Worth a Read: A Web of Financial Ties Between Trump Officials and Industry

“Ethics is in the toilet.”

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to comprehend that all the Trump Administration’s destructive actions are being carried out to benefit very few ultrawealthy individuals.

There’s the cartoonish corruption like Trump’s gilded White House ballroom and Qatari jet. There’s the incomprehensible fact that the first six days of the current U.S. war with Iran cost taxpayers $11.3 billion. Then there’s all the quieter and yet nonetheless harmful corruption playing out in government contracts, agency appointments, policy decrees, and the like. It didn’t just magically happen that Lee Zeldin’s EPA decided that it was going to stop regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles as it gears up to deregulate even more.

That’s why it’s so incredible that ProPublica, the formidable nonprofit journalism outlet, has just released 3,196 documents related to President Trump and 1,500 of his appointees. ProPublica’s database is based on public records and is searchable in multiple ways, so anyone can look and see the Trump Administration’s myriad conflicts of interest.

I highly recommend checking out the information. The corresponding ProPublica article describing the outlet’s motivation for publishing the database is also worth a read.

The database, with all its thousands of names and numbers, shows very clearly: It’s not just that there are Trump officials who are enriching themselves from side gigs with white nationalist groups or with timely Palantir stock purchases, etc. What’s really disturbing is how many current Trump Administration officials are taking part in that normalized corruption. Nepotism, revolving door hires, stock trades related to industries officials oversee, in this Administration, it’s all the norm, not the exception.

The grift isn’t just with Trump and his kids — it’s pervasive. What stands out to me?

• Many Trump officials in senior positions are obscenely rich and have conflicts of interest with their government and business positions. The richest is Deputy Secretary, Department of Defense Stephen Andrew Feinberg, with a reported $2 billion in personal assets. ProPublica lays out Feinberg’s stunning conflicts of interest as the Department of Defense is planning a multi-billion-dollar project to build a Golden Dome for America defense shield, and at least four of the companies awarded contracts so far are owned by the private equity firm founded by Feinberg.

• Many Trump Administration appointees hold stocks and other assets in contractors with current business with Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Many officials own assets in the very industries they’re tasked with overseeing, including industries that supply apparatus to the military and ICE.

• Many Trump appointees — including officials overseeing the cryptocurrency industry — hold cryptocurrency investments. According to ProPublica’s reporting, more than 200 Trump appointees or their spouses collectively reported owning between $175 and $340 million in cryptocurrency.

• Many senior Trump officials have been paid by rightwing news and new media outlets and organizations that promote white nationalist rhetoric. Turning Point USA, for example, has paid Lee Zeldin and Pete Hegseth to speak. The database is full of other examples.

• Many senior Trump Administration officials take income— often in significant sums— from the same think tanks and advocacy organizations that are currently lobbying the government with extreme policy proposals. The Heritage Foundation, the organization behind Project 2025, has recently paid numerous Trump appointees, for example John L. Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA. Ratcliffe also lists in his financial disclosures that on or before December 2024 he received $180,000 as co-chair for American Security at American First Policy Institute. Examples go on and on.

• Many senior Trump officials have profited as consultants for major businesses that benefit from the Trump Administration’s rapid deregulation of industry and contracting with specific vendors. Ratcliffe, for example, has also been a consultant for Blackstone and several major tech companies, oil and gas industry companies, and defense contractors. This, too, seems to be the norm, not the exception.

There are so many more dots to connect. We already know, as Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer in four previous administrations, told ProPublica, “Ethics is in the toilet.” But it’s something different altogether to be able to search for the names of agency officials, rightwing think tanks, and major government contractors and see the conflicts of interest presented right there, with dates and numbers. It’s definitely worth searching and reading what you find.