The History of Presidential Grift

Everyone knows that Donald Trump is the Grifter-in-Chief. Earlier this month, the president and his family raked in approximately $5 billion from meme coins, stablecoins and tokens. His businesses skimmed about $2.5 billion in profits from politically-connected real estate deals during his first term. People eager to suck up to the leader of the free world are paying tens of millions to join Mar-a-Lago and stay at his hotels. Trump’s shares in his social-media outfit Truth Social are worth $2 billion—value that would instantly go poof were he no longer president. And there’s still time for him to partner with Israel to develop post-genocide Gaza.

As with his tariffs, deportations and suppression of dissent, it’s important to point out that, while Trump’s unseemly pigging out at the capitalist trough is rightfully shocking, it is not new. Many of his predecessors paved the corruption-paved road on which Trump is profiteering, but very little was done to stop it from happening again. Here we are again and, because we’re unlikely to enact meaningful reforms now, here we will be again.

Harry Truman struggled financially after he left the White House. He had no significant personal wealth, and ex-presidents didn’t get pensions. His primary income was his Army pension of about $113 per month. Famously refusing lucrative board positions and endorsement deals—”I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency,” he said in 1953—he moved back to Independence, Missouri, and relied on income from his memoirs (which are pretty good) and a few speaking engagements. Partly inspired by Truman’s situation, Congress passed a 1958 law providing a pension to former presidents.

Despite his pension, Jimmy Carter was close to broke when he returned to Plains, Georgia. His peanut farm, which he placed in a blind trust during his term, had been poorly managed; drought and a drop in the market made things worse. The farm, a family business he had inherited, was sinking under $1 million in debt (equivalent to about $3.5 million today). He was forced to sell. A prolific author who lived frugally, he ultimately recovered and prospered.

LBJ inaugurated the modern era of the presidential grift. Beginning in Congress and throughout his presidency, his backroom magic ensured a “twenty-year-long string of strikingly favorable rulings by the Federal Communications Commission” for his wife Lady Bird’s Texas media company that grew her $17,500 investment in 1943 to over $20 million at the time of his death in 1973.

Nixon and subsequent presidents through George H.W. Bush milked their post-presidential prestige via the books-and-speeches formula.

Throughout his second term, Bill Clinton laid the groundwork for next-level presidential grift, inviting nearly a thousand donors and potential donors to his then-planned Clinton Foundation to crash in the White House’s Lincoln bedroom. Pledges in the form of barely-disguised kickbacks came from executives at companies like Coca-Cola and Boeing, which cashed in from NAFTA and other Clinton-era trade deals. The gravy train began rolling in earnest after 2001, when he amped up the cut-and-paste speech grift (over $100 million in the next 20 years), shook down book publishers for over-the-top advances ($15 million for the crappy My Life), and turned the foundation into a personal piggy bank that covered private-jet trips for Bill worth millions and employed staff who also served the Clintons personally or politically. Bill scored $18 million as an “honorary chancellor” for Laureate International Universities, a Trump University-like for-profit education company that donated to the foundation, in an obvious quid pro quo. And don’t get me started on the Clintons’ rape of Haiti.

Barack Obama has mimicked and improved upon the Clinton model: pricey speeches, huge book advances, a foundation that doesn’t seem to accomplish much in terms of charity but helps fund his lavish lifestyle. He’s also got a Hollywood production company that mostly relies on his political influence as a Democratic éminence grise.

Dick Cheney was both the real president and the chief grifter of the Bush Administration. He quit Halliburton, where he was Chairman and CEO to become vice president—but the oilfield and engineering giant’s money didn’t quit him. Not only did he collect $2 million in deferred compensation during his eight years in Washington, Bush-Cheney steered $40 billion in no-bid contracts for the Iraq War (which he convinced Bush to start) to Halliburton, pumping up his personal wealth—largely in Halliburton stock—to nearly $100 million.

As I said at the beginning, however, none of this is new. Trump’s favorite president, Andrew Jackson, profited from land speculation tied to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, under which Native American tribes were forcibly expelled from their ancestral lands in the southeast. A land speculator and parceler, Jackson leveraged his political power and military experience to buy Native lands cheaply, expel the Natives, and sell the more valuable plots, now free of threats from indigenous people, to cotton plantation owners, pocketing millions. In fairness to Andy, our ethical standards over emoluments and conflicts of interest were not a factor in 19^th century politics.

As a young man, George Washington surveyed frontier lands, particularly in the Shenandoah Valley. Surveyors often received land grants or first pick of prime parcels, which Washington leveraged to acquire thousands of acres. By his 20s, he owned over 20,000 acres, a foundation of his wealth. By the time he became president, Washington’s land holdings (over 60,000 acres across Virginia, Maryland, and what is now West Virginia) and his marriage to a wealthy widow made him one of the richest men in America. His frontier land appreciated even more due to his own policies promoting Westward expansion, which meant the genocide of Native Americans.

When it comes to self-dealing, Donald Trump is as true-blue American as presidents come.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)