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There are anniversaries worth celebrating. Like last weekend’s 50 th anniversary of the movie “Jaws.” And there are anniversaries we’ll regret forever. Like June 16, 2025: the 10th anniversary of Donald Trump’s coming down the golden (of course!) escalator in Trump Tower and announcing he was running for president.

Reporters noted there was a certain gleam in Trump’s eye that day. And now we know what that gleam was all about. Not about how much good he could do for the country, how many new jobs he could create or how many Americans he could protect with health care. The gleam in his eye was about how much money he could make as president.

In 2000, when he was first thinking about running for president, gadfly developer Donald Trump told Fortune magazine: “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” Which he did, and which he’s still doing.

Donald Trump may be president of the United States (sigh!), but that’s just a sideline gig. He is first and foremost a hustler. The first modern president not to put his financial assets in a blind trust, Trump’s never stopped grubbing for money: as candidate, as president, as candidate again, and now as president again.

That rumbling sound you hear? It’s the sound of Thomas Jefferson, or Abraham Lincoln, or Jimmy Carter, or any of our other 42 deceased presidents rolling in their graves. Any one of them would be appalled at the way Donald Trump has turned the presidency of the United States from the highest form of public service to the most disgusting display of personal enrichment. Trump has replaced the revered title “commander in chief” with the disgraced “grifter in chief.”

Go online. The amount of Trump Merch for sale is sleazy and staggering. The president of the United States himself is hawking Trump sneakers, trading cards, watches, golf balls, caps, T-shirts, mugs, beach shorts, a “patriotic” whiskey decanter set, and even pickleball paddles. By the end of the year, you’ll also be able to buy a Trump Mobile smartphone for $499. How long before he’s hawking Trump condoms (small size only)?

For the more adventurous, there’s also the $Trump meme coin, whose 220 top investors flew in from China, Germany, Singapore, Taiwan and around the world on May 22 to dine with Trump at his golf club in Potomac Falls, Virginia. The next morning, donors were given a private tour of the White House. And, to be clear, this was not a campaign fundraiser. This was a business event for Trump, Inc. – from which, according to the New York Times, Trump and his family have already collected more than $320 million in fees in five months. And this comes on top of a new crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, which Trump launched in January with a $2 billion investment from the government of Abu Dhabi.

Not so long ago, Republicans in Congress were demanding that Hunter Biden be prosecuted for “exploiting his father’s name.” And yet, ever since the inauguration, sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr. have been bouncing around the world in their father’s name, signing a breathtaking bounty of new business deals for Trump, Inc., including: a $1 billion, 80-story luxury hotel in Dubai; a second high-end residential tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; a new high-rise Trump hotel in Belgrade; a new golf course and villa complex in Qatar; a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City; and a $1.5 billion golf complex outside Hanoi. They’ve also opened a private club in Washington, the “Executive Branch,” where for a $500,000 entrance fee, members can rub elbows with members of the Trump administration – and maybe with POTUS himself.

And, again, all of those deals have but one purpose: to line the pockets of Donald Trump and his family. Eric Lipton, investigative reporter for the New York Times, concludes: “Mr. Trump is estimated to have added billions to his personal fortune, at least on paper, since the start of his new term, much of it through crypto.” Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard and co-author of “How Democracies Die,” told the Guardian: “I have never seen such open corruption in any modern government anywhere.”

How times have changed. Not so long ago, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton was roasted for making $100,000 in cattle futures – 12 years before her husband was elected president. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that was such a big deal. But at least we had some standards of decency then. We have none today.

(Bill Press is host of The BillPressPod, and author of 10 books, including: “From the Left: My Life in the Crossfire.” His email address is: bill@billpress.com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter @billpresspod and on BlueSky @BillPress.bsky.social.)

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