Here’s How Much Money Trump Has Made Off the Presidency So Far

Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, have been making deals and raking in money ever since Trump won the election, including a cool $40 million to license Melania’s documentary about returning to the White House as first lady.

That’s just one of Trump’s numerous moneymaking schemes since his return to office, which have netted him and his family nearly $80 million so far, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. That includes donations to his future presidential library and a hefty $10 million settlement with Elon Musk’s X. That sum doesn’t include the millions the president and first lady have each netted from “meme coin” cryptocurrency ventures, a blatant means of scamming MAGA supporters.

Melania’s upcoming Amazon documentary may be one of the most obviously corrupt deals. The Journal reports that the first lady, the president, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, all had dinner at Mar-a-Lago in December, where Melania sold Bezos on her movie. Two weeks after that dinner, Amazon agreed to shell out the $40 million, nearly three times as much as the next best offer and the most the company has ever spent on a documentary.

The first lady is reportedly getting over 70 percent of the $40 million, and her agent is trying to sell “sponsorships” to executives and billionaires for the movie, with $10 million as the starting price. In return, these sponsors would get thanked in the credits and be invited to the premiere.

Some of Amazon’s competitors weren’t even interested in the film. Netflix and Apple declined to field offers, while Paramount only bid $4 million on distribution rights. The only other company that showed some interest was Disney, but their offer was just $14 million.

According to an Amazon spokesperson, “We licensed the upcoming Melania Trump documentary film and series for one reason and one reason only—because we think customers are going to love it.”

That seems hard to believe. Amazon and Bezos are shelling out money not because they love the documentary but because they are cozying up to the president to stay on his good side and hopefully get some favorable decisions from the Republican-controlled government. In Trump’s second term, it’s all about cash for favors, with no concern about appearing corrupt.

The DOGE website is wide open and vulnerable to hackers, according to reporting from 404 Media. Two coders had already infiltrated the site and left their own messages on it at the time of 404’s reporting on Thursday evening: “THis is a joke of a .gov site,” said one, and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro” said another. 

This will be unsurprising to anyone who has visited the DOGE.gov website since its inception—it looks like a high schooler could’ve made it. 404’s Jason Koebler previously referred to it as “just a Wordpress theme placeholder page.”  

Anonymous experts told 404 Media that the DOGE.gov website is supported by a Cloudflare page outside of government servers, making it easily accessible to third-party hackers. 

“Feels like it was completely slapped together,” one of the sources said. “Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”

Musk has yet to comment on the hacks as he continues promising “transparency.”

It seems like New York Mayor Eric Adams got exactly what he wanted from Donald Trump’s Department of Justice—and then some.

Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon resigned Thursday, two days after acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop the charges against Adams. Bove claimed that they hindered the mayor’s ability to target immigrants at Trump’s behest.

In a scathing eight-page letter announcing her resignation, Sassoon revealed that her office was preparing to hit Adams with a superseding indictment from a new grand jury.

“We have proposed a superseding indictment that would add an obstruction conspiracy count based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI, and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme,” Sassoon wrote.

Sassoon, who has a strong conservative record and clerked for late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, warned that dismissing the case against Adams would amplify—rather than abate—concerns about weaponization in the Department of Justice.

Adams was previously hit with a 57-page indictment, including five damning public corruption charges, alleging that he’d sought out and taken bribes from the Turkish government. The indictment refers to “a senior official in the Turkish diplomatic establishment” who “facilitated many straw donations” to Adams on behalf of foreign nationals and businesses.

Sassoon’s letter revealed that Adams’s attorneys were up to a similar gambit during his negotiations with the Justice Department. During a meeting on January 31 with Bove, Adams’s lawyers, and members of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, “Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed,” Sassoon wrote, in a footnote of her letter.

“Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion,” Sassoon said, indicating that Bove didn’t wish for a record of Adams’s request to exist. It seems that Adams got exactly what he wanted from Trump’s DOJ.

In her letter, Sassoon criticized the rationale behind dismissing the charges, arguing that Bove and the DOJ had “reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which this case is based.” Instead, Bove argued that dismissal was necessary on policy grounds because the “pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration.”

Sassoon pointed out that “Adams has already seized on the memo to publicly assert that he is innocent and that the accusations against him were unsupported by the evidence and based only on ‘fanfare and sensational claims.’”

“Confidence in the Department would best be restored by means well short of a dismissal,” she added.

Three senior Justice Department officials resigned Thursday rather than drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. 

On Monday, acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop the charges against Adams, claiming that they limited Adams’s ability to help President Trump’s crackdown on immigrants. Apparently, that did not sit well with the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, who opted to resign instead.   

After her office refused to drop the charges against Adams, the DOJ then sought to move the case over to the agency’s Public Integrity Section in Washington, D.C., which handles all federal public corruption cases. But then, the section’s acting head, John Keller, left his position rather than drop the charges. 

As a result, Adams’s case went to the DOJ’s criminal division, which oversees every federal criminal case in the country. Kevin Driscoll, the division’s acting head, didn’t want to drop the charges either, and he then resigned. 

Of all three, Sassoon’s resignation is the most surprising, considering that she has a strong conservative resume. A member of the influential Federalist Society, she once clerked for Supreme Court Justice and conservative stalwart Antonin Scalia. More recently, she captured the national spotlight for prosecuting cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The stunning sequence of events evokes memories of the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973, when President Nixon tried to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was tasked with investigating the infamous Watergate scandal, causing the top two officials in the DOJ to resign instead. It was only the third ranking DOJ official at the time, conservative Robert Bork, who finally agreed to carry out the firing. 

The Trump administration appears to be doing Adams a favor for cozying up to the president, ignoring the multiple counts of fraud and bribery against Adams for actions going back to 2014, when he was Brooklyn borough president. It seems that some of the DOJ’s prosecutors can see the corruption coming from on high, even those with right-wing backgrounds.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum threatened Thursday to sue Google after it changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico in its maps, in compliance with Donald Trump’s superficial executive order.

Google announced Tuesday that it had updated the name of the body of water on its maps system, keeping with the standards set by the federal Geographic Names Information System. In the U.S., the name would appear as the inane “Gulf of America”; in Mexico, the “Gulf of Mexico”; and everywhere else would see a monstrous “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).”

During a press conference Thursday, Sheinbaum said that her government had exchanged letters with Google about the issue but that the company had not resolved the complaints.

“Who we have a dispute with is Google,” Sheinbaum said, according to Bloomberg. “If they keep insisting, we’ll consider a lawsuit.”

Sheinbaum argued that Trump’s vanity project could remain but that it needed to be limited to a small section of the gulf, saying that “the only place it was effective was where [the U.S.] has sovereignty, or up to 22 nautical miles from the coast,” according to Reuters.

It’s worth noting that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was among those invited to flank Trump at the inauguration, cementing just how important the administration’s ties to Silicon Valley are and just how much these pitiable tech bros hope to stay in the pocket of the president.