This country has had some bad presidents, but it’s a bit hard to imagine a president whose main goal is to put his name on things and who would openly steal billions from the Treasury. But that is Donald Trump.
Starting with the quest to get his name on stuff. We now have the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, which used to be the United States Institute of Peace, before Elon Musk shut it down. We have the Donald J. Trump John F. Kennedy Memorial Center, which Trump also shut down. There are also the Trump accounts which will allow homeless and hungry kids to have accounts that pay fees to a brokerage house.
And now we have Trump Rx, which is supposed to be Donald Trump’s big effort to make drugs cheaper; 1500% cheaper according to people named Donald Trump. This could just be a funny joke if paying for drugs was not such a major problem for many people with serious medical conditions.
Despite Trump’s boasts of being a master negotiator, people will not find much in the way by deals at Trump Rx. It doesn’t actually provide new discounts on drugs. The site just gives people coupons that allow them to get the discounted prices that the companies already offered on their websites.
Even worse, more than half (26 of 43) of the drugs on Trump Rx are already available as low-cost generics at prices far lower than the prices the site offers. To take the example posted on MSN’s site, Trump Rx offers a 30-day supply of the antidepressant drug Pristiq for $200, which is less than half of the list price. However, a generic version of the drug is available at GoodRx for $30 and at Mark Cuban’s CostPlusDrugs for $16.65.
This means that someone buying Pristiq from Trump Rx would be paying 1100 percent more than they would at Mark Cuban’s site. That doesn’t sound like the road to affordability.
For anyone interested in what we are actually paying for drugs, the answer is 7.5 percent more in 2025 than in 2024. In Trump’s loony-tune head prices might be falling by more than 1000 percent, but when it comes to people’s pocketbooks, they are paying more for drugs.
Trump’s $10 Billion Heist from Taxpayers
I know I have written about this one before, but the theft is so large and so open that it’s hard to stop talking about it. Trump is filing an absurd lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and then instructing his lackeys to hand over the money. It is hard to imagine a more open theft of taxpayer dollars.
To be fair, there is some basis for the lawsuit. The I.R.S. allowed Trump’s tax returns for two years to leak, revealing that he paid almost no taxes.
Returns are supposed to be kept secret, so there was an actual wrong committed against Trump. But where the hell does he get $10 billion in damages? There were 40 other rich people who had their returns leaked. If we handed $10 billion to each of them it would come to $400 billion, or nearly half of the Defense Department’s budget.
Realistic damages may come into the tens of thousands of dollars, or maybe low hundreds. After all, Trump is the ultimate public figure, all prior presidents for decades had freely released their tax returns, and Trump had promised to do so as well. So, the leaker was just helping Trump keep his promise. How is Trump damaged by having information made public that he had actually promised to make public himself?
It is almost impossible to fathom how large Trump’s attempted theft from the Treasury is. The Republicans for years made a huge deal out of the fact that Hunter Biden got around $1.5 million for his paintings. Let’s grant that people bought the paintings with the idea of getting influence with President Biden. Hunter’s take was less than 1/6000th of what Trump is putting in his pocket.
It’s the same story with Hunter Biden and Burisma. He got between $2 and $4 million for his work for the company. Again, we can assume this was with the expectation that he would get favors from his father. We know he never did because Republicans spent five years looking for the favors and came up empty. Since Trump’s haul is between 2,500 and 5,000 times as much, an equivalent investigation would take between 12,500 and 25,000 years.
Trump likes to boast about things he has done that no one ever thought was possible. Sometimes his boasts are about things that everyone thought were possible and sometimes they are about things that Trump hasn’t done. But in this case Trump would be right; no one ever thought it was possible for a president to steal $10 billion from the government right in front of everyone’s eyes.
Correction
I had a couple of readers inform me that I had mispresented steps involved in the Trump lawsuit against the I.R.S. While Trump can order the I.R.S. to agree to pay him $10 billion, a judge will ultimately have to approve the settlement. Given the absurdity of the case, it seems that any judge not appointed by Donald Trump, and even some who were, would throw the suit out.
On this point, another reader pointed out to me that one of the other rich people who got their returns leaked, Ken Griffin, did in fact sue the I.R.S. The judge in the case ruled that Griffin did in fact have a course of action, since the I.R.S. should not have allowed the returns to become public. However, the judge said that Griffin had not shown any evidence he was damaged in any way by the leak.
Applying the same logic to Trump, he would have even less basis for damages since as an incredibly public figure, he has less basis for a claim to privacy. Also, his enormous platform gives him ample opportunity to respond to any wrong impressions that may have resulted from his leaked tax returns.
It is worth pointing out that Trump’s $230 million case against the Justice Department, because they tried to prosecute him for attempting to overthrow the government and steal classified documents, is different in this respect. That is an administrative action that will be decided entirely by Trump appointees in the Justice Department. No judge has to sign off on the agreement, so this is Trump just choosing to hand taxpayer dollars to himself.
Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.
Reprinted with permission from Dean Baker.
