Susan Glasser: Our Money-Grubbing President

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is the 2nd of July, 2026 So I'd welcome back to the show, staff writer at The New Yorker and host, co-host of its Political Scene podcast. Her most recent book is The Divider, co-authored with her husband, Peter Baker.
It's Susan Glasser. What's going on, Susan?

**Susan Glasser** (0:30)
Hey man, so great to be with you. What a treat.

**Tim Miller** (0:33)
Welcome back to the show.
Not much to talk about. Not a lot happening out there. Not a lot of embarrassments for America on the world stage or anything. It's hard to decide where to start, but I think I want to hit on corruption. I didn't have a time to get into it yesterday. I think Maggie mentioned it briefly on the pod, but Trump had to file financial disclosures. I guess it's something that the financial disclosures are getting filed, these small victories this day and age. It revealed just an insane amount of graft and corruption. He brought in at least 2.2 billion dollars, which is compared to much, much less than that from before he returned to the presidency.
A lot of this money is from crypto, all this money is from foreign countries, including the investment firm tied to the UAE. We're going to get into the cutter plane a little bit. I guess that's more of government grift, but it is pretty astonishing that he has just decided that he is going to make as much money from this as possible, as if he is Vladimir Putin or the corrupt dictator of a country that does not have a rule of law.

**Susan Glasser** (1:48)
Yeah, the thing is...

**Tim Miller** (1:52)
Maybe we are one of those countries that doesn't have a rule of law, at least when it comes to the president of the United States.

**Susan Glasser** (1:56)
Well, actually, that is Donald Trump's theory of the case, which is that no laws apply to him and the Supreme Court in some ways has gone along with that theory. There's the sort of you and what army are going to do anything about it, challenge to this.
What accountability is there for a president who decides to shamelessly monetize the presidency? There is increasing evidence that he's doing things like selling off pardons. This crypto business that Donald Trump and his sons have gotten into, along with the sons, I should point out, of Steve Witkoff, his all-purpose everything envoy, literally making billions of dollars. We know about the investment by the UAE Investment Fund. We do not have a list of the other investors who have put more than $2 billion in the pocket of Donald Trump. This is the guy who went literally like steam flowing out of his ears crazy over the idea that, heaven forbid. Joe Biden's son had embarrassed the country by making money off of his father's name. By the way, an embarrassment. Let's be honest that Hunter Biden was trading off of his father's name and the appearance that he might have access. When he joined the board of a Ukrainian energy company, when Joe Biden was vice president. You know what that is? That's an embarrassment. We're talking though about maybe millions of dollars. Add many, many, many zeros here to the scale of corruption from Donald Trump. And from my perspective, it's one of those things.
Are we so inured to this that people just won't care? Or is corruption the issue that finally causes people to break with Donald Trump? I mean, to me, that is the question, because it's where he's so profoundly different than essentially any of his predecessors. And we've had some crooked presidents, but not this crooked.

**Tim Miller** (4:00)
Not anything, and even The Bulwark, this doesn't even include also the stock trading he's been doing, something that our past presidents weren't doing. I want to just focus in on the Middle East. And I mentioned the UAE deal, which is part of the bulk of the money, frankly, which is this massive crypto deal that the UAE is involved in. But then he also has some smaller, for Trump, it'd be nice money for me, licensing deals that are happening in these countries, 14 million in licensing deals for hotels and Qatar and in Saudi Arabia. That ties to the other corruption story from this week, which is our new Air Force One, which was gifted from Qatar. Trump took his first flight on that. The new plane that he feels is more appropriate to his status, which again, I think should be noteworthy was like a hand-me-down from Qatar. They wanted a fancier plane for themselves. That's where we are right now as a country, we're taking Qatar's hand-me-downs. But if you tie all this together, he's making personal money with a licensing deal in Qatar.