Donald Trump’s money grab

| 9:00 pm EST January 5, 2024
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Early last year, in “Donald Trump’s secret foreign gifts,” I wrote about how over 100 foreign gifts to Trump while he was in office remained unaccounted for, according to a report from House Democrats. The total at the time was more than $250,000. A new report from House Democrats released on Thursday makes this figure seem tame.

“Concrete evidence” shows that Trump’s businesses raked in at least $7.8 million during his presidency, according to an analysis of the report by the New York Times. Most of the money ($5.5 million) came from China, followed by Saudi Arabia. As the report, entitled “White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump,” points out, Trump “violated both the clear commands of the Constitution and the careful precedent set and observed by every previous Commander-in-Chief.”

Even though the Constitution (in Article I, Section 9, Clause 8) bars the President from accepting payment or gifts from foreign governments “of any kind whatever” without “the Consent of the Congress,” Trump used his businesses to quietly accept millions of dollars. To make matters worse, the $7.8 million is “almost certainly” far from complete. The report notes that House Democrats were only able to learn of some of the payments over just two years of his presidency, looking at only a handful of nations that funneled the money into “just four of his more than 500 businesses.”

This new information, which appears to represent just the tip of a massive emoluments iceberg, makes it even harder to follow the Republicans’ rushed impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and his allegedly improper business dealings with a straight face. It’s 2024, an election year, and Democrats are pulling out all the stops to expose Trump as the Constitution-flouting, existential threat to American democracy we have long known him to be.