President Donald Trump and his family are using the White House to make the Trump family “the richest on the planet by the time the president’s term is over,” warned MS NOW correspondent Jonathan Lemire on Wednesday.
‘Donald Trump Jr. has been quoted in media reports saying that his goal is for the Trump family to be the richest on the planet by the time the president's term is over,” Lemire told MS NOW anchor Katy Tur on Wednesday while discussing the first people to disembark Air Force One in China. “It is telling that Eric Trump and his wife Lara Trump were among the first off the plane. And I will say, at least in that initial wave of officials who came down the front steps of Air Force One, I didn't see the Secretary of State. I didn't see the Secretary of Defense. I did see a couple of CEOs, and I certainly saw the Trump family — which I think is a fitting symbol of a family that, in the first term, did put up a few minor barriers and did try to have a few restrictions on how they did business, particularly business overseas. That has all gone. There's not even a pretense of that now.”
Lemire went on to describe how the Trumps are pursuing business deals all over the planet, from working with Chinese business and striking crypto currency deals to profiting from drone companies. Tur pointed out that this notion of monetizing power was reinforced by the panoply of oligarchs that joined Trump including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and nearly 20 other Fortune 500 CEOs. She also listed other business ventures in which the Trumps are involved including “the golf course, the skyscraper buildings” and “most recently, the tungsten mine in Kazakhstan — which the Financial Times reports the Trump sons are asking the Pentagon for $400 million more in backing, in addition to the $1.6 billion they've already received for this project.”
Although Trump and his family are personally profiting from their overtures with China, recent reports indicate that China perceives America as being in a state of decline because of Trump’s presidency. A recent Beijing think tank report was titled “Thank Trump” and argued Trump’s immigration, tariff and isolationist policies have strengthened China at America’s expense.
“At this turning point in history,” the authors of the report argued, “what we hear is the heavy and haunting toll of an empire’s evening bell.”
Similarly the American think tank Brookings Institution discovered the term “American decline” has “nearly doubled” in official Chinese sources since the start of Trump’s second term in 2025. One education consultant in China who works with international students said that roughly 80 percent of students hoped to study at an Ivy League college in America. Since Trump took over, that number has fallen to 45 percent.
“The America that represented wealth, freedom and institutional confidence feels like it belonged to a different era,” the source told The New York Times. Financial observers have broken down how Trump’s policies are helping China position itself as the world’s new premiere superpower.
“While Washington raises walls, Beijing is opening doors,” Fortune’s Steve H. Hanke wrote earlier this week. “On May 1, Chinese tariffs on imports from all 53 African countries with which China holds diplomatic relations plunged to zero. Europeans now enter China visa-free. India’s Modi government is fast-tracking minority Chinese investment in seven strategic sectors. China’s DeepSeek AI went open source, giving the world’s developers free access to a frontier Chinese AI model. While Washington is tightening export controls on America’s AI enterprise, China is open for business.”
Hanke also pointed out that China has taken advantage of the rise in oil prices due to Trump’s war against Iran and their nation’s wealth of valuable rare earths.
“The verdict is in. The Alliance of Democracies’ Democracy Perception Index, which was released on May 8, puts China’s net global perception at +7 [percent],” Hanke wrote. “Meanwhile, the international perception of the U.S. has collapsed. Two years ago, it sat comfortably at +22 [percent]. Today, it has plunged to a dismal -16 [percent]. It is clear that Trump will be tiptoeing through the tulips with Xi and coming home empty-handed.”
Ironically, Trump and his supporters repeatedly attacked former President Joe Biden by alleging that his son Hunter Biden got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired for supposedly investigating their financial corruption. Yet the evidence revealed that Hunter Biden was never investigated for his role working for the natural gas company Burisma, with the prosecutor in question (Viktor Shokin) being fired because he was accused of not doing enough to deal with corruption. The Trumps’ also claimed, without evidence, that Hunter Biden abused his power to do business with China.
Lemire alluded to this double-standard when speaking with Tur on Wednesday.
“Their allegations against Hunter Biden, even if they were true, they were a pittance compared to the amount of money that the president, his family, their associates have made so far in the first year-and-a-half, not even quite year-and-a-half, that he's been back in office,” Lemire told Tur.
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