Beyond belief’: Trump’s rationale for $1.4 BILLION crypto earnings, Qatari plane raises eyebrows

But what is getting a lot of attention this morning, certainly here on this show, is just how much money Donald John Trump has raked in since returning to the Oval Office. According to his 927-page annual financial disclosure, which was released late yesterday, the president reported eye-popping earnings of $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency-alone related income last year. He earned $635 million from his meme coin, and he pulled in more than $500 million from token sales and $65 million from selling an equity stake related to World Liberty Financial, that of course is the crypto company he co-founded with his sons. And that is just the crypto dough. Trump's reported income soars past $2.2 billion when you include his real estate holdings, various legal settlements, his books, and merchandise. Note that for all of the year 2024, his enterprises pulled in $622 million. Just moments ago, the president was asked about that financial report and his earnings, and here's what he said. I don't get involved in my personal, we have funds that run my money. Well, I've made a lot of money before I became president, and they invest my money, and I don't talk to them, I never, I don't even speak to them. To critics who say you're profiting off the presidency, Mr. Trump. Well, you know why I'm profiting is the stock market's going up, everybody's profiting. Not everybody's profiting. And one thing that is critical to keep in mind, the president is now a major crypto industry operator, and essentially, he's its top policymaker. Now I want you to remember that these aren't just my questions in this show, I want to know what yours are. What do you want to know about the president's financial disclosure, about yesterday's Supreme Court decisions, or anything else in the political or business sphere? What do you want to know? Scan the QR code on your screen, send us those questions, we're going to try to get to them later in the program. But for now, let's get smarter with the help of our lead-off panel. Justin Wolfers joins us, professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan. Natasha Cern, president of the Budget Lab at Yale University and former Treasury official. And Andrew Ross Horkin, you know him, a financial columnist for the New York Times. He co-founded Dealbook, and of course, he's the co-anchor of CNBC's Squawk Box. He just left his show to join ours, so Andrew, you haven't even had time to stretch, but I need you to lay this out for us. Just the crypto, $1.4 billion in crypto, an industry he once called a scam and a disaster waiting to happen. What do you make of this? Lay it out. Well look, the biggest issue within the crypto question is where all the money came from. Some of this money came from the UAE, which took a stake in his family's company. Would they have taken that stake in the company if he was not the president? Was there anything asked for in return? Even if there wasn't something asked for in return, was it clearly an effort to influence the president in some way? And I think, you know, even if you put aside the very real issue of an actual conflict, the perception of a conflict, the fact that we are having this conversation, ultimately undermines our democracy and our belief in the integrity of the system. And that's what I would implore more than anything else. All of these questions that we have, I'm sure there will be investigations, there will be hearings over time about all of this. But underneath it all, the fact that we're even having this conversation is the challenge. And whether we need either more rules, enforcement of current rules, the emolument clause being one of them, so that we don't have to be even having this very discussion. Okay, well not just rules around conflicts of interest, how about regulating the industry? I want to share what former top White House lawyer Ty Cobb said about Trump's crypto earnings. Let's watch this. With regard to the crypto, obviously that's, you know, it's a slimy industry. You know, certainly the way he's going around it, where he creates policies that can only enrich himself and his family, is something that I think the average American should be staggered by. But you mentioned the scale, and I think the scale here is just, it's intentional. There's no question. I mean, we are seeing the greatest onslaught of corruption in the history of mankind. This is somebody who every day is devoted to the accumulation of wealth and power. Given Trump has installed key people in regulatory rules at the SEC and the CFTC, doesn't this raise a huge issue, Natasha, that he is making all of this money, that he is now a major investor, a major player in crypto, and he's the policymaker? It raises a huge set of issues. And by the way, in general, for government officials, you are actually not allowed to be actively investing in areas where you are actively regulating or involved in policymaking. The president has previously said that he is exempt from these rules that apply to everyone who works for him. But again, I think a bunch of what Andrew is describing is really at the heart of this. This is a president who won his reelection on the promise that he was going to make America richer and more affordable for everyday Americans. And what they're watching and observing is him making himself, he and his family making himself richer at turn after turn. This is a report just a few weeks ago we got, remember, about active stock trading in the president's portfolio that had hundreds of trades in just the first quarter of this year. And so all of these raise questions that aren't just about where are these resources coming from, what types of conflicts exist, but also kind of fundamental questions about our democracy and fairness that I worry that are going to take quite some time to actually play out in practice. Justin, to be clear, crypto could still be a disaster waiting to happen. According to Reuters, the crypto venture alone delivered $2.3 billion to Trump and company while creating similar losses for investors. Yeah. So I think that's a really important part of the president's business operation. This is not a guy who is creating a better widget that enriches people's lives and therefore the company wins when the customer wins. When you're betting on, when you're making financial bets like this, every dollar that's going into the Trump family accounts is a dollar leaving the accounts of the poor suckers who are on the other side of that bet. It's not just that though, Steph, our democracy is not built for this sort of money. Let me just juxtapose two numbers. The president made roughly $2 billion in the first year of his presidency. Total funding by Republicans to buy that presidency was less than $2 billion. So what that has basically said is buying the next election, you will earn it all back in the first of your four year term. If there's anyone out there with a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit, go buy yourself an election. It's now so profitable. It's the most profitable investment you can make. Our top story tonight is a number and the number is the price of self-dealing, self-enrichment and what many reports say is normalized corruption in the Trump White House. That number is $2.2 billion, a staggering amount of money that only because of disclosure rules are we now learning, the reason it's news tonight, that Donald Trump made that not from four years of the presidency or a 10 year estimate. That is just in the year 2025 alone, the first year of his second term. And the money is not coming in from say passive investments or just what it means to have a pseudo billionaire president. It is coming in at a far faster clip than anything he did in the first term because of how much time and energy he's spending off the job, not doing the people's business, not doing what he promised to do, not doing the job of the presidency because he has side jobs and plans and what the kids call a side hustle. He has been moonlighting on a lot of other projects and they are making a lot of money. And they're not projects that to be clear he was making money on before he was in the White House. The crypto schemes, some of the stock trades and certainly some of the mining deals that we reported on just this week are a product of him being president. This isn't about say if a rich person like Michael Bloomberg became president and continued to make interest on his investments. This is very specifically a crisis for the Trump presidency because it breaks his past vows. It shows the conflicts of interest and puts a number on the self-dealing and self-enrichment, some of which I can tell you might be legal. And then the question is, should it be? And some of which raises questions of bribery, quid pro quo, constitutional emoluments. All of this is in the new disclosure. And this morning we saw an illustration of how these conflicts of interest work. For example, no other president has taken large foreign contributions or gifts. No other president. And yet today of all days, we see the maiden flight for Donald Trump on this Air Force One, which was a gift from the government of Qatar. And he is expected to try to find a way to keep the plane you're looking at because it's a foreign gift and use it for his institutions, organizations, library or personal use after leaving office. No one's saying that in this great capitalist country, you can't just go make a lot of money for yourself and do self-enrichment. That's what Wall Street and fortunes are made and lost that way. That's what business is all about. But the public service in office demands something different. And so what we just showed you, Trump contradicting himself, owning himself, if you will. The guy once said this is a scam, then realized he could make money off it, off his fans. And now he's into it. And that kind of looting or profiteering is not generally acceptable in the American government. Indeed, I will just tell you some of what he's doing is legal because, as I mentioned, we have these kind of exemptions for the president that are different than other other jobs. But if you took the exact same facts I just told you about and applied them to other types of government officials, a judge, a member of Congress, you could literally wind up in jail for doing what is actually publicly reported tonight that Trump is doing. And whether there are others around him who should be investigated is an open question if we had a working DOJ or aggressive subpoena powered Congress, which we might get after November. We don't know. Some of Trump's crypto profits come from the half a billion dollars linked to a foreign government. In fact, just before the inauguration and that investment firm tied to the UAE government bought basically half of the Trump crypto firm, making it look like an inauguration related effort to get to the president, meaning they weren't interested in giving that money away to him unless and until he was about to become president again. Months later, the UAE struck a deal. The Times reports that the Trump administration over national security objections to export valuable computer chips that power AI. So Trump gets rich. Other people, though, are on the losing end. We can show you a chart. Trump or gripping two billion dollars while investors lost over two billion dollars because the things they're selling don't have a lot of value in the real market. Trump also reported over 20,000 stock trades in a whole bunch of investment accounts. That's 24 times the number of transactions previously disclosed. And the question is why, again, as I told you, someone who is supposed to be busy being president who supposedly has enough money, why are they so actively trading, whether it's through a third party or not? Well, the details don't help Donald Trump's denials that this has nothing to do with being president and that he's not abusing power. Dell got a 10 billion dollar Pentagon contract that became public after Trump bought stock in the company. And Dell has been making a lot of money because of the AI and government relationships they have. But whether someone traded on inside information, like I told you, something that would be illegal and land you in jail if you weren't the president, is the big question. Trump has used his platform to praise companies that he invested in, Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft. And then there's 80 million dollars tonight because of these disclosures that we see Trump got by shaking down these major companies that, of course, have to do business with and be regulated by the United States government. We've heard about that over time, but in the disclosure, you see that all in, he reaped 80 million dollars from that alone, another 200 M in profits from his properties. The comparison there would be he's clearly making far more from abusing presidential powers, shaking down companies and suing them and selling crypto than from the thing that he claims his business empire was built on, being a real estate mogul. I want to show you how we got here, because part of what's happened in the second term is a kind of degradation of even the most basic baseline rules and principles. And in any modern society, there will be things that are done because we agree to do them together. What you might call the social contract, I don't mean to sound naive, and not all of them have to be enforced at the point of a gun or the threat of prosecution. And so when we talk about clean, good government, not holding a second job, not abusing your government powers to just enrich yourself or your family, apart from the laws, that is something that, believe it or not, most presidents have refrained from and all presidents have refrained from at the scale of Donald Trump. And we can go one better. The first presidency of Donald Trump also refrained from it. So maybe you need a psychologist or a historian to figure out why he is behaving so much worse now having captured the Republican Party and degraded the Justice Department and all the things that, as a news viewer, you probably know. But I want to remind you tonight, in 2017, during the period where Trump had won the election, was getting ready to take office, and there were all these unprecedented questions and he had all his business interests, he did claim then something that he's not doing now and not claiming now. He, at that point, felt the need to say, and he had lawyers backing him up, that they were going to avoid the kind of conflicts we're living through today and that he would step away from and not operate his business interests. My two sons, who are right here, Don and Eric, are going to be running the company. They are going to be running it in a very professional manner. They're not going to discuss it with me. He is completely isolating himself from his business interests. He is not exploiting the office of the presidency for his personal benefit. No new foreign deals will be made whatsoever during the duration of President Trump's presidency. I could actually run my business and run government at the same time. Again, I don't have to do this. Trump was claiming that he could be worse, but he wasn't going to be that bad. In other words, even 2017 Donald Trump knew that it would be bad to try to run your business and the government at the same time, to be actively involved, to hold those two jobs, that there would be conflicts. I want you to just take a moment and remember what he said there. He and his lawyers said there won't be new foreign deals, because to even do a deal, a back-and-forth business deal with other countries while you're also running foreign policy is a huge conflict of interest, and the American taxpayer or the American soldier could lose out. So you don't want that kind of conflict. We went from Donald Trump claiming no foreign new deals to Donald Trump taking $400 million in a free gift from a foreign government that, of course, expects something in return. That's how fast we've gone downhill. The $2 billion he raked in last year is more than the previous year when he was a candidate. Trump's White House denies any wrongdoing, and they don't have really logical answers for why all of a sudden he's making so much as president, which seems to be related to the powers of the presidency and not just, say, his general private citizen revenue rate. And we're seeing, even in conservative circles, this is too much. It's so grifty. I'm not going to lie. It's grifty. You know, the Trump family is grifty. There's been like story after story about all the money that his sons are making off of the government, these government contracts they're getting, all that. I can't stand that stuff. There was this story this week, too, about his sons making money off a deal in Kazakhstan. What's the White House's position on all these questions? That's what Americans wanted. They wanted a businessman in office if they think that this issue is not permeating across the country with people going, huh, wait, what? Your children are involved in this. And if you remember, we spent a lot of time talking about Hunter Biden. I didn't like it when Hunter Biden was doing it, and I don't like it when the Trumps are doing it. That's the sound of the criticism on the right. You don't need to be a political expert to see why this is terribly unpopular and this is bad news for the president, a bad night for the president, a bad disclosure report for President Trump, because corruption is unpopular and it is unpopular in a long-term nonpartisan way. It's something that they were concerned about at the founding of this nation. This is a fitting week to think about that as we approach the 250th July 4th. Corruption is bad. That corruption undercuts the very theory of having a government fought by the people for the people because the corruption undercuts that and you end up getting worse and worse people in charge who are enriching themselves and not thinking about you. There's a reason why he ran on Drain the Swamp. And if you're listening and saying, well, Ari, I knew that was BS the whole time. You knew it back in 2016. Well, you were right because he is the swamp. But something else is happening on this issue. Just like Epstein, just like the war, just like the high prices, a bunch more people may be joining where you are or if you weren't following politics then or you didn't have that view, you might be one of those people looking up and saying, even if you like other things about some of what the Republican Party offers and elections show that people have that view in America, there is nothing that anybody who is informed would like about having a profiteering, corrupt government, which ultimately is stealing from you. Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. As America's two hundred and fiftieth birthday nears, as a heat wave bears down on much of the country powered by climate change and the price of gas still hovers around four bucks a gallon, Donald Trump, well, he's he's playing with his favorite new toy, taking a maiden voyage on his new Air Force One. You know, the seven forty seven he accepted from the Qatari government in just flagrant open violation of the Constitution, which bars foreign gifts like this. And that's not a small trinket. That's the plane with the new paint scheme. So reminiscent of the old Trump Organization aircraft. So this was a gift from a country that's treated us very well and they're an ally of us over in the Middle East, Qatar. And I went to Boeing. I said, who has the best one? They said, Qatar. There's no there's never been a plane like it. So I said, I'd like to use it. And the Amir Nameem, who is a great gentleman, he said, no, no, I'd like to make a contribution to the country. You'll be shocked to hear that that's not exactly how it all went down, that it's not just a free gift to the country. First of all, the Qataris tried to sell it for years, no one to buy it. And then, of course, there's the nine hundred and thirty four million dollars, almost a billion dollars of your money. It appears to have taken for the U.S. government to make the foreign owned jet suitable for presidential travel. So it cost a billion dollars also, except for the fact it's not for future presidents. According to Trump himself, the jet will be transferred to the yet to be created Trump presidential library after he leaves office in twenty twenty nine. Also it was not a gift. Multiple outlets reported the time that Trump asked Qatar for the plane, which you see there as Trump poses in front of them. As we just learned from regime change, the new book on Trump's second term by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, at some point after Qatar agreed to give Trump the plane, it was announced the aircraft would be a gift, an idea that a senior official would say was generated at the POTUS level. So we kind of just took the plane and then charged you a billion dollars for it. Money that could have gone to, like, I don't know, health care premiums. And then he's going to keep it after he's done. I mean, at this point, the corruption is so frequent and so brazen that he's shoving our faces it he I think he's sort of delighting in the transgressive thrill of it all. I'm not just talking about his vanity projects like the ballroom and the flecting pool on the arch. The weird passport, which he appears to think doesn't go to citizens, but to immigrants. The restoration of Washington's fountains, even though a new Washington Post analysis signs that for the past three months, Trump has talked about those projects more. He's talked about health care and wages. That stuff's just the tip of the iceberg. On Tuesday, reporters gained access to nearly a thousand pages of new financial disclosure forms showing that Trump's reported income soared to more than two point two billion dollars last year as he took in more than one point four billion from crypto and digital schemes alone. In fact, according to a Reuters investigation, Trump and his sons have added at least two point three billion dollars to the family fortune from their main crypto ventures. While the investors they would have lost a near identical amount. Think about that. While the investors they would lost him in other words, a direct transfer of two point three billion dollars from those pokes out there into the pockets of the president and his family. In response, a White House spokesperson said, all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people. Again, they're playing in our faces, right? Sure. Those aren't investors. Those are benefactors. The president says, says the president, as it says, that's his business, not yours. Mr. President, you had a very lucrative year last year. What message does this send to average Americans, especially those who are, you know, I don't get involved in my personal. We have funds that run my money. I'd never speak to any of the people that run the money, but they're at big institutions and they invest in whatever they invest, but to critics, to critics who say you're profiting off the presidency. Mr. Well, you know why I'm profiting because the stock market is going up. Everybody's profiting. If you have a you have a 401k, how's your 401k done? It's about up 85 percent. Thank you, President Trump. So we're all profiting. I'm profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash. Now, again, this is all, I think, basically intentional. He likes sort of flagrantly violating while he's saying that he has nothing to do with the stock trades. His sons who oversee the portfolio are right in the shot and they're going to fly the train with the plane with it. Right. Also, the two point three billion dollars, the main source of the guy's revenue this year wasn't the stock market. It was the crypto schemes. But again, he doesn't care how any of this looks, as he said in a January interview about his son's many conflicts of interest. I prohibited them from doing business in my first term and I got absolutely no credit for it. Trump said it's not really true, by the way. I didn't have to do that. And it's really unfair to them. He added, quote, I found out that nobody cared and I'm allowed to. In fact, over the weekend, The New York Times reported on a billion dollar mining deal that Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick closed with Kazakhstan in which, oh, surprise, guys, contracts are going to businesses with ties to both men's sons. So the Lutnick boys and the Trump boys are going to make a mint off of this deal negotiated by the president and the commerce sector. In fact, the Times found that Trump and Lutnick families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals. We're just talking about the mining portfolio, including the Kazakhstan project. We're not even talking about the weird drone company and the other federal contracts at D.O.D. that Don Jr. and Eric are running around trying to get. The White House and the Congress department reject any suggestion the Trump administration was improperly mixing government actions with family business. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump's beloved White House ballroom was being built under, oh, look at this, a secret 500 million dollar no bid contract similar to the ones the administration doled out for the botch reflecting pool job, which, by the way, let's hope this one goes better. White House officials said that they could award the no bid contract by routing it through the executive residence, which is not bound by competitive bidding requirements. Also on Tuesday, The Atlantic reported on a new White House effort to grant pardons that are tied to the 250th birthday celebrations, setting off a kind of bidding war for clemency. One prominent white collar defense attorney told the magazine, quote, It is general knowledge in our practice that for two million dollars, you can have a part. The clients come to us and tell us, I've been told I need to go hire this specific person and then I will get a part. Is the White House selling pardons? I mean, it sounds like it. I don't know. This is the whole game for Donald Trump. As those reporters, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, suggest throughout regime change, U.S. policy is dictated by whoever appeals most directly to Trump in his vanity. Now a CEO can simply ask for something. It was granted. He would reportedly dictate exact dollar figures to extract from each CEO. And within days, millions of dollars and then tens and hundreds of millions were pouring into Trump's various fundraising accounts. And according to the White House, all this is what Trump voters wanted. The story this week, too, about his sons making money off a deal in Kazakhstan. What's the White House's position on all these questions? Well, I think the president said it best. And let's remember, Bill, why Americans elected this president to office, because he was an outsider who was tremendously successful in business, built the New York City skyline. And that's what Americans wanted. They wanted a businessman in office. Oh, yes. The kind of outsider who is the president of the country and negotiates his mining deals so his sons can make money off it. That kind of outsider. Suck it up. This is what a great businessman looks like, right? That's the White House's message to Americans who are struggling in their daily lives, looking up at this guy and his family swimming like Scrooge McDuck in a sea of corruption and The sheer scope of how much money President Trump has made in office can be kind of hard to fathom. But think about it like this. In the last year Trump was out of office in 2024, he was still making a ton, $622 million. But his first year back in the White House, that tripled to more than $2 billion, in large part thanks to his enormous and controversial cryptocurrency investments like World Liberty Financial, which raked in $799 million last year. The sales of the company's crypto tokens and his own Trump meme coin, all worth $636 million alone. Here with me to discuss that and more, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey. Senator, good to have you. Thank you for being with us. Democrats have pushed for years for more disclosures, tougher ethics rules. It has not seemed to work. What do you do to stop this grift? Well, obviously, Trump has been engaging in an all you can eat corruption buffet. And today's report is just further evidence of that, $2 billion in one year as president of the United States. That's just a classic case of insider trading. He's just making money over on all of the insider information, which he and his family members have. And that's just absolutely outrageous. I'm actually the author of the Insider Trading Act of the United States of America. That is just plain wrong, what he is doing. Public office is a sacred trust. You're supposed to be working to help every other family meet their needs rather than self enrichment. But it's very clear that's who Trump is. And today he's flying around in a gift from the Qatari government of the Air Force. One is a gift from a foreign nation in oil and natural gas producing nature, a nation that is all part of this incredible picture of corruption, which is the Trump administration for his cronies, for his children, for his corporations and for himself. Maybe that all you can eat buffet you reference is where your Republican colleague got those lobster tails he was teasing for 4th of July. Reporters asked the president about his financial disclosures today. Let's take a listen and then we'll talk about it on the other side. Mr. President, what message does this send to average Americans, especially those who may be struggling right now financially? I don't get involved in my personal. We have funds that run my money. To critics who say you're profiting off the presidency, Mr. Well, you know, I'm profiting because the stock market is going up. Everybody's profiting. You have a 401k. How's your 401k? Done. It's got up. Eighty five percent. Thank you, President Trump. So we're all profiting. I'm profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash and. OK, a lot of people do not have money in the stock market or in 401ks. Everybody is not profiting. Everybody is paying more for gas at the pump. Everybody is paying more for beef at the supermarket. How do Democrats highlight the disconnect that the president thinks you're doing fine out there? Because I'm doing fine. Yeah, these are individual investments which Donald Trump made last year. And he has been able to see an incredible windfall profit to himself personally. And this doesn't even count all the rest of his family members and cronies, Albania or other countries around the world where they're moving in. And this is just a perfect example of him being the corruption commander in chief. That's who he is. And in everything he does is towards his own self enrichment rather than dealing with the fact that gasoline prices are up, food prices are up, health care costs are up, electricity prices are up. That's what people want the president of the United States to be working on every single day. And he has failed on that mission for every other family in our country. And that is why people are angry. And we're seeing it at the polls in state after state after state. Trump is enriching himself at the expense of the American people, the policies that should be guiding our nation. He's compromising them in order to, in fact, himself get richer while everyone else in the country is getting poorer by the day. And he thinks that his enrichment is somehow or other being enjoyed by every other American. It is just the opposite. They are having a hard time meeting their monthly bills for everything. That's why these Republicans at the Humpston Senate level are going to pay a huge price on Election Day this year. Senator, let's talk about what we saw this week from the Supreme Court just hours after yesterday's birthright citizenship ruling came down. The Trump Justice Department directed prosecutors to target, quote, birth tourists or foreign nationals who arrive in the United States pregnant and give birth here. They are not satisfied by what they got yesterday from the Supreme Court. They are not going to stop simply because the Supreme Court says that birthright is, in fact, constitutional. What would what the Justice Department is suggesting actually look like in practice? And what can you do to push back? This is just a continuation of the Trump administration attempts to make America great again by making America hate again. What they did last Friday in the Supreme Court decision saying that 350,000 Haitians have to leave our country and its protections in order to go back to a country where our American citizens are told it's too dangerous to go. Well, yesterday, the Supreme Court decision on demonizing transgender kids. And today they're seeking again just to keep this issue of hate, of discrimination, of an attempt to demonize others in order to distract from the affordability crisis which we have in our country. So they are just going to continue this all the way to Election Day. But it was very clear yesterday that the Supreme Court ruled that you cannot change the United States Constitution with a sharpie. And they struck that down. And all they're trying to do today is just keep some life in this issue. But it's not going to work because the American people can see, in fact, how their lives are absolutely being negatively affected by the cost of living issues, the inflation issues, the affordability issues that are at the core of what it is that they have to deal with every single day. Senator, I only have about 30 seconds left, but I do have to ask you, in light of this week's rulings from the Supreme Court about court expansion, I know it's an idea that you have supported in the past. You still have a lot of Democratic colleagues who are not there. Is this a conversation you're having inside the caucus? Yes. I am the author of the court expansion bill. The Republicans stole two Supreme Court seats in 2016 and 2020. That's what's giving them their supermajority. The only way to solve this problem in a very short period of time is to expand the Supreme Court by four seats up to 13. That would then restore the 7 to 6 majority, which should be in place right now. And we have to fight for that, and we can do that statutorily. It does not require a constitutional amendment. That has to be at the top of the agenda, and that's what I'm talking to my colleagues about right now. President Trump is heading to North Dakota in his new Qatari jet amid revelations that he has been raking in a whopping $2.2 billion windfall last year. And yes, that is billion with a B. Most of this money is coming from crypto, a complex and somewhat shadowy industry. The president himself regulates, and it's all raising concerns about how Trump and his family may be making money off the presidency. I don't get involved in my personal. We have funds that run my money. You know why I'm profiting? Because the stock market's going up. Everybody's profiting. So we're all profiting. I'm profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash. It's an especially painful contrast right now. As Americans report, they're struggling to pay their bills. One third of Republicans say inflation and prices are their top concern, and 71 percent of voters aren't sure the president has his priorities straight. Case in point, his dismissal of the bipartisan housing affordability bill. I think it's so unimportant by compared to by compared to the Save America Act. Some people say it's wonderful. To me, compared to the Save America Act, just about everything is a big yawn. Housing affordability, I guess it's just a bore to the White House. And although Congress is supposed to be a co-equal branch of government, they're fully tied in knots right now over the president's priorities. In fact, their work has completely ground to a halt. They're getting out of town early for July 4th, leaving the House with only 24 legislative days before the midterms. Let's bring in to break all this down Bloomberg White House correspondent Jeff Mason, deputy White House press secretary in the first Trump administration Sarah Matthews and Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander. And he is the author of White House Incorporated How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency Into a Business. Jeff, I'm going to start with you. Is this White House concerned at all with the optics here of the president hopping on a Qatari gifted jet amid these new crypto concerns? Well, I think the answer to that is no, it's not a concern for them. Otherwise, they wouldn't have gone this in this direction. President Trump is super excited about that plane. And every time you ask a White House official about his business and his family business and whether or not he's profiting off of his presidency, they dismiss that and and talk about him having a high ethical standards and this not being an issue. So no, I don't think they're concerned, but others are. And that carries political risk for him, certainly at the same time when when the housing bill that you were just referencing in the intro is not moving forward, at least right now, so far without his signature, maybe it'll become law without his signature. I actually asked him that question in the Oval Office on Monday. And that answer about it being a yawn can't have been what his Republican colleagues wanted to hear on the Hill at a time when affordability is going to be a buzzword in the midterms and at a time when they're trying to hold on to power in Congress. So should it be his concern? That's not for me to answer. Is it a concern? It doesn't appear to be. Sarah, we're, of course, learning the president has been railing against Republicans who tanked a vote to get the Save America Act passed, the election related bill that the president's obsessed with. That's what he's insisting gets done. As you just heard just spell out there, too, is sort of an exchange for this housing affordability issue. When you look at the dynamics here, what does it tell us about this president, the people around him, and their priorities? I think that if President Trump was doing everything in his power to tank Republicans' chances in the midterms, he wouldn't be doing anything differently. That's what it seems like. It seems like he does not care about the party, which he never has, to be fair. He has never cared about what is good for the betterment of the Republican Party. He has only ever cared about himself and accumulating as much power as possible. And that's what his voter suppression bill, the Save America Act, would do. And he's so hung up on the 2020 election that that is what his priority is. He doesn't care about affordability. He's called it a hoax, said that Democrats have created it. He obviously doesn't care about housing, called this unimportant. And I know that that had a lot of Republicans on the Hill who were wanting to bang their head against the wall when they heard him say that. Because look, when you look at something like housing, that is a big deal for voters, especially of my generation, where affording a home and buying a home is out of reach for most of us. And so then when there is this bipartisan bill that is an easy win for Republicans in the midterms to point to as a tangible thing that they did to address the affordability crisis, Trump has to immediately make it all about himself and try to use it as leverage to get what he wants passed. Which is not something that I think is a priority of the majority of voters right now. They don't really care about this Save America Act. They care about what is he doing to lower costs for me and my family. Dan, you know, the split screen between what Americans are feeling, their concerns about just being able to cover basic bills and survival, contrasted with the $2.2 billion there, that is a lot of cash for the president to reveal. He's made unimaginable for most people who are struggling right now. Can you just walk us through the breakdown of where all this money for the president has been coming from? Yeah, it is a tremendous amount of money. And if you look at this, about $1.4 billion of that is from two crypto ventures. So first, Donald Trump launched World Liberty Financial before the election. Not too many people took notice. Then he won the election. All of a sudden, a lot of people started buying tokens of World Liberty. And the way that that business is structured, it funneled most of the proceeds back to Donald Trump. And so if you look at those token sales, plus a stake sale that he later made, that gets to almost $800 million right there. Then you have his meme coin, and it appears that his meme coin has thrown off roughly $635 million. Add those two things together, you're at a really big number. But I want to emphasize something here that people might miss. It's not just that he's making a lot of money while the economy is struggling. He's making a lot of money when the investments that he pitched are struggling. The meme coin, World Liberty Financial tokens are down significantly from their highs. And the big question for Donald Trump is how much money he's able to suck out of these ventures before sort of the ruse is up, before these things continue to decline to a level where he's not able to get much more out of it. And what we see on these filings is that he's already taken a tremendous amount of money out. Dan, do you get the sense that your average voter is aware, not just of the fact that he's able to kind of pull the rug out via some of these schemes here, but then also just to the fact that he is basically the chief regulator of this industry that he and his family are now so tied into? I do think that people are aware. And the reason that I think that people are aware is because the reason that you saw a run up in a lot of crypto assets was because of Donald Trump's own policies. Another revelation on this filing that came out yesterday was that Donald Trump personally held Bitcoin wallets worth more than $100 million. That's in addition to the indirect interest in Bitcoin that we knew he owned through Trump Media and Technology Group, which made a multi-billion dollar bet on the cryptocurrency last summer. The value of Bitcoin was soaring when Donald Trump was elected. And then as he comes into office and throws off a lot of the restrictions, totally changes the attitude of the administration toward crypto. That creates this massive wave of money. And then it also may have created a bubble, because what we've seen now in the last handful of months is that the value of Bitcoin has decreased significantly as people sort of say, wait a second, that's it? You know, I mean, we got all these things, but how do we actually make money out of these assets? So these things are moving on his decisions. And I think investors and people are very aware of that. Sarah, I want to play something for you that Congressman Troy Nels recently said to Midas Touch, because it's really not just the president here, as much as people make everything that's happening here about him personally, the reality is, it seems that other people in his party are not taking the issues of affordability very seriously. Take a listen to this. How do House Republicans make the case that you're fighting for affordability when you go back to your districts? Affordability? What are you talking about? Well, affordability is the big one. I'm going to go to tomorrow. I'm going to, well, over to 4th. I'm going to get me a couple of big lobster tails. I'm going to get me some nice ribeyes. I'm going to sit in my backyard with my family, my neighbors. You think 60% of Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck can afford lobster tails and ribeyes and all of that? Maybe not. Maybe, maybe the 60% of America don't work as hard as I do. Maybe those 60% of Americans don't work as hard as I do. After he talks about lobster tails and ribeye, I mean, why? Why would a congressman even say that right now, Sarah? You know, I wish I had an answer for that and could understand the inner workings of congressman, that congressman's brain, but I just think that Troy Nails is clearly not that bright because there's no reason you would say something like that unless you quite literally do not have any amount of, or any ounce of empathy for the struggling Americans right now. Look, millions of Americans across this country are struggling right now in this economy, whether it's skyrocketing gas prices because of Trump's war of choice with Iran or inflation causing the cost of everything to rise. And he goes out there and makes some claim like that and says, oh, well, maybe these Americans aren't working hard enough or working as hard as me. I mean, I'm actually at a loss for words. That's the first time I've seen that clip. And I just, I can't imagine anything more tone deaf than that right now. And look, everything that this administration is doing is just exacerbating the issues that already existed. We were already facing an affordability crisis when Trump came into office and everything he's done, whether that be the war with Iran, his asinine tariffs and everything else in this administration, it just is making things worse. And so if I were a congressman or senator, just a Republican running in the midterms, I would be trying to run as far away from those policies as possible and speaking to my constituents or my voters and telling them what I would be doing to help address the affordability crisis, not trying to make light of it or say that they don't work hard enough. I mean, that's just such a slap in the face. And I hope that the people in his district are paying attention and vote someone like him out of office. But I think that he's in a pretty safe seat so he can get away with making such stupid and out of touch remarks like that.