President Donald Trump holds an image of a rendering of the new White House ballroom to be built during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., October 22, 2025.
Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has accelerated his use of the presidency to enrich himself in unprecedented new ways compared to his first term. A new analysis from The Nation argues it all comes down to his discovery that "nobody cared."
In a piece from Monday, The Nation's Jeet Heer compared the scale of Trump's kickbacks and corruption during his two terms in office and found stark differences. This is not because the president is greedier, as Heer argued that the escalation has been driven by Trump now having the "imagination and connections" to extract wealth from the White House "on a grand scale."
"It’s now clear that, in the grand scheme of things, Trump’s first-term corruption was penny-ante, involving tens of millions of dollars rather than billions," Heer explained. "It’s not that Trump was less greedy; he simply lacked the imagination and connections to realize how the presidency could really be milked on a grand scale."
He continued: "But his four years out of office allowed him to remake his business empire, moving into realms like social media (with Truth Social) and cryptocurrency (with World Liberty Financial, founded in September 2024 with the Trump family owning 75 percent). During these years, the Trump family also deepened its ties to the wealthy elites of Middle Eastern petro-states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These shifts allowed Trump to move from being a relatively small-scale con man to his current position as perhaps the most corrupt elected official in human history."
Heer also highlighted a quote from an interview Trump did last month with the New York Times, in which he, usually "not given to regret," said that he ought to have gotten more for himself business-wise during his first term, and revealed why he now thinks that way.
"I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to," Trump told the Times. "You know, George Washington, when he was president… had two desks. He had a business desk and he had a president desk, and he did both. It’s OK to do that."
Heer noted that this alleged anecdote about the first president is one that Trump has been fond of repeating over the years, and that "it won’t shock anyone to find out that it is nonsense." According to a CNN fact-check, while Washington did continue to own and manage land while in office, numerous historians said that the claim about two desks is "baseless."
“It’s an absurd allegation, basically,” Elizabeth Cobbs, a history professor at Texas A&M University and senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, told CNN. “Certainly, every one of the founders had personal property that they maintained while they were in office. Whether they kept their materials in a separate desk or not is irrelevant.”
