Donald Trump works for the highest bidder
At 2:31 in the afternoon, Donald J. Trump exited Air Force One onto the tarmac in West Palm Beach, Florida, and slowly made his way toward the press pool waiting nearby to ask him questions. As the president began to speak, the camera caught the growing exhaustion and confusion we have been seeing more frequently in recent months. As he hurried through questions after attending a crypto event at Mar-a-Lago for those who invested in his $TRUMP meme coin, which he has personally made millions of dollars from, he continued to struggle to justify not sending negotiators to Iran talks because it’s “too expensive,” adding that he’s “a very cost-conscious person.”
The man who is too cost-conscious to send negotiators to Iran to end the war that he started, that has destabilized the entire region, and impacted the world’s fuel supply, just walked out of a party his family has made over $336 million from in a single year. Money he made from a meme coin, a personal cryptocurrency he launched three days before taking office, one that has since collapsed 96% from its peak, while he collected a transaction fee on every single trade, all the way down. The people who paid to be in that room today lost most of what they put in. And he just keeps making money from them and all the fees.
That is where we are. The president of the United States, standing on a tarmac, too cost-conscious for diplomacy, on his way back from selling access to himself by the token.
I was in Washington in the morning, walking before an event I was attending later in the day. It was one of those mornings where the city feels like two places at once. On the surface, everything looks like it always has. The buildings are still standing. The streets are still full. People are moving through their days with purpose. But underneath it, you can feel the weight of what is happening inside those buildings, and what is being done to them from the top down.
I stopped to talk with a security guard outside one of the federal buildings. He was not a federal employee. He worked for an outside company. And he started talking, the way people do when they have been holding something in and finally find someone to say it to. He told me about the federal workers he sees every day. People who have given decades to this government. Who were there long before Trump arrived and who intend to be there long after he is gone. He said they keep showing up by telling themselves, and each other, that he is a temporary “bad manager.” That the work still matters and that the mission does not belong to him. He told me that the banners they have hung everywhere draw a reaction from at least half the people who walk past them. Not salutes or approval, but a different kind of gesture entirely, involving one finger raised in the middle of their hands.
I found more comfort in that conversation than I have found in a lot of headlines lately. Because what he was describing is not a coup, nor is it dramatic. It is just people, without power like those at the top, without titles, and without aspirations of wealth accumulation from proximity to the current administration, showing up every day and refusing to let the institution be hollowed out on their watch. These are the real Americans. The true patriots. Doing the work under harsh conditions and not losing hope for better days and better leaders.
And then I came back to my hotel room and opened my laptop. While those federal workers were walking into their offices this week, doing the unglamorous, unnoticed work of keeping this government functional, the people at the very top of it were doing something else entirely. The New York Times published an investigation that we should all be talking about. At the center of it is a Syrian billionaire named Mohamad Al-Khayyat, whose family business is tied to more than $12 billion in Syrian reconstruction contracts. Contracts that were worthless as long as American sanctions blocked the international financing needed to build anything. Meaning the only thing standing between him and that money was the United States government.
The barrier was sanctions. The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, in place since 2020, was specifically designed to block international financing from flowing into Syria’s reconstruction until there was accountability for war crimes committed by the Assad regime. For the Al-Khayyat family, those sanctions stood between them and billions of dollars. So they went to work on getting them lifted. And they did not do it through normal channels.
They proposed a Trump-branded golf course on the Syrian coast, part of a larger development vision that also included a cruise port, a polo club, and a Bugatti showroom. According to the Times investigation, they cut Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump into a multibillion-dollar resort project in Albania, a deal that began as a contractor arrangement and grew into a full joint venture. Ivanka flew to Albania to meet with the family and review design plans with architects and local officials. They cultivated at least a dozen members of Congress. And then there was the stone. Someone physically delivered a stone engraved with the Trump family crest to a Republican congressman, with instructions to carry it to the White House to get the president’s attention.
And then in December of 2025, Trump signed the repeal of the Caesar Act into law, buried deep inside the National Defense Authorization Act. The sanctions were gone, and the contracts started moving. The Damascus Airport redevelopment. Power plants. Natural gas projects. Historic properties in the capital being converted into luxury hotels. The resort deals with Kushner’s firm kept expanding. And not a single Republican said a word about any of it.
The same family that needed the policy changed to access their billions of dollars was building resorts with the president’s son-in-law and daughter. The policy was changed. And the reporting suggests all it took was that, plus a stone, with a congressman willing to carry it.
And then there is the meme coin gala that happened earlier today. One that tells much of the same story told in a different way. Old money uses engraved stones and Albanian resort deals and defense bills with buried provisions. New money uses a leaderboard and a smartphone and a champagne toast.
Here is what today’s event at Mar-a-Lago actually was. Not a crypto industry conference or a policy summit. A contest. The 297 people who held the most $TRUMP tokens during a qualification window won invitations. The top 29 got a VIP champagne reception with the president of the United States. Winners received Trump-branded watches, trading cards, sneakers, and fragrances. The coin is trading around $2.98 today, down 96% from its $75 all-time high in January 2025. The minimum holding needed to qualify dropped 85% from last year, because fewer people were willing to play. The people in that room lost most of what they put in. But the Trump family has pulled in more than $1 billion from crypto ventures overall, at least $336 million tied to meme coin sales alone in the first half of 2025, all while Trump is simultaneously shaping U.S. crypto policy. He earns a transaction fee on every single buy and every single sell. He profits when people buy in. He profits when people panic and sell. He profited from the entire collapse. The White House says there is no conflict of interest. Ethics experts say the opposite, and the numbers say everything.
And those losing money weren’t just the people in that room. It was all of us. We are the ones paying with our tax dollars, the money we pay into the government pool for roads and schools and veterans’ care and the basic infrastructure that holds a country together. Instead, untold millions are flowing toward Trump’s constant travel to events like this one in Florida. The nonstop fundraising. The donor parties. The meme coin galas. Local security alone costs $240,000 a day every time he lands in Palm Beach. Individual trips run three to four million dollars when you add Air Force One and the Secret Service. He has visited his own properties 129 times since taking office. And every dollar spent protecting him at a club he owns and profits from is a dollar he is effectively collecting twice. We are the losers here, too.
And then there is Justin Sun. A Chinese-born crypto billionaire. The single biggest $TRUMP holder. This year’s top contest winner for the second year in a row. He was in that room today raising a glass with the president. He also filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the Trump family’s other crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which Eric Trump co-founded, accusing it of freezing his token holdings worth hundreds of millions of dollars and using the Trump brand as a vehicle to profit through fraud. He is suing them and celebrating with them on the same weekend. That one detail captures the whole arrangement. Even the people who got burned keep showing up, because the access is that lucrative.
We talk a lot about Trump’s authoritarian takeover. But the thing about Trump is that he has taken the worst parts of authoritarianism, dictatorship, and fascism and combined them with something that gets less attention but may be doing just as much damage. Kleptocracy. Government by theft. Because what he is doing is what kleptocracy looks like. Not a dramatic seizure of power. But often, a transaction fee collected on a collapsing coin. An Albanian resort deal. A defense bill with a sanctions repeal buried on page 400. Small corruptions, stacked and compounded until the entire structure of government bends toward one family’s financial interests. In Putin’s Russia, the oligarchs did not bribe the government from the outside. They became the government. The line between the state and the family vanished. In Erdogan’s Turkey, the president’s son-in-law ran the energy ministry while the family’s firms won government contracts worth billions. Trump’s version is distinctly American, louder, brasher, sold with merchandise and a leaderboard and a branded fragrance. But it follows the same blueprint. When the people at the top are extracting wealth from the power, the people at the bottom are paying for it twice. Once in taxes. Once in the cost of a government that no longer works for them.
And it’s not just what he is doing through his personal businesses. It’s also what he is doing to the federal government itself, trying to use the machinery of our own institutions to funnel money directly to himself and his family.
Take the IRS lawsuit. In January, Trump, along with his sons Eric and Donald Jr. and the Trump Organization, filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department. The claim: that the government failed to protect his tax returns when a contractor leaked them to the press. The lawsuit followed a New York Times report that found Trump had paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017. The contractor, a man named Charles Littlejohn, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison.
But on Friday, a federal judge named Kathleen Williams, an Obama appointee sitting in Miami, looked at the case and asked a question that cut through what this lawsuit really was about: money. She pointed out that Trump is the sitting president who directly oversees both the IRS and the Treasury Department. His named adversaries in this lawsuit are agencies whose decisions are subject to his direction. She questioned whether the parties are even “sufficiently adverse to each other” for the lawsuit to be constitutional under Article III, which requires an actual controversy between genuinely opposing parties. She ordered both sides to explain by late May why the case should not be thrown out entirely.
Here is why that matters beyond the legal technicality. Trump and his lawyers are currently in settlement talks with the Department of Justice over this lawsuit. The same DOJ that he controls. If those talks result in a payout, it would be Trump’s own administration writing Trump and his family a check from the United States Treasury. That would be taxpayer money being spent. A group of former government officials filed a brief calling the situation “extraordinary” because “the President controls both sides of the litigation, which raises the prospect of collusive litigation tactics.” And Trump himself, on Air Force One back in January, acknowledged the strangeness of it. He told reporters it is “very interesting” to be on both sides of a lawsuit, adding, “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself.”
And if he does donate the winnings to charity, as he suggested on Air Force One, do not hold your breath waiting to find out which one. This is a family with a history of creating entities that look like charities on paper. The Trump Foundation was shut down under court supervision after the New York Attorney General found that Trump had repeatedly used its funds for his own personal, business, and political interests. He was ordered to pay $2 million in damages. He made 19 admissions of illegal activity. His three adult children were required to undergo mandatory charity law training as part of the settlement. So when he says the money could go to charity, it might not mean what we imagine that to mean.
There is a lot of corruption in Washington, D.C., especially in the Trump regime, but that is a small part of American society. We are seeing more and more people stepping up outside of the machine of profit and self-dealing in our government. And we just saw another example of this with Bette Midler and friends who created a new rendition of Woody Guthrie’s, “All You Fascists” that he originally wrote in 1940. As he was watching the rise of fascism in Europe and recognizing the strains of it at home, in the poll tax, in Jim Crow, in the systems designed to keep people powerless and afraid, he used the tool he had at hand, his words, to not just draw attention to what was happening but as a form of resistance. He did not have a Senate seat. He did not have a law firm, a news network, or a lobbying budget. He believed that the people without official power were the ones who would ultimately decide how the story ended. He wrote a song for them and handed it forward.
Eighty-six years later, Bette Midler, now 80 years old, sat down and rewrote it for this moment. She talked to her friend Jane Fonda, who told her the resistance needed an anthem. So she went back to Guthrie’s words and updated them for 2026. She brought in her Beaches co-star Barbara Hershey, actor David Hyde Pierce, singer and actress Jenifer Lewis, Broadway star Shoshana Bean, and she released her powerful version just yesterday with a music video, and she said at the start of it: “I hope you’ll sing it when you’re marching.”
Nobody in that video has the power to lift sanctions. Nobody can issue a pardon or dismiss a lawsuit, or override a president. They are singers. An actress. A woman who has been making people laugh and cry for fifty years and who looked at this moment and decided that was exactly the right set of tools to bring to it.
Verse by verse, she moves through everything we have lived through this year. She warns the fascists directly that when they come for the rest of us, we will fight them at the gate. She names the ICE raids. She names Minneapolis. She calls out the cowards hiding behind their masks and says plainly that we are coming for them at the ballot box. She names the Epstein files and the violence of the raids in the same breath. And then she lands on the close, the clearest statement of purpose in the whole song: “America, get ready, midterms are at hand. We got to stick together folks and vote to save this land.” It is not subtle. It is not meant to be. Woody Guthrie was not subtle either. That was never the point. The point was to give people something to sing when the moment called for it. Bette Midler looked at this moment and decided it called for it.
Guthrie wrote that song for working people, and Midler updated it for the same people. The federal workers who walk past those banners every morning and keep going. The judge who opened a copy of the Constitution and applied it to a $10 billion self-dealing lawsuit. The security guard I talked to in Washington this morning, who is not a federal employee and has no official power, but who told me what was happening inside those buildings with the quiet certainty of someone who has watched it long enough to know. Who told me that the people who built their careers around this government, who were there before Trump and will be there after, are getting through it the same way people always get through a bad manager. By holding onto each other, by showing up and doing the work that keeps this country running, while the man at the top charges people by the token for the privilege of standing near him.
The celebrities, the writers, the judges, the federal workers, the security guards, the people marching, the people reading this right now. None of us has official power. Yet all of us are the resistance. And all of us, together, are the reason this does not end the way he wants it to. The presidency is for sale, but the resistance has no price tag. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture(s) of the day: My husband Pete and I were at an alternative to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (I would never attend the WHCD), The New Media Party in Washington, D.C., tonight, at the same time the shooting was happening. We had no idea anything had occurred and were having a truly wonderful evening, celebrating the First Amendment with Substack and so many incredible writers. And then, in an instant, everything changed.
Our building was placed on lockdown by the Secret Service, and our children, at a hotel across town, were once again confronted with the reality of the gun violence that threatens our country on a nonstop basis. We were all safe, but it was still deeply unsettling for our youngest that we couldn’t get back to her for hours. Thankfully, her older sisters were with her, but I’m left asking, when is enough going to be enough?
I’ll have more to say tomorrow. I’m relieved nobody was injured, but maybe the focus should be on reasonable gun reform to protect our children, instead of building ballrooms that are “gun and drone safe” for just the president.
Sources:
White House Official YouTube Channel: President Trump Gaggles with Press Upon Departure from Palm Beach, FL, Apr. 25, 2026
ALL YOU FASCISTS (Bound to Lose) Music Video Bette Midler: YouTube Video
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/us/politics/trump-syria-khayyat.html
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/24/politics/judge-questions-trump-irs-treasury-lawsuit
Your writing is fabulous for such disgusting events we are living thru. Thankyou
Glad you are all safe and you had a night out at least.
I am bemused by the ability for Trump to cash in on being president, I thought that this was illegal, and yet I hear he has also had bibles printed to sell at his “Ralies”for $30 a piece ?
He has to be the most venal being on the planet along with his grasping family. When does enough mean enough - do they own a bank as well for all this ill gotten coin ?