Breitbart Business Digest: We're All Trumpians Now
Source: Breitbart News · Bias: Far Right
Summary
It took Wall Street a while to come around, but the stock market has finally embraced the president’s worldview.
The post Breitbart Business Digest: We’re All Trumpians Now appeared first on Breitbart.
Breitbart Business Digest: We're All Trumpians Now
Far Right
It took Wall Street a while to come around, but the stock market has finally embraced the president’s worldview.
The post Breitbart Business Digest: We’re All Trumpians Now appeared first on Breitbart.
Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Citadel, urged business leaders to resist the socialism of New York City Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani, warning that the Big Apple's business environment will otherwise be destroyed.
The post Business Leader Calls on New York City to Resist Mamdani appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The Fox Business team was greeted with bad news on Thursday as job numbers came in shockingly low."We came in underneath expectations," said Cheryl Casone. "We came in at 50,000 nonfarm jobs. The Street was looking for 110,000. The unemployment rate fell to 4.2 percent, down from 4.3 percent, which it had been holding steady at for about three months."Furthermore, she noted, the underemployment rate, or rate that includes people who are working in lower-pay or lower-hours jobs that don't use all their skills, is 7.9 percent — and payrolls from earlier in the year were revised down by over 70,000. And health care and social assistance went up, but leisure and hospitality jobs went down.This isn't the report Wall Street wanted, Casone noted — and when Maria Bartiromo tried to spin it as a "Goldilocks story" because the Dow Jones went up slightly on the news, right-wing economic analyst and former Trump adviser Stephen Moore disagreed."Well, I'm just looking at some of the other numbers, and look, I mean I'm a little disappointed in this, frankly," said Moore. "If you look at the household survey, it showed half a million fewer Americans working. So I'm a little puzzled by this."
Being president of the United States is by far the most lucrative business venture of Donald Trump’s checkered business career. The June 30 release of his financial disclosure report makes this official. Trump has turned the American presidency into an extractive industry. In 2025, Trump mined more than $2.2 billion in income from being president, most of it from crypto, from which he extracted $1.4 billion. That’s all the more remarkable when you remember that crypto entered a slump last year and that investors in Trump’s crypto ventures who were not members of the Trump family lost $2.3 billion, according to a June 9 investigation by Tom Bergin of Reuters. It’s almost as if Trump’s ability to draw income from business ventures did not depend on those ventures being successful!A cynic might observe that Trump’s special treatment is no different from that of American chief executives in the private sector who are similarly insulated from failure. But Trump’s payday puts theirs in the shade. The only CEO whose compensation exceeded Trump’s last year was Elon Musk, who (for now) is a category of one. Musk’s $158 billion pay package from Tesla last year was more than 15 times larger than the combined pay packages of the other 391 chief executives surveyed in late June by The Wall Street Journal. If we set Musk aside, the highest-paid chief executive in the Journal’s ranking was Shankh Mitra, chief executive of Welltower, “a real estate investment trust focused on senior housing and healthcare.” Let’s leave for another day the ethics of harvesting a vast personal fortune from the physical and mental decline of one’s fellow human beings. My point here is that Mitra’s obscene pay package last year of $821 million was less than half of Trump’s $2.2 billion. Plus, I bet Mitra had to put in at least some actual work.I observed a year ago that Trump is America’s first rentier president. A rentier is someone who makes his money through the possession of assets rather than the exertion of labor. Rentiers are capitalism’s nepo babies. Prior to Trump, the main rentier occupations were real estate and finance. Trump himself was a classic rentier capitalist, a rich kid who joined the family real estate business, exaggerated his success to a credulous tabloid press, and inherited $413 million from his more successful father. Trump moved the family business from dowdy apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Queens to luxury apartments and hotels in Manhattan and beyond, but many of these went bankrupt. In 2018, The Economist concluded Trump would have made more money had he been a more conventional rentier and invested daddy’s money in index funds. The rentier presidency is a much more lucrative proposition than rentier capitalism, and one with which index funds can’t possibly compete. Crucially, there is no index fund that lets you acquire a stake without investing money or labor. During the 2024 presidential campaign the Trump family acquired a 60 percent stake in World Liberty Financial and was granted 75 percent on net revenues from token sales. (The Trump family stake in the company, the less valuable part of this deal, has since fallen to 38 percent.) Trump did not pay for these privileges, yet last year he earned more than $594 million from them. Neither is there any evidence, according to Reuters’ Bergin, that Trump ever paid for his stakes in the crypto firms ALT5 Sigma, American Bitcoin, or Celebration Coins. This last alone netted Trump more than $636 million last year. The business press often notes these days that Trump has become less a real estate investor than a crypto investor. But to call Trump a crypto investor is a misnomer because investors, um, invest. Trump doesn’t invest. He receives. Nor should we call Trump a media investor, because Trump didn’t pay one cent to acquire his majority stake in Trump Media & Technology Group. This company owns Truth Social, on which Trump posts his late-night rants, and “has engaged,” Michael Hiltzik observed last March in The Los Angeles Times, “in a number of baroque financial transactions.” It works out well for Trump that he didn’t put money into Trump Media & Technology Group because it lost $715 million last year on revenue of $3.7 million. Yet Trump’s stake in this money-losing venture somehow remains, according to his latest filing, worth more than $50 million. Nice work if you can get it.The business model for a rentier presidency might puzzle the untutored, given the extensive losses involved. Why would anyone invest with the president of the United States? Some of them are just suckers, still bedazzled by the phony business-genius image he created during 14 TV seasons of “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.” But others derive value in other ways.
“There are tons of people here,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, the former TV quack who now runs Medicare and Medicaid, at the Great American State Fair on Monday. He was speaking with Dean Cain, another former TV man—he played Superman on ABC in the 1990s—who has acted as a kind of hype man for the event, ostensibly a celebration of America’s 250th birthday, that is currently taking place on the National Mall. Oz seemed to know he was lying—there were not tons of people there. “This is a huge space and it’s just going to be more and more crowded as the week goes on,” he added. He’s right that it’s a huge space, but videos showed he was speaking to a sparse crowd of maybe 100. Cain later shared a picture from the top of the Ferris wheel where you can literally count the attendees. There are a few hundred. Dr. Oz on stage with Dean Cain talks about how great the crowd is at the Great American State Fair... so @hicharliecotton pans his camera to reveal quite the opposite. https://t.co/vZ3exnGWS3 pic.twitter.com/4e1ugj7AVw— TMZ (@TMZ) June 29, 2026Just as President Trump insists his lackeys dress like him, he also demands they adopt his Norman Vincent Peale–inspired embrace of positive thinking—which is to say, the refusal to acknowledge politically inconvenient truths. But it’s hard to argue with the wealth of video and photographic evidence of the Great American State Fair. It may very well get more crowded, but right now it’s a flop. That’s no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to this administration, which is itself a total failure—a group of losers and buffoons so incompetent they … well, can’t even put on a state fair. If they can’t even manage a corn maze, no wonder they’re losing a war.But the Great American State Fair is also failing because it’s the reflection of a president who has no substantive story to tell about the country he leads. While the U.S. is meant to be celebrating its semiquincentennial, Trump can only tell a story about himself. The centerpiece of the fair, after all, is a cheap scale model of a massive triumphal arch Trump hopes to build near Arlington National Cemetery. What triumph does that arch celebrate? When CBS News’s Ed O’Keefe asked Trump whom the 250-foot-tall structure is for, he pointed at himself and said, “Me.” The same could be said of the fair, the war, and so much else that this administration has done—while the World Cup offers a fitting counterpoint.History, at least in an abstract sense, has always been a part of Trump’s political project. He did not invent the slogan that gave the name to his movement—Ronald Reagan used “Make America Great Again” in his 1980 campaign—but he now owns it. Of course, the genius of those four words for Trump is that they don’t really mean anything. They harken back to an earlier, supposedly rosier period without actually saying what period that is. It’s not hard to extrapolate, given Trump’s long history of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, that he is gesturing at a past when white supremacy went unquestioned. But the statement’s utility as a political slogan is entirely dependent on its vagueness. Trump wants to return America to greatness. When was it great? Let’s not get into specifics. Trump, of course, has no genuine interest in history, not even America’s. Although some observers have floated supposed models for his presidency—Andrew Jackson in Trump’s first term, William McKinley in his second—he has never expounded knowledgeably on Jackson’s populism or McKinley’s protectionism, only gesturing at them half-heartedly in an attempt to explain his own xenophobia and imperial ambitions. No, Trump is only interested in history to the extent that he will feature prominently in it. He wants to be seen as a “great man” who changed the world.This unbridled narcissism is how you get a fiasco like the Great American State Fair and the larger project of which it is a part, Freedom 250—an organization that Trump created despite the fact that Congress had already created an organization, America250, for the purpose of celebrating the country’s anniversary. The primary purpose of Freedom 250, which is not subject to congressional oversight and does not have to disclose its donors, is the elevation of Trump and his political movement. That’s why so many musicians withdrew from performing at the Great American State Fair, and organizers had to turn to Kash Patel’s girlfriend. With just a few days to go before America’s “birthday,” Freedom 250’s most notable event so far was the UFC fight held on the White House lawn on Trump’s actual birthday. Under a different administration—one helmed by Kamala Harris, say, or even a doddering Joe Biden—it’s not hard to imagine a different, nonpartisan celebration of America’s 250th.
The socialist wave reshaping the Democratic Party reached Colorado on Tuesday, as three far-left candidates defeated more centrist Democrats in races for governor and Congress. The results confirmed what has been apparent for some time: Colorado is no longer a business-friendly purple state. It is now a deep-blue Democratic stronghold willing to sacrifice growth, jobs, […]
