00:00:01
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven AM. Donald Trump returned to the White House promising to make America the crypto capital of the world, despite having once dismissed bitcoin as not money and warned it was based on thin air in a twenty nineteen tweet. In his first year back in office, Trump has set that skepticism aside as it became clear crypto presented an extraordinary business opportunity. A new financial disclosure thinks that just how lucrative those ventures have become, and while some investors have lost heavily, Trump's own fortune has surged, raising questions about how far a president can go in turning public office into a money making machine. Today, journalists and research director for Public Citizens Trump Accountability Project Zach Everson on Donald Trump's crypto empire and the new frontier of political corruption in America. It's Friday, July three, Zach, thanks for joining us. We've got Trump's slightest financial disclosure. What did it reveal about the President's wealth since taking office?
00:01:16
Speaker 2: The presidency has paid Donald Trump quite well, and that's not money coming directly from the US taxpayers. It revealed that he has made at least one point four billion dollars from Crypto in last year, which is just an astronomical amount of money. All told, his net worth Forbes estimates it to be about six billion in change.
00:01:36
Speaker 1: So he is.
00:01:37
Speaker 2: Really doing better now than he has ever done in his entire career as a businessman.
00:01:42
Speaker 1: I guess that pigs The question ahead is actually pay to other presidents. Actually it compares quite favorably. We haven't seen any sort of record of any other president's reporting anything remotely like this. And it's not just Crypto, it's really everything now.
00:01:56
Speaker 3: He earned more than eighty six million dollars in legal settlements as well. Those included the twenty four point five million from Meta, sixteen million dollars a piece from Paramount and Disney.
00:02:07
Speaker 2: He reported over twenty two thousand stock traits in the last year or so, which again is just an astronomical number. I think with Joe Biden it was in the dozens.
00:02:17
Speaker 3: In President Trump's biggest stockholdings include Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, and Tesla.
00:02:24
Speaker 2: He is very active financially. His entire financial disclosure came to nine hundred and twenty seven pages at a very lucrative year last year. What message does this send to average Americans, especially those financially.
00:02:38
Speaker 4: I don't get involved in my personal and we have funds that run my money. Well, I've made a lot of money before I became president, and they invest my money and I don't talk to him.
00:02:49
Speaker 1: I don't even speak to him.
00:02:51
Speaker 4: So I have many people I don't know what they go and closed accounts or something you put your money in. And that said, I don't talk to him. They're big institutions and they run it.
00:03:01
Speaker 1: And he's my money selling other things as well, like Trump band, Bibles and snakers and other sort of small automs.
00:03:08
Speaker 2: You've got bibles, You've got sneakers, You've got Trump fragrance, which I'm sure you're familiar with.
00:03:13
Speaker 1: I'm wearing it rot now Zech.
00:03:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can smell it through the camera.
00:03:17
Speaker 1: It's yeah.
00:03:18
Speaker 2: I mean, he's really opened himself up to be willing to profit in any way possible, in a way that we didn't even see in the first term. One of the examples I give for that is the online Trump store dot com. It didn't even exist in the beginning of his first term. It just directed people to a physical retail shop in Trump Tower in New York. Within hours of from being reelected, they already had out the forty five forty seven line referring to the numbers of his presidency pedaling merch and if you go on there right now, there are dozens of different types of maga hats. The Trump Organization's official website is now selling Trump twenty twenty eight merchandise. But what we're celebrating our two hundred and fiftieth birthday. He's got all sorts of stuff pegged to that. You know, it doesn't matter that he's not two hundred and fifty, although he's getting up there. You know, Trump two fifty is on a whole bunch of merchandise that he's selling. And you've made several million dollars off that last year, but again not not as much as krypto.
00:04:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, the big ticket otomy is crypti one point four billion dollars in income from that source. When we say income from crypti, what does that mean in this case?
00:04:29
Speaker 2: In this case, you know, he is actually making money off this. That's one of the things when people hear crypto, it's oh, it's for ten money. It's magic beans without the magic. Donald Trump has his deals structured so that he gets paid. These deals get him paid upfront. So for example, with his mean coin, which I think he made about six hundred million dollars off of last year, that's a marketing deal. He was paid to use his image on that. So the coin which was training for as high as about seventy four dollars and is now down to a dollar. Seventy eight people who bought that lost out on it, but Donald Trump still got paid from it. We've had a lot of reporting on him making money off this be it World Liberty financial token sales, getting selling a significant amount of the company to the UE's National Security Advisor. So we've seen enough reports trickling in over the course of the last year that this number, unfortunately was not a surprise.
00:05:23
Speaker 1: So tell me a little bit more about where this money is coming from. Because Donald Trump, finously wasn't always a crypti goud. It just seems like a scam.
00:05:31
Speaker 4: I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollars.
00:05:35
Speaker 1: So, hey does he end up in the crypti business.
00:05:39
Speaker 2: He learned that there was real money to be made out of fit air. He will credit it with some of it to his son Bannon, who was pretty savvy in crypto supposedly and has helped him figure out this stuff, but he really started off gradually.
00:05:53
Speaker 4: Hello everyone, this is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, other than Washington. With an important announcement to make. I'm doing my first official Donald J. Trump NFT collection right here and right now. They're called Trump Digital Trading Cards.
00:06:11
Speaker 2: The first product you put out there were NFTs, which are digital trading cards.
00:06:16
Speaker 4: And you get a chance to meet me, go to collect Trump Cards dot com right now. And remember Christmas is coming, and this makes a great Christmas gift.
00:06:29
Speaker 2: And he did all right with that. So then you saw later on he launched World Liberty Financial in the waning days of the twenty twenty four presidential campaign, and that at first just put out a token that allowed you to vote on matters concerning World Liberty Financial. I didn't convey ownership, you couldn't even sell it up front, but they did sell a chunk of those, and then right before he was inaugurated again they launched the Mean coin, which took off spectacularly, and later on World Liberty Financial launched a second product, USD one that that's a stable coin pegged to the value of the US dollar and supposedly backed one to one with government reserves, and he makes money off that by people depositing money, simwhat to how a bank makes money. People give him fiat currency and then by him World Liberty Financial, World Liberty Financial gives him the stable coin, and the whole time that stable coin is in circulation, World Liberty Financial earns interest on the money that's being made off of it. So that's really how he's pulling in all this money from crypto.
00:07:31
Speaker 1: And when he was selling tokens and the lock there were perks that people that were purchasing those tokens were able to avail himself off. What were some of those cycled perks.
00:07:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, so called is a great way of putting it. Because there were a lot of complaints. The biggest one was a dinner in his DC area golf club where he attended. Now they said he was there in his personal capacity, but I believe he was behind elector and that showed the presidential seal. But he flew in, made a couple of remarks and got out of there. So there were a lot of people who attended that and were upset. There was a similar event recently at Marlago, his Florida residence for people who own a lot of it, and they've really tried to incentivize people to keep the mean coin around. So they've been trying to drive up use of the token through selling access and little perks.
00:08:20
Speaker 1: So for the average person trying to get in on this record, cryptocurrency is a famously risky investment. So what has happened to those who have bought in?
00:08:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, like so many other cryptocurrencies, the problem is not being an insider, you know, and people who get into business with Donald Trump. This is a guy who's been convicted of business fraud. He's taken several hotels to bankruptcy. Like, don't do it, but people did it, and you know, figuring, oh, it's the president, We're going to do all right. According to Reuter's, people who invested in his products lost two point three billion dollars. You know, we've just seen the market value of these things crash. As we talked about with the mean coin, it was its seventy four dollars. Now it's down to a dollar seventy eight.
00:09:02
Speaker 1: So the people who.
00:09:03
Speaker 2: Got in early through those sales, they're up but if you just bought it when it hit the open market and you weren't an a credited investor or a foreigner, you're down. You know. It seems like almost everybody who's engaged in Trump scrypto schemes after the original interest in it has lost most of the.
00:09:20
Speaker 1: Money coming out. Now CRYPTI became my full family business, Zach. It isn't just Trump cashing in on all of this. It's become a family business now as well, with Millennia and his sons. How involved are I and what kind of money of I'm iking?
00:09:42
Speaker 2: So Milania is We got some information from her from the disclosure because presidents are required to disclose their spouse's income. She's done all right, not as well as Donald Trump. She made about seven million dollars last year from her mean coin, which is really shortly after his. The sons are really the ones who are super engaged in this with him. In World Liberty Financial, they're both listed his co founder. Excuse me, all three of them are listed as co founders there and are actively involved in the company. Don Junior and Eric are involved in another company called American Bitcoin, which minds its own bitcoin. So those guys are all in on crypto, and again, according to Forbes, we've seen their finances just skyrocket. You know, they were worth I think Eric was worth about forty million according to Forbes before this presidency. Last they did it in late fall, he was worth five hundred million. Donald Trump's also seen his networth go up about tenfold. And those those numbers are several months old and are almost certainly much higher right now. So while they did profit during the first presidency, it wasn't a ton, but they are out to show that they earned some lessons from the first presidency and they are ready to make some money off those this time around.
00:10:51
Speaker 1: And a cool sec Trump isn't just passively making money from crypto. He's the president of the United States, which maintain and create rules and conditions that help these investments thrive. Is that what has happened here? What is the administration done on that front to affect the value of this cryptocurrency.
00:11:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really convenient to be launching crypto ventures while also oversee the regulatory system of the United States. In that regard, we've seen pardons to business partners in the crypto most significantly cz in Binance. They are incredibly important to world liberty financial helping it set up the plumbing that got it running, churning trades to make it look like it was more active than it was, having incentives for people to keep it in their account and actually holding a significant amount amount of it for themselves. Lest I checked of the stable coin the usc one, eighty seven percent of it was held at binance and finance is banned from the United States, so that means, if the rules are being followed, eighty seven percent of it is an overseas hands. But you know, finance CZ got partned, and there were a whole bunch of other investigations that got dropped, justin Sun being amongst them. You're seeing all sorts of benefits to crypto exchanges that have listed his currencies for trade. And yeah, with regulation, we passed a stable coin bill and it is set up perfectly for his stable coin. You know, it kind of decapped a lot of the competitors that maybe weren't as prepared with reserves as his was, but his is you know, his, His was okay, no surprise.
00:12:26
Speaker 1: From a decent approbably eight in close up Zech, A lot of this looks like it's clearly a conflict of interests clearly corruption. But is any of it illegal and is there any iris sought or investigation into this at all?
00:12:39
Speaker 2: Apparently Yeah, from a late person's look, it is clearly a conflict of interest. By law, the president cannot have conflicts of interest. I mean that is explicitly stated that the president and the vice president cannot have conflicts of interest. The constitution does preclude the president from receiving money from foreign governments. That was never really put to the test in our entire history. We haven't really got a definitive case law on that. There was a look at you there's some cases during Trump's first term that looked at it, but they never got resolved. So we don't know if Donald Trump accepting tens of millions of dollars from a company backed by the spymaster of the UAE counts. And you know, right now, Republicans hold both chambers of our Congress, and they are not investigating, you know, as angry as they were about Hunter Biden and some of his apparent wrongdoing, which was not great.
00:13:32
Speaker 1: He was Jordy.
00:13:33
Speaker 2: He was clearly cashing in on his dad's name. The amount of what Hunter Biden did and got the Republicans so upset about is minuscule compared to what the Trumps are doing. One thing I think a lot of us take hope is we saw what happened in Hungary where corruption was just such a major issue there to drive out an entrenched power that you're hearing Democrats saying, Okay, we think this corruption is going to play like this, and polls are showing that it is resonating with voters. The issue again is that it's hard to make a lot of these people who've lost money to Donald Trump seem sympathetic and that, you know, to the rest of the country, and that they're Trump supporters who put money in a guy who's got a reputation of not being a great investment.
00:14:18
Speaker 1: And finally, Zach one, are the broader ethical implications of Trump cashing in on the presidency like this, are we opening a Pandora's box here when it comes to how political pal could be monetized in the United States?
00:14:31
Speaker 2: That box was opened during his first term, when he didn't suffer any consequences for how he monetized the office there that paled in comparison to what he's done this term. You know, the thought would be that Joe Biden and the Democrats would come in, they would have some power. They would say, Okay, here's what Donald Trump did, Here's how he got away with it. You know, yes, okay, this was never done before, but it was legal. Let's try to close that loophole. Let's put in some rules here. And they did nothing of the sort, and there was no really reckoning with what he did. So when he came back into power, it's all out there again.
00:15:07
Speaker 1: You know.
00:15:07
Speaker 2: My hope is that now is just so watantly obvious and so massive that whomever takes power after Donald Trump, we will go ahead and say, okay, yes, we need to get some checks put in here, because we have seen somebody absolutely exploit these rules and we can't let that happen again. But that's my hope.
00:15:27
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's many people's hopes. Zax. Thank you so much for joining us.
00:15:31
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me on, Daniel.
00:15:42
Speaker 1: All someone us Shadow Assistant Finance min Is to Simon Kennedy says the Albinezy government is crumbling to the gambling lobby as it introduces its gambling aed reform into Parliament. The Coalition, the Grains and the crossbenches are all pushing for changes to the bill, which limits TV and radio ads only certain times and creates an opt out feature for online platforms. The legislation will now be sent to an eight week Senate inquiry, and a United Nations scientific panel has released its first global report and Artificial Intelligence. The report, compiled by forty experts, say AI could transform healthcare, hunger relief, education, and climate action if used responsibly, but the technology is advancing faster than governments can regulate it. The report also says power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies and countries, with the United States controlling seventy five percent of computing power in the world's largest AI clusters. I'm Daniel James. Thanks once again for listening to seven AM. We'll be back tomorrow.
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven AM. Donald Trump returned to the White House promising to make America the crypto capital of the world, despite having once dismissed bitcoin as not money and warned it was based on thin air in a twenty nineteen tweet. In his first year back in office, Trump has set that skepticism aside as it became clear crypto presented an extraordinary business opportunity. A new financial disclosure thinks that just how lucrative those ventures have become, and while some investors have lost heavily, Trump's own fortune has surged, raising questions about how far a president can go in turning public office into a money making machine. Today, journalists and research director for Public Citizens Trump Accountability Project Zach Everson on Donald Trump's crypto empire and the new frontier of political corruption in America. It's Friday, July three, Zach, thanks for joining us. We've got Trump's slightest financial disclosure. What did it reveal about the President's wealth since taking office?
00:01:16
Speaker 2: The presidency has paid Donald Trump quite well, and that's not money coming directly from the US taxpayers. It revealed that he has made at least one point four billion dollars from Crypto in last year, which is just an astronomical amount of money. All told, his net worth Forbes estimates it to be about six billion in change.
00:01:36
Speaker 1: So he is.
00:01:37
Speaker 2: Really doing better now than he has ever done in his entire career as a businessman.
00:01:42
Speaker 1: I guess that pigs The question ahead is actually pay to other presidents. Actually it compares quite favorably. We haven't seen any sort of record of any other president's reporting anything remotely like this. And it's not just Crypto, it's really everything now.
00:01:56
Speaker 3: He earned more than eighty six million dollars in legal settlements as well. Those included the twenty four point five million from Meta, sixteen million dollars a piece from Paramount and Disney.
00:02:07
Speaker 2: He reported over twenty two thousand stock traits in the last year or so, which again is just an astronomical number. I think with Joe Biden it was in the dozens.
00:02:17
Speaker 3: In President Trump's biggest stockholdings include Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, and Tesla.
00:02:24
Speaker 2: He is very active financially. His entire financial disclosure came to nine hundred and twenty seven pages at a very lucrative year last year. What message does this send to average Americans, especially those financially.
00:02:38
Speaker 4: I don't get involved in my personal and we have funds that run my money. Well, I've made a lot of money before I became president, and they invest my money and I don't talk to him.
00:02:49
Speaker 1: I don't even speak to him.
00:02:51
Speaker 4: So I have many people I don't know what they go and closed accounts or something you put your money in. And that said, I don't talk to him. They're big institutions and they run it.
00:03:01
Speaker 1: And he's my money selling other things as well, like Trump band, Bibles and snakers and other sort of small automs.
00:03:08
Speaker 2: You've got bibles, You've got sneakers, You've got Trump fragrance, which I'm sure you're familiar with.
00:03:13
Speaker 1: I'm wearing it rot now Zech.
00:03:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can smell it through the camera.
00:03:17
Speaker 1: It's yeah.
00:03:18
Speaker 2: I mean, he's really opened himself up to be willing to profit in any way possible, in a way that we didn't even see in the first term. One of the examples I give for that is the online Trump store dot com. It didn't even exist in the beginning of his first term. It just directed people to a physical retail shop in Trump Tower in New York. Within hours of from being reelected, they already had out the forty five forty seven line referring to the numbers of his presidency pedaling merch and if you go on there right now, there are dozens of different types of maga hats. The Trump Organization's official website is now selling Trump twenty twenty eight merchandise. But what we're celebrating our two hundred and fiftieth birthday. He's got all sorts of stuff pegged to that. You know, it doesn't matter that he's not two hundred and fifty, although he's getting up there. You know, Trump two fifty is on a whole bunch of merchandise that he's selling. And you've made several million dollars off that last year, but again not not as much as krypto.
00:04:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, the big ticket otomy is crypti one point four billion dollars in income from that source. When we say income from crypti, what does that mean in this case?
00:04:29
Speaker 2: In this case, you know, he is actually making money off this. That's one of the things when people hear crypto, it's oh, it's for ten money. It's magic beans without the magic. Donald Trump has his deals structured so that he gets paid. These deals get him paid upfront. So for example, with his mean coin, which I think he made about six hundred million dollars off of last year, that's a marketing deal. He was paid to use his image on that. So the coin which was training for as high as about seventy four dollars and is now down to a dollar. Seventy eight people who bought that lost out on it, but Donald Trump still got paid from it. We've had a lot of reporting on him making money off this be it World Liberty financial token sales, getting selling a significant amount of the company to the UE's National Security Advisor. So we've seen enough reports trickling in over the course of the last year that this number, unfortunately was not a surprise.
00:05:23
Speaker 1: So tell me a little bit more about where this money is coming from. Because Donald Trump, finously wasn't always a crypti goud. It just seems like a scam.
00:05:31
Speaker 4: I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollars.
00:05:35
Speaker 1: So, hey does he end up in the crypti business.
00:05:39
Speaker 2: He learned that there was real money to be made out of fit air. He will credit it with some of it to his son Bannon, who was pretty savvy in crypto supposedly and has helped him figure out this stuff, but he really started off gradually.
00:05:53
Speaker 4: Hello everyone, this is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, other than Washington. With an important announcement to make. I'm doing my first official Donald J. Trump NFT collection right here and right now. They're called Trump Digital Trading Cards.
00:06:11
Speaker 2: The first product you put out there were NFTs, which are digital trading cards.
00:06:16
Speaker 4: And you get a chance to meet me, go to collect Trump Cards dot com right now. And remember Christmas is coming, and this makes a great Christmas gift.
00:06:29
Speaker 2: And he did all right with that. So then you saw later on he launched World Liberty Financial in the waning days of the twenty twenty four presidential campaign, and that at first just put out a token that allowed you to vote on matters concerning World Liberty Financial. I didn't convey ownership, you couldn't even sell it up front, but they did sell a chunk of those, and then right before he was inaugurated again they launched the Mean coin, which took off spectacularly, and later on World Liberty Financial launched a second product, USD one that that's a stable coin pegged to the value of the US dollar and supposedly backed one to one with government reserves, and he makes money off that by people depositing money, simwhat to how a bank makes money. People give him fiat currency and then by him World Liberty Financial, World Liberty Financial gives him the stable coin, and the whole time that stable coin is in circulation, World Liberty Financial earns interest on the money that's being made off of it. So that's really how he's pulling in all this money from crypto.
00:07:31
Speaker 1: And when he was selling tokens and the lock there were perks that people that were purchasing those tokens were able to avail himself off. What were some of those cycled perks.
00:07:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, so called is a great way of putting it. Because there were a lot of complaints. The biggest one was a dinner in his DC area golf club where he attended. Now they said he was there in his personal capacity, but I believe he was behind elector and that showed the presidential seal. But he flew in, made a couple of remarks and got out of there. So there were a lot of people who attended that and were upset. There was a similar event recently at Marlago, his Florida residence for people who own a lot of it, and they've really tried to incentivize people to keep the mean coin around. So they've been trying to drive up use of the token through selling access and little perks.
00:08:20
Speaker 1: So for the average person trying to get in on this record, cryptocurrency is a famously risky investment. So what has happened to those who have bought in?
00:08:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, like so many other cryptocurrencies, the problem is not being an insider, you know, and people who get into business with Donald Trump. This is a guy who's been convicted of business fraud. He's taken several hotels to bankruptcy. Like, don't do it, but people did it, and you know, figuring, oh, it's the president, We're going to do all right. According to Reuter's, people who invested in his products lost two point three billion dollars. You know, we've just seen the market value of these things crash. As we talked about with the mean coin, it was its seventy four dollars. Now it's down to a dollar seventy eight.
00:09:02
Speaker 1: So the people who.
00:09:03
Speaker 2: Got in early through those sales, they're up but if you just bought it when it hit the open market and you weren't an a credited investor or a foreigner, you're down. You know. It seems like almost everybody who's engaged in Trump scrypto schemes after the original interest in it has lost most of the.
00:09:20
Speaker 1: Money coming out. Now CRYPTI became my full family business, Zach. It isn't just Trump cashing in on all of this. It's become a family business now as well, with Millennia and his sons. How involved are I and what kind of money of I'm iking?
00:09:42
Speaker 2: So Milania is We got some information from her from the disclosure because presidents are required to disclose their spouse's income. She's done all right, not as well as Donald Trump. She made about seven million dollars last year from her mean coin, which is really shortly after his. The sons are really the ones who are super engaged in this with him. In World Liberty Financial, they're both listed his co founder. Excuse me, all three of them are listed as co founders there and are actively involved in the company. Don Junior and Eric are involved in another company called American Bitcoin, which minds its own bitcoin. So those guys are all in on crypto, and again, according to Forbes, we've seen their finances just skyrocket. You know, they were worth I think Eric was worth about forty million according to Forbes before this presidency. Last they did it in late fall, he was worth five hundred million. Donald Trump's also seen his networth go up about tenfold. And those those numbers are several months old and are almost certainly much higher right now. So while they did profit during the first presidency, it wasn't a ton, but they are out to show that they earned some lessons from the first presidency and they are ready to make some money off those this time around.
00:10:51
Speaker 1: And a cool sec Trump isn't just passively making money from crypto. He's the president of the United States, which maintain and create rules and conditions that help these investments thrive. Is that what has happened here? What is the administration done on that front to affect the value of this cryptocurrency.
00:11:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really convenient to be launching crypto ventures while also oversee the regulatory system of the United States. In that regard, we've seen pardons to business partners in the crypto most significantly cz in Binance. They are incredibly important to world liberty financial helping it set up the plumbing that got it running, churning trades to make it look like it was more active than it was, having incentives for people to keep it in their account and actually holding a significant amount amount of it for themselves. Lest I checked of the stable coin the usc one, eighty seven percent of it was held at binance and finance is banned from the United States, so that means, if the rules are being followed, eighty seven percent of it is an overseas hands. But you know, finance CZ got partned, and there were a whole bunch of other investigations that got dropped, justin Sun being amongst them. You're seeing all sorts of benefits to crypto exchanges that have listed his currencies for trade. And yeah, with regulation, we passed a stable coin bill and it is set up perfectly for his stable coin. You know, it kind of decapped a lot of the competitors that maybe weren't as prepared with reserves as his was, but his is you know, his, His was okay, no surprise.
00:12:26
Speaker 1: From a decent approbably eight in close up Zech, A lot of this looks like it's clearly a conflict of interests clearly corruption. But is any of it illegal and is there any iris sought or investigation into this at all?
00:12:39
Speaker 2: Apparently Yeah, from a late person's look, it is clearly a conflict of interest. By law, the president cannot have conflicts of interest. I mean that is explicitly stated that the president and the vice president cannot have conflicts of interest. The constitution does preclude the president from receiving money from foreign governments. That was never really put to the test in our entire history. We haven't really got a definitive case law on that. There was a look at you there's some cases during Trump's first term that looked at it, but they never got resolved. So we don't know if Donald Trump accepting tens of millions of dollars from a company backed by the spymaster of the UAE counts. And you know, right now, Republicans hold both chambers of our Congress, and they are not investigating, you know, as angry as they were about Hunter Biden and some of his apparent wrongdoing, which was not great.
00:13:32
Speaker 1: He was Jordy.
00:13:33
Speaker 2: He was clearly cashing in on his dad's name. The amount of what Hunter Biden did and got the Republicans so upset about is minuscule compared to what the Trumps are doing. One thing I think a lot of us take hope is we saw what happened in Hungary where corruption was just such a major issue there to drive out an entrenched power that you're hearing Democrats saying, Okay, we think this corruption is going to play like this, and polls are showing that it is resonating with voters. The issue again is that it's hard to make a lot of these people who've lost money to Donald Trump seem sympathetic and that, you know, to the rest of the country, and that they're Trump supporters who put money in a guy who's got a reputation of not being a great investment.
00:14:18
Speaker 1: And finally, Zach one, are the broader ethical implications of Trump cashing in on the presidency like this, are we opening a Pandora's box here when it comes to how political pal could be monetized in the United States?
00:14:31
Speaker 2: That box was opened during his first term, when he didn't suffer any consequences for how he monetized the office there that paled in comparison to what he's done this term. You know, the thought would be that Joe Biden and the Democrats would come in, they would have some power. They would say, Okay, here's what Donald Trump did, Here's how he got away with it. You know, yes, okay, this was never done before, but it was legal. Let's try to close that loophole. Let's put in some rules here. And they did nothing of the sort, and there was no really reckoning with what he did. So when he came back into power, it's all out there again.
00:15:07
Speaker 1: You know.
00:15:07
Speaker 2: My hope is that now is just so watantly obvious and so massive that whomever takes power after Donald Trump, we will go ahead and say, okay, yes, we need to get some checks put in here, because we have seen somebody absolutely exploit these rules and we can't let that happen again. But that's my hope.
00:15:27
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's many people's hopes. Zax. Thank you so much for joining us.
00:15:31
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me on, Daniel.
00:15:42
Speaker 1: All someone us Shadow Assistant Finance min Is to Simon Kennedy says the Albinezy government is crumbling to the gambling lobby as it introduces its gambling aed reform into Parliament. The Coalition, the Grains and the crossbenches are all pushing for changes to the bill, which limits TV and radio ads only certain times and creates an opt out feature for online platforms. The legislation will now be sent to an eight week Senate inquiry, and a United Nations scientific panel has released its first global report and Artificial Intelligence. The report, compiled by forty experts, say AI could transform healthcare, hunger relief, education, and climate action if used responsibly, but the technology is advancing faster than governments can regulate it. The report also says power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies and countries, with the United States controlling seventy five percent of computing power in the world's largest AI clusters. I'm Daniel James. Thanks once again for listening to seven AM. We'll be back tomorrow.
