Talk to us a little bit more about that because if President Trump was not in the White House, do you think this would be a different story and by how much?

There's no question that it would be a different story.

We don't know exactly how the past IRS matters, how long they lasted.

So Donald Trump earlier this year in January of 2026, he sued the IRS and the lawsuit was claiming that they had not protected his personal financial information during his first term.

And a few months later, Trump on one side of the table and Trump on the other side of the table reached an agreement, and the beneficiary is Trump.

And the agreement is that the IRS is barred from looking into any past disputes between the IRS and the Trump Organization.

So if those disputes had carried on into that period, which we're not positive if they had ended or not, then they were ended at that point.

Obviously, I know you're saying President Trump here is the biggest winner, but who are the winners and losers, if there are any?

Can you explain how this works?

The most important thing that he's done to protect himself here is that in January, he sued in his personal capacity, the IRS.

So that put him on both sides of the lawsuit.

He's both the plaintiff and he's also the president overseeing the IRS.

Of course, when you're on both sides of the lawsuit, you're likely to find an agreement that is good for you.

And in this case, the settlement that they reached.

was that the IRS was forever barred from going after past offenses of the Trump Organization.

You say the club is worth about $120 million, but that Trump giving up the right to develop it would produce an $825 million deduction? How does that math work?

How worried should Don Jr. be tonight?

He should be very worried.

And the reason he should be worried is, first of all, because he's not a public official, many of his own business dealings remain private.

So depending on how far this expands, it could expose some of what he's been up to over the last couple of years.

And the second reason that he should be really worried is that the ones that there is more reporting on are the ones that are connected to his father.

It's hard to investigate Don Jr.'s finances without getting into Donald Trump's finances.

And so this investigation ultimately could embarrass not just Don Jr., but also the president.

Is it clear where all the money's coming from?

What are the members' reactions when President Trump is there playing a round?

So members' reactions vary, but basically it changes everybody's experience on the whole course.

So everybody who's in front of him is going to get blown through.

Donald Trump is, like, the fastest golfer imaginable, okay? He usually golfs with a foursome, but everybody's sort of on his timeframe, and his timeframe is basically, like, get in front of your ball, hit it.

I don't wanna see a lot of practice swings.

We're not gonna do much messing around on the greens.

Just gonna rip the drive.

Yeah

Can you explain?

Yeah.

So he comes up to the 11th hole at his golf course outside of Washington, DC.

And he's got this routine where he greets the chef and he tells everybody that these are the best hot dogs in golf.

And then he says, order one for everybody.

Everybody needs to get a hot dog.

And so the chef grills up a bunch of hot dogs, starts serving them out.

How come?

How much money did he make from that first term in the Oval Office?

Well, this is gonna surprise you because although he turned the presidency into a business, in the first term he didn't necessarily turn it into a good business.

So [chuckles] what he did was he took this real estate fortune that he had spent his entire life building, and he kind of dragged it along with him into the White House.

And what we saw were there were certain things where he could benefit by taking that business in.

So for example, Mar-a-Lago was able to increase its initiation fee, lots of people joined, and the profits at Mar-a-Lago went up.

But there were other parts of the business where it had sort of the converse effect.

For example, he used to have a large product licensing business where he would sell shirts and ties and that sort of thing.

Tell us again what a president who is following the rules is obliged to do when taking office if they hold or have any business interests.

So to start off the conversation, how so?

Well, the timeline here is pretty remarkable.

So if you look right after Donald Trump's elected in 2024, there's a company called Dar Global that says that it's going to create two new Trump branded projects somewhere in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.

Trump comes into office, one of his first major international trips.

He goes straight to Saudi Arabia.

He meets with people there, including some people who are connected to his business right away, lands on the tarmac, meets MBS, and goes to a lunch with people who have connections to his business.

Then in November of 2025, so about six months after that trip, we see the creation of two companies that have the name Daria in them, which is a city's sort of an ancestral city right on the edge of Riyadh.

How so?

How big are the deals Trump is making with Saudi Arabia?

Last year in 2025, Donald Trump earned $9 million from deals inside the country, but he also has one of his most connected partners that's from Saudi Arabia that's helped spread his name throughout the Middle East, and that adds another $17 million.

You add those two things up together, you're at $26 million.

That's a little bit more than a third of Trump's international licensing business with ties to Saudi Arabia.

In what way?

What linked Donald Trump to Saudi Arabia for years was sort of he had a lot of money, a lot of people in Saudi Arabia had a lot of money, and they really liked to spend it, so that you saw them doing deals on flashy things, yachts, the Plaza Hotel, apartments in Trump World Tower across from the United Nations.

Once the presidency gets involved, you see it be much less sort of happenstance, and there are big efforts.

You mentioned Jared Kushner's fund raising $2 billion from the Saudi government, but then there's also, you know, all these licensing deals that come on board.

Yeah.

And so what we did is we went and looked at court records and bond filings and SEC filings, and layered those on top of the financial disclosure report to pinpoint exactly how much money he made in 2025, which was $2.4 billion.

And then we went back and looked starting in 2016, and drawing it over that whole timeline, and seeing just how dramatically the rise was last year.

What do you make of his company's explosive growth?

Well, the first thing to understand is that when private equity firms grow really quickly, usually they do it because of great performance.

They've had a, a small fund.

They've made great returns for their investors.

People dump more money in.

So how exactly do you see any potential ethics concerns playing out, if at all?

Well, one thing that I'll note is that this is just the licensing business.

And if you look at his cryptocurrency business, a lot of that money has come from the Middle East as well.

So these numbers might sound big, but if you add in the cryptocurrency stuff, you're tacking on hundreds of millions of dollars more.

So it's an enormous amount of money that's flowing in the president of the United States from these Gulf countries.

Now, I think that one of the clearest ways to see the potential conflict of interest is to look at the first major trip that Donald Trump took as president.

And he didn't fly to a traditional ally like Great Britain.

But specifically, what are you looking out for next in this year?

So Dan, can you walk us through, obviously this is a complete and total about-face here from, uh, now versus then, but where is this money coming from?

Most of it is coming from the Middle East.

So of the $61 million, $23 million came from the United Arab Emirates, $9 million from Saudi Arabia, $5 million from Qatar.

India has also become an important, uh, country to the Trump organization.

They had some business there before.

They have new partners now.

And then there are some other countries, Vietnam, $5 million, Romania, $5 million.

Uh, but you have found, you say, that there are.

Can you share other Trump revenue streams that are flying under the radar?

Well, so one of the things that he's referencing here is that if you are the child of a president and you're an adult, then you do not have to disclose how much money you're earning because you don't necessarily have a White House position.

Now, Ivanka Trump had to when she was in the White House.

But for example, You know, Hunter Biden did not.

And other presidents' kids have not.

And so one of the things that's happening right now is that both Don Jr. and Eric Trump were very involved with the World Liberty Financial, that thing that threw off nearly $800 million to Donald Trump.

they also got huge sums of money.

I just whispered to Hugo, did you know that? No.

Can you share other Trump revenue streams that are flying under the radar?

Well, so one of the things that he's referencing here is that if you are the child of a president and you're an adult, then you do not have to disclose how much money you're earning because you don't necessarily have a White House position.

Now, Ivanka Trump had to when she was in the White House.

But for example, you know, Hunter Biden did not.

And other presidents' kids have not.

And so one of the things that's happening right now is that both Don Jr. and Eric Trump were very involved with World Liberty Financial, that thing that threw off nearly $800 million to Donald Trump.

They also got huge sums of money.

Did you know that? No.

Uh, but based on, on your reporting at Forbes, how much could Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner stand to gain from this project?

project?It's very difficult to know, and largely that's because although Jared is doing high-level diplomacy all over the world, he still hasn't filed a financial disclosure report, which would tell us about the structure of his underlying investments.

But if you just do some rough math, I mean, this is reportedly a $1.4 billion project.

Let's say that it doubles its money.

In a typical structure, a private equity firm would get about 20% of the profits.

That gets you to maybe $280 million.

Now, I wanna emphasize that that's all super theoretical-

Explain what you mean.

history.Dan Alexander is a senior editor of Forbes Magazine and the author of White House, Inc.: How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency into a Business.

The key question here is are those holdings impacting the decisions that he's making? And what's tricky about this, like so many other things, is that in order to answer that question, you really have to get inside Donald Trump's head.

While President Trump did transfer his assets into a trust, it is not blind, says Dan Alexander.

The trust doesn't hand over the ownership of those assets to anybody else.

It allows his kids to make [clapping] decisions about them on a day-to-day basis.

Those assets are still owned by Donald Trump, so therefore, all the potential conflicts with them and all the money that comes with them still rolls back to Donald Trump.

Dan Alexander is a senior editor of Forbes Magazine and the author of White House, Inc.: How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency into a Business.

The key question here is, are those holdings impacting the decisions that he's making? And what's tricky about this, like so many other things, is that in order to answer that question, you really have to get inside Donald Trump's head.

While President Trump did transfer his assets into a trust, it is not blind, says Dan Alexander.

The trust doesn't hand over the ownership of those assets to anybody else.

It allows his kids to make decisions about them on a day-to-day basis.

Those assets are still owned by Donald Trump, so therefore, all the potential conflicts with them and all the money that comes with them still rolls back to Donald Trump.