Donald Trump ascended to the presidency for a second time by pledging to bring down the rising cost of groceries and housing, essentials that every American needs, but increasingly few find affordable. Then he flipped that promise on its head. Instead of putting the full weight of the presidency behind addressing economic insecurity, the president’s first year was a blatant exercise in how to turn corruption into a governing principle, enriching the already rich by extracting wealth from the same people bearing the brunt of rising costs.
Let’s start with the money. Trump and his family have made a mint from occupying the White House. In just one year, the Trump family fortune has grown somewhere between $3.4 and $5 billion, largely the results of crypto ventures launched just after the election. The $TRUMP coin and World Liberty Financial have pulled in money not only from devoted Trump followers, but also from powerful, monied interests seeking to curry favor with the president. Case in point: a trucking executive reportedly bought $20 million in Trump coin to avoid the brunt of the capricious tariffs placed on goods crossing American borders. Then, in an ironic display of transparency, Trump invited the largest holders of his personal meme stock to the White House for a dinner. What do you think they talked about? The blockchain?
As Trump’s crypto empire expanded, the administration started to dismantle crypto oversight and consumer protection. Enforcement actions were dropped, investigations shelved, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was effectively gutted. The Trump administration’s self-interested attacks on consumer protection regulations has exposed millions of Americans to volatile, underregulated financial markets with fewer guardrails and real losses. The CFPB rollback alone cost Americans at least $18 billion. A crypto crash saw investors lose $380 billion in a single weekend. The crypto-fication of the Trump administration has led to proposals for crypto assets to be integrated into mainstream financial markets (e.g. mortgage underwriting), meaning the fall-out from crashes wouldn’t be felt solely by investors, but by everyone. Indeed, Chainalysis’s annual crypto crime report is set to claim “that crypto addresses tied to criminal operations pulled in at least $154 billion during 2025, shattering prior records with a 162% jump from the previous year’s revised $57.2 billion figure.”
Wasn’t Trump supposed to be tough on crime???
In effect, the White House now operates as one giant pay-to-play scheme. Tech leaders earned pride of place at Trump’s inauguration ceremony after donating millions of dollars to his inauguration fund. Private interests poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s ballroom project. Buying a little favor pays off. Executive agencies have dropped cases and enforcement actions against donor companies, and the administration has largely adopted Big Tech’s AI agenda as its own. The administration is fast tracking data centers to build out the infrastructure for the AI arms race, with little consideration for skyrocketing energy costs or environmental damage.
Trump’s brand of self-dealing translated directly into policy choices that hurt Americans and boosted big business. In 2025, consumers paid for 96 percent of Trump’s tariffs (nearly $200 billion), while politically connected firms got carve-outs. Stock investors’ profits have surged while working families paid more on their monthly bills. And let’s not forget that Republicans passed a massive tax bill that cut taxes for the wealthiest, but increased medical costs for 20 million Americans and cut services for the poorest.
Trump likes making deals, and he’s made a deal with the American elite: if you take care of him, he’ll take care of you. He has absolved and endorsed corruption and corporate malfeasance through a parade of pardons, wiping away $298 million in fines and restitution owed to victims. Aside from the crazed Trump fanboys that violently attempted to overthrow American democracy, the select beneficiaries of presidential grace are mainly those that have financially contributed to Trump in some way. Who says you can’t buy your way into heaven?
The Trump administration has also carried out a wave of deregulatory action that has gutted the parts of the federal government designed to serve the public interest. Labor and consumer protections? Gone. (That also means less money in people’s pockets.) Environmental regulations? Goodbye. Putting the best and brightest in charge of our health and safety? Not a chance. Trump 2.0 ripped out guardrails that existed to *checks notes* protect the public’s health and safety, all so industry could operate faster and cheaper. The billionaire executive class can breathe easy now. Those pesky regulations won’t stand in the way of profit.
Republicans have pushed a deregulatory agenda for decades. But no other Republican administration had the power of DOGE on its side. Trump handed the business of dismantling the administrative state over to Elon Musk as a reward for financing his presidential campaign. Musk’s acolytes wormed their way through the inner workings of federal agencies and started pulling wires. No plan, no oversight. Just haphazard destruction.
It’s easy to see DOGE as a failure if you focus on Musk falling comically short of his promised goal of $2 trillion in cuts or the chaotic rehiring of staff initially fired. But you’d be shortsighted, and wouldn’t see all that DOGE has achieved. Cuts to vital weather and climate monitoring programs now leave us ill-prepared for catastrophic weather events. Programs tracking industrial pollution were terminated due to staff cuts. DOGE cuts eliminated 85% of the staff that ran a firefighter cancer registry helping 9/11 first responders receive treatment. Just over a year ago, you could reasonably assume that your Social Security data was safe within government databases. Now you can thank DOGE for exposing your personal information to insecure systems, dramatically increasing the risk of identity theft. Thank you, Elon; what would we do without you?
Trump allowed an unelected, centibillionaire to take the federal government for a spin. And if you think we’re in the clear because Chainsaw Man has left Washington, don’t get your hopes up; they always save the bigger bad for a sequel.
DOGE is dead in name, but its mission lives on in Russell Vought. Where Musk was driven by ego and grievance and hindered by ignorance, Vought is ideologically committed to dismantling the parts of our government that help the public. It’s not an exaggeration to say he’s a real villain: he’s openly shared that he wants to traumatize federal workers so badly that they quit. Yikes.
If you’re interested in the full scope of damage wrought by DOGE, we’ve laid it all out in a recent report, DOGE: From Meme to Government Erosion Machine.
Outside the Trump family, no other person benefitted more from the chaos of DOGE than Musk himself. That’s no coincidence. Musk had frequent run-ins with federal agencies regulating his companies. DOGE allowed Musk to target those agencies. DOGE audited the FAA, which grounded Musk’s failed spacecraft; laid off workers at the NHTSA, which investigated deadly Tesla crashes; and closed an NLRB office that filed unfair labor practice charges against Musk’s company SpaceX, just to name a few. Being inside the higher echelons of government placed Musk in prime position for the juicy contracts handed out to private business. In just a few short months since the 2024 election, Musk’s companies gained a collective $613 billion in value, while his personal wealth shot up over 50 percent. SpaceX recently won a $2 billion military contract. We could keep going, but you get the idea.
Trump’s second term has delivered higher costs, weaker protections, and a government explicit in its service to the richest among us. DOGE kneecapped government capacity to an unprecedented degree, and Vought remains on hand to finish the job. That was year one. Three more to go.
Photo: President Donald Trump arrives to deliver remarks on the economy at Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, Tuesday, December 9, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)