• Donald Trump’s first 100 days have forced necessary change

The Trump family control a cryptocurrency business called World Liberty Financial. In October it launched its own currency, $WLFI, a brilliant way for anyone who wants to make a deal with the president to funnel him money in secret, such as foreigners, who are barred from making political donations. Helpfully, Trump’s justice department has disbanded a national team charged with investigating crypto fraud. This year the Trumps launched another, USD1, which is pegged to the dollar.

As Mark Hays, the director of Americans for Financial Reform, observed: “With the launch of a Trump-backed ‘stablecoin’, World Liberty and Trump are now issuing their own private currency, while pressuring Congress to pass a bill … overseen by crypto-friendly Trump loyalists, and daring anyone to object.” Few Republicans in Congress will accept the dare, terrified of Trump’s vindictiveness.

Trump promotes his family’s cryptocurrency on Truth Social (part of Trump Media and Technology Group, managed by his son, Donald Jr). He has also taken to announcing market-sensitive tariff U-turns on that platform rather than via official White House statements. The result is that, above all, stock market traders feel they need to subscribe to the platform, which boosts its advertising revenues. Thus Trump’s family profits from the very policy instability that is a curse for so many Americans in their financial planning, or running their own businesses.

The most brazen monetising of the presidency is that Trump is offering wealthy businessmen solo dinners with him at Mar-a-Lago for a fee, negotiable, of up to $5 million. As one of Trump’s political opponents pointed out on the floor of the Senate: “If you were mayor of a medium-sized town and it was reported that you were selling meetings for, like, $200, you would be arrested.”

Trump is simultaneously dismantling the offices charged with investigating corruption within government: in January he fired 17 inspectors-general. The following month the Department of Justice “paused enforcement” of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the law that stops American companies bribing foreign governments to get business.

This will come in handy if, as Trump set out in his so-called Ukraine peace plan, US sanctions against doing business in Russia come to an end. It is impossible to understand Trump’s disgusting practice of blaming President Zelensky, rather than Vladimir Putin, for “starting the war” without appreciating how for many years the Trump organisation depended on Russian money, and Trump himself always aspired to a big financial footprint in Moscow. This is quite distinct from his nauseating man crush on Putin himself, though in practice they have become linked.

In 2008 Donald Jr told a business conference: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” And in 2014 his younger brother Eric told a sportswriter who asked him where the Trump Organisation was getting the funds to buy up many “exclusive” golf courses: “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” That was the year Putin annexed Crimea. The following year Trump himself boasted of his endeavours to launch enterprises in Russia (including, believe it or not, Trump Premium Vodka), saying that he had contacts with “the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top-of-the-government people … and the relationship was extraordinary”.

Trump, as his former lawyer Michael Cohen wrote, admired Putin above all for his ability “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company — like the Trump Organisation, in fact”. Trump did not succeed in that form of imitation during his first administration — and resented the way some in his cabinet thwarted him — but now he is indeed running the US government as an extended arm of the Trump Organisation.

Trump’s obsession, golf, has become the medium for this message, not least because of the vast resources being plunged into the sport by the Saudi government of Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, with which enterprise the Trump organisation is intimately connected (it is also now launching Trump Tower in Jeddah).

To quote my friend Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic last month: “As the stock markets crashed on Friday April 4, Donald Trump left Washington. He did not go to New York to consult with Wall Street. He did not go to Dover, Delaware, to receive the bodies of four American servicemen, killed in an accident while serving in Lithuania. Instead he went to Florida, where he visited his Doral golf resort, which was hosting the Saudi-backed LIV golf tournament, and stayed at his Mar-a-Lago club, where many tournament fans and sponsors were staying, too. His private businesses took precedence over the business of the nation.”

Keir Starmer understands that this is the way to Trump’s covetous heart. So officials from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport have been asking the Royal and Ancient, which runs the Open Championship, whether obstacles can be removed to enable the world’s oldest golf tournament to be held at the Turnberry course … owned by the Trump Organisation. The R&A has previously said it would not hold the event there because of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, by rioters incited by Trump to try to overturn an election that he lied, and continues to lie, was “stolen”.

One of Trump’s first acts on resuming the presidency was to pardon them all, even those jailed for assaulting police officers. After he got away with that, it is no wonder Trump believes he can get away with turning the presidency into a vehicle for his own family’s enrichment. Everything he does in the Oval Office should be viewed in that light.