Donald Trump’s Vampire Presidency
President Donald Trump is America’s first rentier president. A rentier is a sort of capitalist parasite who extracts wealth from the economy without contributing to economic productivity. He is the precise opposite of the entrepreneur who disrupts markets and creates jobs with innovative new products, new manufacturing methods, or new ways to market goods or services. Many commentators bemoan today’s rentier capitalism. Now we’re seeing the advent of rentier politics.
John Maynard Keynes, in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, predicted “the euthanasia of the rentier” as a growing supply of capital pushed interest rates down permanently, depriving the “functionless investor” of his livelihood. He was too optimistic. Today the rentier is alive and well—partly because he learned how to extract wealth when interest rates were low (rentiers are no strangers to debt); partly because more of the United States economy is financialized than Keynes could possibly imagine; and partly because tax and other policies at the federal and state level privilege capital over labor.
Trump was a textbook rentier well before he entered office, as both an heir to a family fortune (he inherited $413 million from his father, Fred Trump) and as an investor in real estate. To derive wealth from the ownership of land is the original French meaning of rentier. A more modern rentier activity is to dodge taxes, and when House Democrats three years ago released Trump’s tax returns for 2015 through 2020, Trump was revealed to have paid $750 or less in three of those six years.
During his first term as president, Trump’s serial violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses to extract wealth from public office put previous White House financial scandals like Teapot Domeand the Whiskey Ring in the shade; neither of the latter two episodes implicated the president, whereas Trump was the sole offender. Trump netted at least $7.8 million in payments from at least 20 foreign countries. The Supreme Court, three of whose members were appointed by Trump, avoided passing judgment by putting off a ruling until after Trump left office and then declaring the question moot.
Thus emboldened, Trump in his second term is going full kleptocrat. But while Trump’s strip-mining of the presidency for personal profit is unquestionably illegal—let the second wave of lawsuits begin!—we can get a better feel for how its various mechanisms work by applying economic, rather than legal logic. Trump has transformed himself from rentier capitalist to rentier politician. What does that mean in practice?
Trump’s net worth is $5.3 billion according to Forbes, $6.9 billion according to Bloomberg. The precise number is “unknowable,” says The New York Times, partly because the Trump Organization is privately held; partly because real estate values are difficult to estimate; and partly because much of Trump’s wealth is shared with his children and business partners. But it’s clear that Trump is no longer a real estate tycoon.
When Trump left office in 2020, 86 percent of his wealth was in real estate, according to Bloomberg, and as recently as November 2023 the vast majority of Trump’s wealth was in real estate. The former president was notably insolvent. In 2024, Trump’s debts (currently valued by the Times at more than $640 million plus interest), primarily from legal judgments, were so great that I speculated Trump would become the first ex-president since Ulysses S. Grant to declare personal bankruptcy. (I still think so, given the instability of Trump’s net worth. Or rather, I think Trump will go bankrupt again. Trump’s companies have filed for bankruptcy six times.)
Today, Trump’s net worth is doubled, and real estate accounts for only half of it. The other half consists of Trump’s crypto holdings and his meme stock, Truth Social. These are ventures in which Trump may not have invested a single dime. A whole cottage industry was created to keep Trump solvent.
We know for a fact that Trump invested no cash in Truth Social. He nonetheless was gifted with a majority of company shares, worth today about $2 billion. If Trump were to cash out, he would crash the company’s stock price and put Truth Social out of business. That wouldn’t be very nice, but Truth Social is a money-losing company anyway whose only financial purpose is to enrich Trump. Would the cultish shareholders who got wiped out even complain?
Trump may have invested some money in his various crypto partnerships, but if I know our boy he’s a freeloader there, too. (According to the Times, it’s the partners who “invested most or all of the capital.”) According to Forbes, Trump has made about $1 billion from crypto. That breaks down to $390 million from World Liberty tokens, $742 million from memecoins, and $7 million from NFTs. What these assets have in common, along with Trump’s shares in Truth Social, is an absence of intrinsic value. Their worth lies exclusively in enriching Donald Trump. According to the Times, Trump’s crypto holdings might conceivably be worth as much as $7.1 billion.
Melania, it should be said, is no slouch as a rentier herself. Her annual financial disclosure form shows that the Log Cabin Republicans paid her about $700,000 for two speaking engagements last year, one in New York and one in Palm Beach. If this LGBTQ+ group imagined it was buying Trump’s support, it was badly mistaken. The once and future first lady also collected about $217,000 to license Melania NFTs. And Amazon, of course, paid Melania $40 million to participate in a documentary about herself.
Rentier politics is a little bit like the end of It’s A Wonderful Life, when the townspeople gather at George Bailey’s house to bail out his savings & loan. In this version, though, they’re gathering to bail out Mr. Potter, George’s stingy and corrupt business rival. The sums are considerably greater than in Bedford Falls, and the motive less exalted. Investors gave Trump $3 billion on the hunch that he’d become president, or (after November 5) the certainty that he’d become president, or (after January 20) the fact that he was president already. It’s an unstable foundation on which to build a fortune because in three and a half years Trump will no longer be president. Perhaps a few hard-core fans will keep shoveling money Trump’s way for sentimental reasons, but the business model will have collapsed.
Former presidents don’t starve; they earn millions traveling the lecture circuit, writing memoirs, or sitting on corporate boards, usually providing little value in return. Perhaps that’s a kind of rentier politics, too. But those stakes are pitiful for a billionaire like Trump. Thus, the downside to rentier politics: It’s time-limited.
Still, the upside is considerable. To be a rentier capitalist, you have to bring some capital or property to the table, but to be a rentier politician all you need to do is win an election. Nice work if you can get it, while it lasts.