Trump Corruption Inc., Part 9: “The boss wants this money.”

This issue will be our last Political Report until after Labor Day. Best wishes to all for an enjoyable August and then we head into the November 3 elections.

See Trump Corruption Inc., Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, Part 7 here and Part 8 here

Call it political extortion, call it pay-to-play, call it shakedown money, call it transactional fundraising. Call it whatever you like.

It comes down to this: the mob-like presidential pressure for donations of huge sums of money, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, is part of a big money shakedown with no known precedents in American history.

Trump has turned the presidency into his personal ATM with no limits on the amount of money he greedily grabs while offering to “help” his major donors with what they want from the government. It’s known as pay-to-play.

According to the Journal, Trump and his “the boss wants this money” fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, whom Trump calls the “princess of darkness,” have raised, since his second term began, an astonishing $800 million for Trump related projects and his super PAC.

The individual amounts that have been donated are also astonishing. The Journal reported that SoftBank gave $50 million for the Trump presidential library. Apple gave $25 million to help pay for Trump’s outsized White House ballroom while Microsoft gave $10 million and Amazon $5 million. Meta gave $10 million to a Trump-aligned political committee, made a multimillion-dollar contribution to support the ballroom, and directed $22 million from the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against Meta to the presidential library.

According to the Journal, “‘What can I do to help you?’ Trump has said at multiple events [involving executives], according to attendees. ‘What do you need?’ he asked CEOs at a Florida event.” Later, he told the executives’ lobbyists how much the client should give.

The message being sent to executives could not be clearer: give generously to Trump’s causes, and the president who controls decisions affecting your business is prepared to help you.

Trump reported making more than $2.2 billion in 2025 while serving as president, with a reported $1.4 billion coming from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures.

He earned $636 million alone from his memecoin, $TRUMP, while nearly 1 million people lost some $3.8 billion by investing in the same memcoin. Great deal for Trump. Terrible deal for those who followed him down the rabbit hole.

The Campaign Legal Center has detailed “over three dozen of the most egregious examples” of what it describes as Trump’s pay to play schemes since he returned to office last year.

Days before Trump’s inauguration, for example, a UAE-backed investment entity agreed to pay $500 million for 49 percent of World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency business founded by the Trump family and the Steve Witkoff family. This reportedly resulted in an initial $187 million going to Trump family entities.

According to the Wall Street Journal, months later the Trump administration gave “the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters.”

In addition to using the presidency to gain enormous wealth, Trump engaged in an extraordinary conflict of interest by enlisting Acting Attorney General Blanche, whom he controls, to sign an agreement to shield Trump, his family and the Trump Organization from any tax claims and examinations that covered past tax periods up until when the agreement was reached. This could save Trump from as much as an estimated $100 million in tax payments.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams issued a “scathing” order regarding Trump’s self-dealing agreement. According to Law and Crime, the judge found “Trump’s lawyers filed a “non-adversarial, collusive” lawsuit to “manipulate the judicial process” and improperly force the IRS into a $1.776 billion “settlement” with “no viable basis in law or fact.”

The judge wrote, “the Court expressly finds that Plaintiffs [Trump, his sons and the Trump organization] acted in bad faith.” She also referred Trump attorney Alejandro Brito to the Florida Bar and ordered copies of her ruling sent to disciplinary authorities in New York and Washington, where complaints involving Blanche and another senior DOJ official were already pending.

Trump is a disastrous President, and Americans know it. He is also a national disgrace due to his exploitation of the presidency to enormously enrich himself.

Trump has the lowest approval ratings at this stage of his tenure of any modern president, except for Richard Nixon just before he resigned.

The American people are more than ready to move on from him.

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Fred’s Weekly Note appears on Thursdays in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s newsletter, and other recent editions, here. And subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.