Feb. 4, 2026, 1:50 p.m.
In normal times, last Saturday would have been the most brutal day in the history of White House corruption, a journalistic one-two punch that might have left a president reeling and a staff frantically scrambling to do damage control. Shortly after noon, The New Yorker released a 4,600-word story under the headline “Trump’s Profiteering hits $4 Billion.” Nine hours later, The Wall Street Journal dropped 3,600 words headlined “‘Spy Sheikh’ Bought Secret Stake in Trump Company: $500 million investment for 49% of World Liberty came months before U.A.E. won access to tightly guarded American AI chips.”
Together, the two stories presented details, many for the first time, about a level of presidential self-dealing and profit-taking never before seen. For any other president, this would have been a devastating blow, triggering a non-stop coverage frenzy, demands for answers, and late-night emergency meetings.
But these are not normal times. And Donald Trump is not just any other president. Neither The New Yorker’s meticulous listing of the money rolling in to the Trump family from bitcoin, pharmaceuticals, online weapons sales, drone manufacturing, and new resort projects, nor the Journal’s disclosure about Trump’s cryptocurrency venture made much of an impact.
The reaction has been far from a media feeding frenzy. In the three days after the stories, the president took 40 questions from reporters at Mar-a-Lago and the Oval Office. None dealt with the New Yorker story and only one mentioned the Wall Street Journal disclosure. Asked to explain the transaction, Trump brushed it aside, saying, “Well, I don't know about it. I know that crypto is a big thing and they like it. A lot of people like it. The people behind me like it. Uh, my sons are handling that. My family is handling it. And uh, I guess they got investments from different people, but I'm not—I have all I can handle right now with Iran and with Russia and Ukraine and with all the things we're doing.”
There was no follow-up question.
In those days, from Sunday through Tuesday, there was no daily briefing. Instead, press secretary Karoline Leavitt took 19 questions in the White House driveway. There were questions on Bad Bunny and polls, but none on the president's enrichment.
Government ethics experts, some of whom have been monitoring presidential behavior for half a century, find the disinterest hard to fathom.
“This is the worst example of big-money influence begetting policy that I have ever seen in 50-plus years working on the issues of money and politics,” said Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan organization that promotes government integrity. Wertheimer has been a crusader against big money in government since he joined Common Cause in 1971.
Now 87, he told National Journal that there is no public outcry because people feel powerless to change things. “What do you think you can do right now if you’re a citizen? The polling shows that people do not like corruption,” he said. “But Trump has unprecedented control of the Justice Department and the FBI. They’ve eliminated the Public Integrity Section and the Foreign Corrupt Practices sections at the Justice Department. And Republicans in Congress are not going to do anything about it.”
Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, has been studying corruption since before 1996 when he wrote Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics. But he says he has been surprised at the extent of the corruption in this administration.
“Did I ever think there would be a president that would make Nixon look like a choirboy? God, no,” Sabato said. He recalled 1958 when Sherman Adams, chief of staff to the immensely popular President Dwight Eisenhower, was forced to resign because he accepted a $700 vicuña coat from an industrialist—far from the $500 million Trump received from the sheikh. “We’ve always had some graft and corruption,” Sabato said. “But when it was revealed, the public was outraged and the backlash kept things clean for a while at least.”
Today, though, he said: “The rules have changed. The Trumps grab for everything they can get; no amount is too much.”
The president openly acknowledges that he changed the rules after his first term. Then, he said he did not want the Trump Organization, run by his sons, to seek new business overseas. Now, as he told The New York Times last month, he has given them a green light.
“I got no credit in the first term,” he complained. “My kids, I didn’t let them do anything, because to me, it’s the highest calling. You’re the president of the United States.” But he said he was not praised for that restraint. “I got nothing but criticized.” He said he changed his mind “because I found out that nobody cared.”
And he insisted “I’m allowed to” conduct personal business, arguing that George Washington “had two desks."
"He had a business desk and he had a president desk, and he did both.” It is a claim disputed by historians.
Trump also defended his actions by citing the controversial moneymaking actions of Hunter Biden, son of former President Biden. “I saw the things that went on with Biden,” he said.
Trump has cited Hunter Biden's actions to excuse his own moneymaking in office. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool)
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Richard Painter, the University of Minnesota law professor who was President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer in the White House, said Trump’s defenders have latched on to Biden’s failure to rein in his son’s excesses to defend the current race for money. “Biden was a big disappointment on ethics,” Painter said. “But it wasn’t as bad as Trump I and obviously nowhere near as bad as Trump II.”
That history, he said, has contributed to one reason for the lack of outrage over the recent disclosures. “I think the public is jaded by a lot of this,” said Painter, though he contended the public dissatisfaction with Trump led to his defeat in 2020 and the narrowness of his victory in 2024.
Polling leaves no doubt that the public does not see Trump as honest. A YouGov survey in August found that 53 percent—including 85 percent of Democrats and 13 percent of Republicans—said Trump would accept a bribe if offered.
In September, the Pew Research Center found that 61 percent believe Trump is improperly enriching himself and friends and family, an increase of 5 percent from when the question was asked in 2019.
But critics have a hard time building outrage at Trump because of a widespread belief that many politicians are corrupt. Veteran Democratic strategist David Axelrod, who was President Obama’s top political adviser, said he finds it “stunning” that the two stories faded so quickly.
“Part of it is that we live in a time of extraordinary cynicism about government and all institutions where the thinking begins with the assumption of corruption, and that's sort of baked in the cake,” he said. “And some of it is just them flooding the zone. When you have so many different things going on that are outrageous, it's like playing Whac-A-Mole to cover it all.”
To that, Axelrod added the problem of intense partisan tribalism. “The defense tends to be, 'Well, everybody does it.' And you rally to your tribal leader,” he said. “Cynicism and tribalism are the reasons why these things that would in the past have been enduring scandals prompting congressional review just come and go.” He added, “What would have been the scandal of the century in the past is like a Tuesday in the Trump White House—just another day.”
A third factor cited by Axelrod is Trump’s lame-duck status. “He was somewhat restrained by the need to run for reelection before,” he said. “Now, I think he has just decided, ‘I’ve been given immunity by the Supreme Court, I can pardon anybody I want, and I’m going to leave here as rich as I can.'”
Despite the continuing revelations and non-stop dealmaking, Painter struck an optimistic note. “We’ve gone through periods where there’s been corruption and bribery in our government. … We have the congressional elections coming up. And then I hope the next president after this says … we need a reset.”
Until then, though, Wertheimer said the country should be braced for a wild ride. “All the brakes are gone,” he said, “and he’s got his foot on the pedal going a hundred miles an hour on money, money, money.”
