For extraordinary reporting revealing the conflicts of interest and self-enrichment that run rampant through the Trump administration, from President Trump outward, the staff of The New York Times won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.

Trump World’s Self-Enrichment – The New York Timeshttps://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/trump-worlds-self-enrichment

April 28, 20266:32 PM ET

By 

Scott Neuman

Katia Riddle

The headquarters of the National Science Foundation in Alexandria, Va.

Mark Schiefelbein/AP

The White House abruptly dismissed the entire board overseeing the National Science Foundation, informing each of its 22 seated members in a terse email on Friday that they had been “terminated, effective immediately.” The move follows a Trump administration push for deep cuts to the NSF and raises concerns in the scientific community that a tradition of independent decisions for allocating federal science grants could be jeopardized.

One of the fired board members, Willie May, who is vice president for research and economic development at Morgan State University, says he’s “deeply disappointed” but not surprised. “I have watched the systematic dismantling of the scientific advisory infrastructure of this government with growing alarm, and the National Science Board is simply the latest casualty,” says May, a chemist and former director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The reference is to the Trump administration’s weakening or marginalizing of science advisory bodies across government, including the ousting of advisory boards at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., got rid of members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. At the Food and Drug Administration, the Trump administration also moved to eliminate a long-standing policy of having outside experts review new drug applications.

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Scientists push back on Trump plan to break up a critical climate and weather center

The National Science Board was established by Congress in 1950 and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. It’s a major funder of basic science, math and engineering research, especially at colleges and universities across the United States. Members are appointed by the president to staggered, six-year terms, and do not require Senate confirmation. The board — made up primarily of academics and industry leaders — is charged with identifying issues critical to the NSF’s future, submitting the NSF’s budget and approving its programs and awards.

In a written statement sent to NPR by email, the White House said the firing of the board was in line with a 2021 Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Arthrex, that “raised constitutional questions about whether non-Senate confirmed appointees can exercise the authorities that Congress gave the National Science Board.”

“We look forward to working with the Hill to update the statute and ensure the NSB can perform its duties as Congress intended. The National Science Foundation’s work continues uninterrupted,” according to the statement.

Legal scholars contacted by NPR were mostly confused when asked about the White House statement. Duke University law professor Jeff Powell, a leading expert on the appointments clause of the Constitution, says there is “a puzzling disconnect between firing the Board members and the [White House] statement.” He said that if Arthrex applies, “eliminating the [NSB] members leaves it unaddressed.”

The Trump administration’s firing of the NSF board is just the latest move aimed at the agency. In the White House’s preliminary budget request for 2026, it sought to cut $4.7 billion from the NSF budget — more than half of the agency’s $9 billion budget. The administration has also rescinded thousands of already-approved NSF grants.

Concerns over the creation of a partisan science board

Roger Beachy, a professor emeritus of biology at Washington University, was one of the board members fired on Friday, though his term was set to expire shortly. He is concerned the NSB could become partisan, “[taking] … orders from the administration rather than being independent” — though he emphasizes that it’s too early to know for sure.

Beachy is worried that basic research could take a back seat to short-term goals as defined by the White House. “If we target what we know to be a focus of the administration,” he says, then fields that interest the administration, such as nuclear energy and quantum machinery, may be all that gets funded.

Astronomer and physicist Keivan Stassun, who also served on the board until Friday, shares that concern. He told NPR that the National Science Board was created to safeguard “far-reaching, long-term investments that may not pay off for a generation.”

But when those investments do pay off, he says, society is stronger. The Board’s role is to ensure such decisions are made “wisely, soberly, patriotically,” and in the national interest, he says.

California Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the ranking member on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, which oversees the NSF, calls the administration’s move an “attack on science.”

She points out important advances and technologies, such as the internet, CRISPR gene-editing technology and Doppler radar, where NSF funding played an important role. “At one time, [NSF] grants were merit-based,” she told NPR. “Now they appear to have more political influence in addition to a falling off just in terms of the volume.”

Texas Republican Rep. Brian Babin, who chairs the House Science Committee, said in an email to NPR: “Every President expects advisors to serve in a manner consistent with executive and legislative priorities. I look forward to seeing whom President Trump selects to fill the NSB and refocus our science agencies on their core mission: pursuing science.”

To be sure, there are some scientists who are less alarmed. Gennady Samorodnitsky, a professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell University, has received NSF funding in the past. “It is the task of the government to figure out what’s best for society,” he says. “The money comes from the government, so ultimately [the government] makes the decisions.”

Willie May, however, is concerned about what the cuts to science funding and the chaos at the NSF says to America’s rivals abroad.

“At a moment when the United States faces intensifying global competition in science and technology — when other nations are investing aggressively in the research and the STEM workforce that will underpin innovation for the next century — we are systematically undermining the institutions and the people dedicated to keeping our country at the leading edge,” he wrote to NPR.

“That is not good for our country; it is not in the interest of American workers, American industry, or the next generation of scientists who are watching what we do at this critical time,” he says.

Donald Trump has long been synonymous with wealth, luxury, and business.

But when he started his first term as President of the United States, The New Yorker (1) reported his finances were in a “tight spot.” At the start of his second term, that they were in an even tighter one.

Joanna Sinclair

Apr 28, 2026

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According to The New York Times (2), Trump faced mounting financial pressure ahead of his second term. Trump Tower in Lower Manhattan couldn’t cover its mortgage, his golf courses didn’t have enough players to cover operating costs and a slew of legal judgments threatened to take more of his wealth.

Six months into his second term, however, The New Yorker published an investigation showing his finances had “vastly improved” to the tune of $3.4 billion, driven in part by foreign deals and cryptocurrency ventures.

Trump’s ongoing $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS could add even more. He sued the agency in January, alleging it leaked his tax information to news outlets (3) during his first term.

Donald Trump’s wealth “is now built on monetizing the family name in new ways and, intentionally or not, the office of the presidency,” The New York Times (2) wrote.

The Trump Organization, now run by his two eldest sons, Eric and Donald Jr., has seen a boon in profits from his time in the White House. If he has success in his case against the IRS, he stands to profit even further.

Where did the $3.4 billion come from?

Although the Trump Organization has a self-imposed rule against doing business directly with foreign governments (4), it has struck eight overseas deals so far in Trump’s second term.

For example, Eric and Donald Jr. are involved in a Qatar project for a Trump-branded golf club and villa, developed in part by a government-owned company. Similar projects in Vietnam (5) and Saudi Arabia have generated tens of millions in fees for the Trump Organization and could curry favor with U.S. officials.

Five of the eight overseas deals are in the Persian Gulf. Much of the money flowing to the Trump Organization, and Trump himself, wouldn’t be possible without his presidency, The New Yorker (1) reported.

Cryptocurrency has also been a huge driver of wealth. One Trump-linked venture, World Liberty Financial, has earned at least $1.2 billion (6) since its founding in 2024.

The Associated Press reported the Trump family sold nearly 50% of this crypto business for $500 million to a UAE government-linked company run by a member of the UAE royal family just before Trump’s inauguration (7). A UAE government fund then invested $2 billion in a stablecoin issued by World Liberty through an offshore crypto exchange, Binance, generating tens of millions of dollars in interest for the Trump-backed company.

Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, has said the Trumps “have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House.”

Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie (8) wrote that “the president and his family have leveraged his office to the tune of nearly $4 billion,” adding that Trump’s business investors include large corporations and foreign nationals seeking to get on the good side of the U.S. government.

Whether or not conflicts of interest are at play, Trump and the Trump Organization are clearly seeking significant growth in their bottom line during his time in the White House.

By

Jennifer Hansler

Updated 20 hr ago

This rendering shows a US passport with President Donald Trump’s image on the inside. US State Department

The US will soon begin issuing passports featuring an image of President Donald Trump inside, a State Department official said Tuesday.

The official said that the passport “will be the default passport out of the Washington Passport Agency when available” for those who renew their passports in person at that location.

“Online options or other locations will maintain existing passport design,” the official said.

The presence of Trump’s likeness in the US passports is the latest – and most significant – instance of his image being used for an item said to be commemorating the 250th anniversary of US independence. Unlike a commemorative coin or national park pass, a US passport is an internationally recognized form of identification that is typically valid for 10 years.

According to a mockup of the passport, Trump’s face and his signature in gold will appear on the inside cover.

“As the United States celebrates America’s 250th anniversary in July, the State Department is preparing to release a limited number of specially designed U.S. Passports to commemorate this historic occasion,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said Tuesday.

“These passports will feature customized artwork and enhanced imagery while maintaining the same security features that make the U.S. Passport the most secure documents in the world,” he said.

The news was first reported by The Bulwark, and Fox News first published a mockup of the new passport.

The State Department will begin to issue the passports this summer. It is unclear how many will be issued.

According to the mockup of the passport, the back cover will show an image from “The Declaration of Independence” painting by John Trumbull.

Currently, the inside front cover of the US passports show an image of Percy Moran’s painting of Francis Scott Key the morning after the bombardment of Fort McHenry – the battle that inspired Key to write what would become the US national anthem. Lines from the anthem are also printed inside the front cover.

The Department of the Interior, which oversees national parks, announced last year it was unveiling “commemorative new designs” for park passes, one of which features Trump’s face alongside George Washington.

“It is the department’s honor to showcase the America the Beautiful pass honoring America’s 250th anniversary and the generations who have protected our lands,” Secretary Doug Burgum said in a video posted on the department’s website.

And last month, Trump’s handpicked Commission of Fine Arts voted to approve a commemorative coin for the United States’ 250th birthday featuring the president’s likeness.

Last year, Trump’s name was also affixed to both the Kennedy Center and the US Institute of Peace.

Michael Tomasky/

April 4, 2025/10:22 a.m. ET

His reading of American history is shockingly stupid, even for him.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Trump’s “Liberation Day” event in the White House’s Rose Garden on April 2

You remember the Brady Bunch movies of the 1990s, whose ingenious conceit was that television’s archetypal late-1960s sitcom family was transported to the ’90s but still lived in their oblivious 1969 bubble of bell bottoms and groovy chicks and Davy Jones fandom? That’s how I’ve been thinking of Donald Trump this week, except that he’s living in an 1890s bubble that no one around him is willing to puncture but that everyone else in the world, probably including those now-famous penguins on that one island, knows is utterly insane.

There’s a lot to say about these tariffs and how destructive they are, and most of it has been said. My colleague Timothy Noah wrote about the stupidity of tariffs as policy and how Trump has already cost him personally thousands of dollars. But I want to focus on something different here. I want to focus on Trump’s understanding of history. It’s so shockingly dumb—yes, even for him—that it’s hard to believe that we have a president of the United States who is this ignorant.

Here’s what Trump said the other day, and he has said versions of it a number of times: “In the 1880s, they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting. We were collecting so much money so fast, we didn’t know what to do with it. Isn’t that a nice problem to have?”

OK. First of all. Nobody can tell what commission he’s talking about. President Chester Arthur empaneled a commission that recommended reducing tariffs by 20 to 25 percent, going hard against the conventional wisdom of the day. But Congress defied him, lowering tariffs by just an average of around 1.5 percent (and yes, that’s another thing—Congress is supposed to set tariffs, not the president, making this move, among other things, an impeachment-worthy “abuse of power,” a phrase invoked by The Wall Street Journal editorial board Thursday).

But more importantly, there’s this. Allow me to put this as Trump himself might on Truth Social: THE MAN IS AN IDIOT!!!

It is true that tariffs were the chief source of federal government revenue for most of the country’s history until the twentieth century. Tariffs and excise taxes, which are taxes on specific goods—gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol, certain amusement activities. And for a spell, a modest income tax, which President Lincoln imposed during the Civil War and that lasted through 1872. But broadly speaking, tariffs were the ball game.

Even so, they were always a political hot potato because there were powerful interests that supported them (steel, iron, and wool) and other powerful interests that opposed them (wheat, cotton, tobacco). Tariffs were at the center of some of the most heated debates of the nineteenth century.

But here’s the thing you need to know that the president of the United States does not: Tariffs supported most of what the federal government did in the 1800s because the federal government didn’t do much of anything. The government did about four things. It recruited and paid an army. It delivered mail. It ran some courts of law. And it collected duties and tariffs. That was about it. There was no need for much federal revenue.

Today, liberals and conservatives argue over what might constitute an optimal number for federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. Generally speaking, liberals want that number to be up around 25 percent, which indicates a robust welfare state. Conservatives prefer that it be down closer to 15 or so.

Here are some numbers from the St. Louis Fed, which go back to the Great Depression. During the New Deal, as Roosevelt was just constructing the first iteration of the American welfare state, federal spending as a percentage of GDP got up to around 10 percent. During World War II, when the government took over a number of industries, it shot up to around 40 percent. In the postwar era, it has indeed hovered around 20, indicating the liberal-conservative tug of war over federal spending. Interestingly, it rose a little under Ronald Reagan (military spending), and it reached its highest postwar point, 30.7 percent, under … Donald Trump, during the pandemic.

So that is where federal spending as a percentage of GDP has been for nearly a century—17 percent, 22 percent, 30 percent in a crisis. Want to take a guess as to what it was in 1900? Maybe 11 percent? Nine percent? Seven? Try 2.7 percent.

In other words—tariffs could cover the cost of what the federal government did because the federal government didn’t do anything!

Now, there will of course be those who say, “Well, good! We need to go back to that!” OK. Let’s go back to no Social Security. Let’s go back to no Medicare. Let’s go back to senior citizens having to fend for themselves and move in with their kids (if you’ve never seen Make Way for Tomorrow, please watch it this weekend). Let’s go back to no environmental regulation, no food inspection. Let’s just have no airline safety regulations. Flying would be so much more interesting that way! And finally, I say to those conservatives who think they want a 1900-style government, let’s go back to an army of 25,000 personnel.

So in sum, Trump is fantasizing about some America that no one, literally not a single American, wants to return to. Poverty was through the roof. Health care was abysmal. People had seizures from toothaches. Most people didn’t even use toilet paper yet (it wasn’t “splinter-free” until the 1930s!).

One more idiotic Trump quote, if I may: “Then in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government.”

What?! Well, here, we encounter a very interesting history that maybe 1 percent of Americans know. As I noted, Lincoln imposed an income tax, which disappeared in 1872. There was no income tax for 20 years. Then there was a big depression in 1893, and Congress imposed a tax on high-income people for two years. Then it went away again.

Come the twentieth century and the Progressive era, and the demand for the government to do things like inspect meat and enforce child labor laws, and liberals began pushing for an income tax. Conservatives, of course, were opposed.

So in 1909, progressives attached an income tax plank to—guess what? A tariff bill. Conservatives counterproposed that an income tax be the subject of a constitutional amendment, confident that they’d fixed the progressives’ wagon because there was no way three-quarters of the states would approve such jackbooted madness. Then they sat and watched slack-jawed as state after state approved it! In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment took effect.

Is it Trump’s secret plan to do away with the income tax? Actually, it’s not secret at all. He has said it many times. He’s going to raise $6 trillion from tariffs and abolish the IRS.

OK. We’ll see. Even putting aside the downsides of tariffs (most obviously, higher prices), economists see nothing close to $6 trillion in revenue.

Trump is blowing more smoke out his you-know-what than a decade of California wildfires could produce. Read this, from CBS.com: “In a recent news conference, White House staff secretary Will Sharf estimated that Mr. Trump’s 25 percent tariff on vehicles and auto parts imported into the U.S. could raise ‘roughly $100 billion in new revenue.’ At the same news conference, Mr. Trump claimed moments later ‘anywhere from $600 billion to $1 trillion will be taken in over the relatively short-term period, meaning a year from now.’”

The aide says $100 billion. Trump casually ups it to a trillion. Billion, trillion; who knows. Well, even I know: A trillion is a thousand billions. That’s like the difference between 10 and 10,000. Pretty vast, in other words. But Trump knows that nobody really thinks about the difference between a billion and a trillion, so just say a trillion.

Finally, before I let you go: How much do tariffs bring in now? Around $80 billion. Sounds like a lot, and it is. But take a guess as to how much total revenue the federal government takes in, from (1) income taxes, which is half of all revenue, (2) payroll taxes, (3) excise taxes, and (4) corporate taxes.

It’s around $4.7 trillion. Know what percentage of $4.7 trillion $80 billion is? About 1.7 percent. That’s how much of our current federal revenue comes from tariffs.

Going from 1.7 percent to 100 percent sounds, um, like something that will cause vast, unknowable dislocations; and more to the point, like the fantasy of a stupid man who’s never read a book and has no effing idea what he’s talking about.

Or as Gary Cole’s Mike Brady might have put it: “Donald, when you’re trying to fool other people, you’re really only fooling yourself, and who’s the real fool then?”

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
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