How Trump made an estimated $2.2 billion during the first year of his second term

How Trump made an estimated $2.2 billion during the first year of his second term

New York Times reporter Eric Lipton discusses his Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations into Trump's conflicts of interest and whether he's exploiting the power of the presidency for self-enrichment.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. President Donald Trump made an estimated $2.2 billion last year, which was the first year of his second term. How did he manage to do that? That's what my guest, New York Times reporter Eric Lipton, has been investigating. He's uncovered business deals made by Trump and/or his sons, Don Jr. and Eric, that exploit the power of the presidency for self-enrichment, present conflicts of interest and violate norms. Lipton also uncovered conflicts of interest related to Trump's commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, as well as Lutnick's two sons. This year, Lipton won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of Times reporters who investigated how the president and his family have profited from White House deal-making. This was Lipton's fourth Pulitzer.

Last month, Lipton and four other Times reporters got something else as a result of their reporting - subpoenas from the Justice Department. The DOJ wanted to know the reporter's sources for a story about the luxurious plane donated as a gift to Trump from Qatar. At Trump's insistence that it serve as Air Force One, it had to be retrofitted with security measures it wasn't designed to accommodate, and it had to be finished within a year to meet Trump's deadline of the July Fourth Sesquicentennial celebration. Later in July, Trump made his first international flight in it for a NATO summit in Turkey, but he used an older Air Force One on the way back. The Times reporters uncovered that this was because after a ceasefire with Iran fell apart and the war resumed, there was a credible threat against Trump, and the retrofitted plane lacked sufficient security measures, despite Trump's earlier insistence that it was secure. Other recent stories Lipton has written about pertain to the industries the Trump administration regulates or makes decisions about and how he or his sons also made business deals in those sectors, including cryptocurrency, mining rare earth metals and nuclear power. We recorded our interview yesterday.

Eric Lipton, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Congratulations on your fourth Pulitzer.

ERIC LIPTON: Thank you so much for having me.

GROSS: So before we get to the subpoena, can you briefly add more to the Air Force One story that got you - I was going to say won you (laughter) - the subpoena?

LIPTON: Yeah. I mean, we had been tracking Trump's interest in having a new Air Force One since early 2025. After he returned to the White House, he was immediately obsessed with having a new plane. He felt like the old Air Force One does not kind of meet his standards, and it wasn't worthy of a leader, like, the Middle East leaders have these luxurious planes. He was very jealous, and he said so, and he wanted a fresh new plane with luxurious trappings. And so, as of early '25, we started to look at this plane that he identified that he wanted to get ahold of from the Qatari government.

And we were already skeptical by what we were told by people of the Air Force that it could ever be actually ready to serve as a mobile White House command center for the United States government. And so once it was delivered, we immediately began investigating that, and it became obvious based on the conversations that we had that there were shortcomings. There were shortcuts that were taken to get the plane to the president quickly, not only with its air defense systems, but with other smaller things like special exits that are there that are more secure, that are lower and that have built-in stairs that the president has to land at an airport without notice, and there's not ground crews, or a second backup power system for the plane that allows its engines to start faster, so it can get off the ground quickly if it has to, or if it has a power failure, it can still communicate internationally with military leaders or other world leaders. So these are things that are missing in the retrofitted plane and the rush to get it to him and get him a luxury ride.

GROSS: And even little things, like, a lot of the seats face sideways instead of facing forward, why is that basically prohibited on Air Force One?

LIPTON: Well, the FAA, when it certifies planes, it assumes that the plane is prepared for an emergency landing that's going to have a pretty intense, you know, g-force on your body. And so it tests the chairs to anticipate that force of an emergency landing. But when it's a sideways-facing chair, it has a different stress on your body. So this plane has sideways-facing chairs. It's a luxury environment. You know, it's a lounge kind of a setup. It's not really like a passenger plane. So they had to get certification from the FAA to be kind of a special condition outside of the normal FAA. And that didn't come until the day the plane started flying on July 1 of 2026.

GROSS: I have to say, it's not just Trump who flies on this plane. I mean, there's his - sometimes his Cabinet members, other people from his team, journalists.

LIPTON: It's true. I mean, it carries, you know, Cabinet members. It carries other world leaders, members of Congress. You know, there are dozens of people on that flight when he goes, you know, more than 100 at times. I mean, the truth of the matter is that this is a much newer plane than the old Air Force One that has been around since George H.W. Bush, and to some extent, it's a safer platform in the extent that it's a newer plane, but it does not have all the security trappings that are associated with Air Force One. And that's part of the reason that he acknowledged, you know, that he's going to max it up later this year, and they're going to take it out of service and to try to add some additional measures to it to try to get it closer to the standard that we expect nowadays to have, you know, kind of a flying Oval Office.

GROSS: So how much have taxpayers already spent retrofitting this plane?

LIPTON: I mean, it's sort of crazy, but they won't tell us. But it's clearly - it's close to $1 billion, it appears. They had said publicly that it was something around $400 million even after the plane was donated, but we know that it was hundreds of millions of dollars in addition to that, because they rushed so much to try to get this plane ready that they actually had to buy another Lufthansa 747-8 to train the pilots to fly this new plane because it has a different cockpit than the old Air Force One. First, they leased an Atlas cargo plane at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and then they bought another Lufthansa plane, which is sitting now in a hangar in - at the Andrews, you know, Air Force facility in Maryland, simply to train the pilots on it, because they had to transition so quickly to this because Trump wanted his new plane.

GROSS: One more thing about the security measures. Because that plane wasn't built for the kind of security that Air Force One needs, it's hard to retrofit it for some of the security needs because it's just not designed for it.

LIPTON: That's right. I mean, the Air Force One is actually designed to be able to keep flying in the event of a nuclear war - I mean, a terrible potential scenario. So they actually put, like, special shielding around all of the electrical wires and electrical components so that if there were to be an electromagnetic pulse, which can result from a nuclear weapon, that it doesn't lose electric power, which obviously - imagine what would happen on a plane if it lost electric power. That's an unbelievably complicated task. You have to basically, you know, get - expose all of the walls down to the wiring and then cover all of the wiring to put a shield around the wiring so that it's not, you know, disrupted by an elect