President Donald Trump’s family is cashing in on the presidential spotlight with less pushback than in the past.
During Trump’s first administration, first daughter Ivanka, for example, was criticized for her brand endorsements, including a social media post about Goya beans. Ethics experts at the time complained that she, as a presidential adviser and federal employee, broke federal law.
Five years later, with no members of the first family part of the president’s second administration, first granddaughter Kai Trump last month launched her own clothing line using photographs taken at the White House and first son Eric Trump this month is embarking on a book tour for his new memoir, “Under Siege: My Family’s Fight to Save Our Nation,” with fewer or at least less vocal critics.
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Earlier this year, eldest first son Donald Trump Jr., also opened a private social club called the Executive Branch with membership fees reportedly $500,000, Eric’s former Republican National Committee co-chair wife Lara, debuted a new television show on Fox News, and first lady Melania Trump created a memecoin. The first lady’s documentary, Melania, for which Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million, is being released on Jan. 30, too.
For Public Citizen government affairs lobbyist Craig Holman, the Trump family “cashing in” on the presidency “is a family affair on a scale never before seen in American political history,” as other experts underscore that it is not illegal.
“There have been occasional embarrassments to former presidents by a relative seeking financial gain from a family member serving as president, such as Hunter Biden receiving consulting fees from foreign governments and Billy Carter lending his family’s reputation to sell a beer,” Holman told the Washington Examiner. “But nothing on the scale of the profiteering engineered by multiple family members of Donald Trump.”
Sometimes the profiteering benefits both Trump and the family member, including Eric Trump’s book, which is out next Tuesday, according to Holman. Instead of following older sister Ivanka to the White House in 2017, Eric and Don Jr. have remained executives at the Trump Organization. Eric’s portfolio incorporates Trump Hotels, Trump Golf, Trump Estates, and Trump Winery, in addition to the company’s investments in cryptocurrency.
“The book features a foreword supposedly written by Donald Trump, and goes on to depict President Trump and various members of the Trump family in heroic perspectives,” Holman said. “The book has already become a bestseller on Amazon and will deliver Eric a very handsome profit.”
Sometimes the profiteering rewards the family member responsible for the sales, including Kai Trump’s clothing line, Colman added. The 18-year-old golfer’s profile has increased exponentially since her primetime appearance during last year’s Republican National Convention.
“For monogrammed sweatshirts priced at $130 each, Kai’s financial gain will also prove to be lucrative,” he said. “Early orders of the sweatshirt have already sold out because of high demand.”
Eric Trump spokeswoman Kimberly Benza dismissed ethics concerns regarding her boss, particularly with respect to his upcoming book.
“Unlike Hunter Biden, who cashed in on his father’s position, selling influence and finger paintings, Eric Trump is a businessman, who has been in the private industry for 25 years, employing tens of thousands of people and has spent the last decade enduring relentless attacks from the radical left — attacks aimed at destroying his family, their business, and his father’s legacy,” Benza told the Washington Examiner. There truly is no comparison.”
To that end, Hunter Biden wrote his own memoir in 2021 called Beautiful Things. His father, then-President Joe Biden, praised him for his “strength and courage to talk openly about his addiction so that others might see themselves in his journey and find hope.”
Another example from Hunter Biden, other than his amateur artwork being valued at $500,000, includes a report this week that he pursued a real estate deal in 2017 with a Chinese company for land around the U.S. Embassy in Romania predicated on relationships formed when his father was vice president.
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The younger Biden, himself, has conceded he would not have had a $50,000-a-month seat on the board of Ukrainian company Burisma Holdings, which was central to Trump’s first impeachment, if the elder Biden had not been vice president and leading Obama administration foreign policy in the region.
“I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden,” Hunter said in 2019. “There’s literally nothing, as a young man or as a full grown adult that — my father in some way hasn’t had influence over. It does not serve either one of us.”
A spokesperson for Kai Trump did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s repeated requests for comment.
The New Yorker has estimated that the Trump family made $3.4 billion from the presidency between 2017 and August, including the $1 million membership fee for the president’s Mar-a-Lago private resort in West Palm Beach, Florida, though about two-thirds of that amount is thought to be from cryptocurrency.
Don Jr. and Eric Trump were criticized to an extent before the president’s trip to the Middle East in May after they preceded his travel with their own to the region to promote the family’s business interests, encompassing a $1 billion luxury hotel in the United Arab Emirates, a villa complex in Qatar, even a $2 billion investment from an Abu Dhabi firm into crypto exchange Binance that was facilitated by the Trump Organization’s World Liberty Financial.
Claremont McKenna College politics professor John Pitney agreed with Public Citizen’s Colman that “there is no real precedent for the scale and brazenness of the Trumps’ profiteering,” citing Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, who Pitney told the Washington Examiner has “made a fortune from the Saudis.”
Kushner has been in the Middle East this week, despite not formally being part of the administration, to help negotiate the peace deal between Israel and Hamas, as well as to have meetings with the likes of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, alongside U.S. Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff, after multiple sit-downs with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Kushner last month struck a different deal with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and other stakeholders to take video-game maker Electronic Arts private through a $55 billion deal that is the largest leveraged buyout in history so far.
The Washington Examiner asked Trump this week about Kushner’s role in the Israel-Hamas peace process. The president said, “Jared is a very smart guy,” especially after his experience during the first administration with the Abraham Accords. The Abraham Accords normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries.
“He’s a very smart person, and he knows the region, knows the people, knows a lot of the players,” Trump continued. “We had a very smart group of people working this. We had a lot of different players, different countries, and very diverse countries, very different from each other.”
Earlier this month, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt condemned a reporter for asking how the administration decided it was “appropriate” for Kushner to become an emissary to “Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia — three countries that combined have given him more than $2.5 billion for his investment firm,” Affinity Partners.
“I think it’s frankly despicable that you’re trying to suggest that it’s inappropriate for Jared Kushner, who is widely respected around the world and has great trust and relationships with these critical partners in these countries, to strike a 20-point comprehensive, detailed peace plan that no other administration would ever be able to achieve,” Leavitt said. “Jared is donating his energy and his time to our government, to the president of the United States, to secure world peace, and that is a very noble thing.”
For Pitney, the Claremont McKenna College professor, “the most unusual part” is Trump’s participation, with the president’s own memecoin providing foreign and domestic “influence-seekers” with an opportunity “to put vast sums into [his] own pocket.”
Other examples include Trump’s announcement last month that he would hold next year’s Group of 20 leaders summit at his golf course in Miami, Florida, after the same proposal was postponed during his first administration because of ethics concerns and the COVID-19 pandemic – not to mention his own merchandise, from gold sneakers to bibles.
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Regardless, Northeastern University politics professor Costas Panagopoulos reiterated that “while some may find capitalizing on these opportunities distasteful, it does not mean it is necessarily illegal or even unethical.”
“Of course, in some cases, some politicians or their associates cross the line and engage in corrupt practices, but that is not always the case,” Panagopoulos told the Washington Examiner.
, 2025-10-12 11:00:00, 
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