Sixteen months in, the country’s economic gains have flowed to the top. The people closest to Trump have done best of all, winning access, favorable policy, and federal contracts, while the first family profits directly.
The good economic news of this term has been real for some Americans and hard to find for most. Stock values have risen and the wealthiest have grown wealthier. Ordinary households have barely moved. And the people closest to the president have done better than almost anyone, not by luck, but through access, special treatment, and, in the first family’s case, direct financial gain.
The gains went to the top
The household economy and the headline economy now look like two different countries. Real average hourly earnings rose just 0.3% over the past year. The personal savings rate has slipped to about 2.6%, lower than almost any point since 2008,and household credit-card debt hit $1.25 trillion in May. Only 45% of Americans planned to travel this summer, and most of those staying home blamed the cost.
The recovery, in other words, is easy to find on Wall Street and at the top, and hard to find in a typical family’s budget. That gap is the backdrop for everything else on this page.
Access and special treatment, from day one
The pattern started before the president was even sworn in. Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee raised a record $239 million, and more than $245 million once later filings were counted, much of it from corporations and executives with business before the government. Inaugural committees face no contribution limits, and the money buys proximity.
Fossil fuel interests are a clear case. Energy donors gave more than $19 million to the inaugural fund. On his first day in office, Trump signed a series of executive orders expanding fossil fuel production and rolling back climate rules, after asking oil executives for $1 billion during the campaign and installing former Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright as energy secretary.
Crypto followed the same arc. Crypto companies and executives were among the inauguration’s largest donors, and after the administration changed hands, the SEC dropped or resolved its enforcement actions against Coinbase, OpenSea, and Ripple. Then came the dinner: in May 2025, Trump hosted a private gala for the 220 biggest buyers of his $TRUMP memecoin, a group that had poured a combined $148 million into the token. Most of the top holders appeared to be based overseas, raising the prospect of foreign money buying direct access to the president. And the new, privately funded White House ballroom drew technology, defense, and crypto donors, several positioned to benefit from the administration’s AI agenda.
The pattern is hard to miss: money goes in, access opens, and policy moves in the donor’s direction.
The first family is cashing in
The sharpest conflicts involve the president’s own family.
Donald Trump Jr. is a named partner at 1789 Capital, a venture firm that took a stake in Vulcan Elements, a rare-earths startup, in August 2025. Three months later, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital handed Vulcan a $620 million loan, the largest it had ever issued, plus $50 million in Commerce Department equity. ProPublica reported that Peter Navarro, a top Trump aide and a friend of Don Jr.’s, pushed for the funding, and that the White House pressed the Pentagon to move unusually fast.
The president’s own portfolio tells a similar story. In February 2026, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million of Dell stock, according to his financial disclosure. In May, at a White House event, he urged Americans to “go out and buy a Dell” and praised the Dell family. Days later, Dell’s federal arm won a $9.7 billion Pentagon contract. Dell shares rose sharply in the following months, leaving the president with unrealized gains in the millions. The Dell family, separately, had donated $6.25 billion to seed “Trump Accounts,” the savings program created by the president’s own budget law. Ethics experts have flagged every layer of it.
Then there is the Qatari jet. A foreign government gave the administration a Boeing 747 valued around $400 million, now being retrofitted as Air Force One at a cost reported near $1 billion to taxpayers. Trump says that when he leaves office it will become a museum piece, like Reagan’s old jet. But under the arrangement the plane would pass to his presidential library foundation rather than the government, which ethics experts and reporting describe as a loophole that could leave it available for his personal use after his term.
Taken together, the family’s haul is large by any measure. A Center for American Progress tracker puts the Trump family’s cash and gifts since the 2024 election at more than $1.8 billion, a figure that, by the tracker’s own broad accounting, includes crypto gains, the value of the jet, and legal settlements.
What you got
While the connected collected access, contracts, and a friendlier government, ordinary families got the bill. Health insurance premiums for people who buy their own coverage rose by more than 50% on average after extra subsidies expired. Wages barely moved.
Public power is supposed to serve the public. The test is simple, and this term keeps failing it: the first meeting, the friendliest regulator, the federal contract, and the biggest tax break keep going to the people who already have the most, while everyone else is told to carry the cost.