How Trump made an estimated $2.2 billion last year

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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 guess near Times reported 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 Lottnik, as well as Lottnik'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 dealmaking. This was Lipton's fourth Pulitzer. Last month, Lipton and four other Times reporters got something else as a result of their reporting, Sapinas, 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 its service Air Force won, 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 4th, 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 lacks sufficient security measures despite Trump's earlier insistence that it was secure.

Another recent story is 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. Thank you so much for having me. 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 one, you, the subpoena?”

Yeah, I mean, we have 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. Like the old Air Force one does not 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 a hold of from the Atari government, and we were already skeptical by what we were told by people the Air Force that it could ever be actually ready to serve as a mobile White House, a 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

than 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 I 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 them and get them a luxury ride.

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

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 1st of 2026. I have to say, it's not just Trump who flies on this plane, I mean, there's his, sometimes his cabinet member, other people from his team, journalist. 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 a hundred 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 it's a some extent, it's a safer platform and 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 and, 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 a closer to the standard that we expect nowadays to have, you know, kind of a flying over office.

“So how much have taxpayers already spent retrofitting this plane?”

I mean, it's sort of crazy, but they won't tell us, but it's clearly, it's close to

a billion dollars, 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 and 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 hanger and at the Andrew's Air Force facility in Maryland, that simply to train the pilots on it. Because they had the transition so quickly to this, because Trump won it is new plane. 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. 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 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 if imagine what would happen on a plane, if it lost electric power, that's an unbelievably complicated task.

“You have to basically get exposed 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 is not disrupted by an electric magnetic pulse. That takes in and of itself as a massively time-consuming task that could not be done in the short period of time that Trump had to retrofit that plane. So let's talk about the subpoena, so you are served directly.

Yeah, I can't talk about it too much under instructions to the lawyers, but my family and I were coming back from dinner on a Friday night and as we arrived home, the FBI agents were sitting parked near our house and they came out of their cars and to the front of our houses and my kids were outside playing with actually little sparklers after July 4th and they presented me with this subpoena and said that I needed to report to court

to testify about our work around the Air Force 1. So it's been reported, and I know you can't really talk about this, but it's been reported that your phone records were subpoena 2, that's been quashed, that's right, that's not happening, but you know, I'm thinking like if your phone records were actually subpoena, if this subpoena wasn't quashed, they'd have access not only to all your personal calls, but perhaps to a lot

of other sources having nothing to do with the story that they're actually investigating but giving them leads if they want to crack down on other sources that you've spoken to over the years. So can you say anything about the New York Times approach to fighting the subpoenas and

“upholding the right of journalists to not name their sources?”

I mean, you know, the New York Times filed a motion in court to quash the subpoenas. It was very beautifully crafted, it was all about the freedom of the press and the important role that we play in society and democracy and I was very proud of the intense effort that the paper put to articulate those arguments and but I can't get into the specifics of the case really at all, and the fact that after those motions were introduced, the

subpoenas were withdrawn. Now, the reporters from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal who were also not related

writer who wrote for the Times who also got a subpoena.

So it seems to be a pattern of subpoenaing journalists and I'm thinking, okay, the Washington Post Wall Street Journal, New York Times, they are all top news organizations. They have top legal departments.

“How many publications can afford to support their journalists?”

I mean, financially support all the legal fees and the time and the energy to back up their reporters after their subpoenaed for their sources. Clearly, this was to intimidate us, but our response after we received the subpoenas was just to recommit to investigating more, spending more time on the story. We immediately initiated a two weeks of deeper reporting and we did a super comprehensive

story that identified further security shortcomings on Air Force One. So we were not intimidated and we just, we were committed to the story and I'm really proud to work on these paper that has the resources and the determination to pursue stories, regardless of people trying to get in our way. So the Air Force One story that we've been talking about, it's part of your beat, which

is profiteering from the presidency and the interconnection between policies and alliances he's making and the personal financial deals he and/or his sons are making. So let's talk about one of the deals that you recently wrote about pertaining to the tungsten mining industry and before we get into the details, why is tungsten so important now?

So the United States needs certain metals to manufacture all kinds of products, but tungsten is particularly important because it is an incredibly hard and heat resistant metal that is vital for missiles and other military uses. And so for the military it's just vital to have access to sufficient supply of tungsten at a time when we're at a war in the Middle East and we are helping in Ukraine.

And so therefore we have to have a steady supply of it, but China has been cutting off our supply to tungsten as part of a trade retaliation against President Trump and his tariffs. So there's been an effort to try to increase the United States access to tungsten at a bunch

of other critical metals and the Trump administration has been pouring an enormous amount

of federal dollars into expanding our supply to these critical metals.

“And that's what we examined in our investigation.”

My colleague Paul Sondon, I looked at this. So the country where Trump has cut a big deal in terms of mining for tungsten is in Kazakhstan. Why Kazakhstan? And Kazakhstan is situated in between Russia and China, happens to have a really large supply of it sitting in the ground.

It's one of the largest on-tap supplies of tungsten in the world sitting there that the Soviets had first thought about exploiting, but the Soviet Union collapsed before they were able to do it.

And so this site is there waiting for someone to grab it's potentially $80 billion worth of

tungsten in the ground there. And so this is how the United States then got involved, both the Commerce Secretary Howard Lotnick and the President Trump became involved in negotiations in late 2025 with the President of Kazakhstan about potentially giving a small American-based company the right to open up a mine there and to extract that tungsten and to send of a bunch of it to the United

States.

“So who is this, what is this small company and do they have experience in tungsten mining?”

I mean, the small company currently goes by the name of Kaz resources. The chief executive there and those have some experience in the mining sector, but they are not a kind of like a free-port make-more and huge global mining operator. There are very small operation that does not have a great deal of experience and actually pulling tons of metal out of the ground.

And they needed to raise capital, they needed to raise money, and they've come to the federal government to raise billions of dollars in financing to actually build the mine. The same time as they were asking for help from the United States government to get access to this mining site, they were also asking for help from the Commerce Department's you know, associated financing arms to actually help cover the cost of building the mine.

So why was this company chosen? Doesn't have a lot of experience, doesn't have the capital, it's a small company relatively speaking, how do they get chosen? Let's true that the company had started working with the Biden administration to try to see whether or not the remettles in Kazakhstan that it could tap into.

And so it did have a relationship with the federal government that predated Trump's return

of this company, and he actually wrote a letter to the President of the Kazakhstan repeatedly

“urging the President of Kazakhstan to pick this one company to be their partner to open”

the mine there for tungsten. And so it was a bit of an open question as to why the United States was so intensely embracing this one company, and that was part of what we were examining in our investigation. What did you learn about that? I mean, the more we looked into what we learned is that not only was the company working

with the Trump administration, but that separately through investment partners, that it was working with Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. through a series of other, you know, limited liability corporations, and that separately, one of the business partners in the deal had turned to Howard Lutnik's sons to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in capital at the same time as Howard Lutnik was involved in negotiating access by these executives to the

mine. So what we found was that there were family connections financially to the business partners involved in the same deal. Trump's sons, Don Jr. and Eric, started making related investments before the deal was made public.

So no one else knew about the deal. Would you consider that a form of insider trading? I mean, that gets a little bit farther than the evidence that I have, what I know is that is that they were teamed up with this company called Dominarie Securities, which was based in Trump Tower in New York, and that they became investors in a limited liability

company that was looking to invest in the critical mineral sector.

And around the same time as Howard Lutnik and the president were involved in negotiating access to this mine, they made their first investment in the company that is now called Cows Resources. It is certainly odd to see that the sons of the president were actually invested in a company that the president himself was involved in helping get this deal in Cows Extension.

And it's why we wrote that story. Now, in reading the story, there are some really complicated, at least to me, they seem really complicated business deals, where one company buys another company and changes the name of the company, and I'm wondering if that is a way of making things more opaque and kind of obscuring who the people behind those investments are and who the people

who are profiting are, for example, obscuring the relationship of Trump's sons to these companies and to these deals.

“Is that an accurate way of reading it as a possibility?”

I think the net results of all of these financial transactions, the permutations that were next to a possible the track, was that it did obscure who the investors were and it takes a lot of effort to try to figure out the sequence of transformations of these various corporate entities. It was crazy.

They purchased this tiny Hong Kong based road building company that was nearly bankrupt and they purchased it because it was NASDAQ traded and then they changed its name, they took it over and it became a vehicle for them to buy into this New York tungsten mining company. It was almost impossible to track but was that intentional?

I don't necessarily think so because ultimately they were the ones that the Trumps were

involved in the deal, once it actually became public in April of 2026. But I think this illustrates the various complicated ways that people are trying to raise money without doing traditional like initial public offerings. It's a basically a workaround to raise capital on the stock markets without actually building a company from the ground up.

So now that Trump's sons are invested in a company that is going or has already become public, publicly traded on the market. And it was publicly traded. That was part of the maneuver was to buy this failing Hong Kong based road builder to merge with the company that's going to mine the tungsten in Kazakhstan.

So now it's a public-y traded operation.

“Okay, so do the Trumps have an opportunity to profit from the fact that it's publicly traded?”

The stock is actually declined since we wrote the story. I think there's a fair amount of skepticism about this deal and an open question that's whether or not they're still going to get the federal financing.

But if this project is successful and they get the federal financing more than a billion

dollars in federal financing to actually build the mine and they start mining, then yes, there's a potential to make a great deal of money for all of the investors.

It's unclear if it will happen.

“But what we've seen, the pattern we're seeing is that the Trumps sons are investing in a bunch”

of different sectors that the president is involved in setting policy. This crypto currency, it's their predictions, markets, it's the nuclear energy industry. It's mining industry. And they think that these are moves that show their patriotism, that they're supporting their fathers agenda.

But at the same time, as their fathers taking actions that benefit their business plans, they're moving in behind their dad and making investments that benefit from their dad's actions. Well, it's time for another break here. So let me reintroduce you, my guest is four-time pull-up surprise, winning New York Times

reporter Eric Lippton, will be right back.

I'm Terry Gross and this is fresh air. Have you ever been so upset that you can't even think straight? When we're distressed and in high anxiety, we tend to breathe from our chest, which is actually more hyperventilating and is the opposite of relaxing. So we want to breathe from our belly area.

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Learn more at WHYYY.org/FreshAirSciety. This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday, with New York Times reporter Eric Lipton. He's been investigating how President Trump and his family have profited from self-enriching

White House dealmaking, the conflicts of interest these business deals present, and the ethical questions they raise. This year, Lipton won his fourth Pulitzer Prize. When we left off, we were talking about a Trump administration tungsten mining deal in Kazakhstan, within weeks of the deal, Trump's sons, Don Jr. and Eric, had investments related to

that mining deal. So the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutton, who's heavily involved in these tungsten deals, his sons are profiting to, can you tell us more about how they're profiting, or how they stand to potentially profit? Yeah, so Lutton, before he became the Commerce Secretary, he was running a company called

Cantor Fitzgerald, which has a bunch of arms, but one of the things that they do is they help start-ups raise capital. So what we found was that, at the same time, as Howard Lutton is promoting the United States as a investor in mining companies, his Cantor Fitzgerald has been helping some of the same mining companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars in private capital.

So as Commerce Secretary, he and his role on some of the bodies like the export import bank and other federal agencies, those agencies have notified these companies that we're going to give you billions of dollars of financing. And on the other side, the sons of Lutton have been bringing them private financing, and they get paid fees.

And one of the reasons that the companies need private dollars is that the federal government has come and said, "We're going to give you public financing," so all of a sudden, it's a lot easier for them to go to Wall Street and say, "Look, the federal government is giving

“us billions of dollars in financing," so don't you want to invest in us?”

So then his sons are there basically through their companies and raising private capital

for these same mining companies, and they get paid fees right away. Whether or not those mining companies succeed or fail, they are going to get paid a fee, and they've made those fees. So what we found was there were almost a dozen companies that the Trump administration has agreed to help finance that the Luttonic companies have also done work with to help

them raise capital since they're beginning a 2025. So there's, again, an intertwining of the public policy actions that the data is taking, and the private sector profitability that's coming from the actions that the sons are doing. It's a similar thing that's happening with the Trump sons that's happening with the Luttonic sons.

Now, again, both the White House and the Commerce Department and Cantervitz Gerald, each assert that there are no conflicts of interest, that the Trump sons are independent business people who are making decisions to pursue their own business interests, and Cantervitz

of years, and it's continuing to help its partners raise capital.

Those are true things.

“Those create an apparent minimum of a conflict of interest because Howard Luttonic is helping”

these same companies and helping bring them billions of dollars for the capital at the same time as the sons are helping bring private capital to the same company. So it creates an a minimum of an appearance of conflict of interest. Would it be fair to say maybe that's a reason why Howard Luttonic shouldn't be a commerce secretary.

If he is intertwined with businesses or if his sons are intertwined with businesses, he's supposed to be helping regulate maybe he's not the right guy for their job. I mean, he has complied with the federal law which requires him to divest of his holdings and can't to rich-drill, and he has turned over his holdings to his sons and other family members, and so he does not actually legally have a conflict of interest.

I mean, it is an unusual situation to have a commerce secretary whose family is so deeply involved in financing the same sectors. You know, we've written about this a number of times now. The sons company is financing data centers which, you know, Howard Luttonic has been intensely involved with.

“They're funding the nuclear power industry which again, Luttonic is intensely involved”

with, and they're funding the mining sector. And so in all three areas, Luttonic is driving federal policy and the sons are helping fund the companies that are seeking to capture the profits from those policy changes that is that is making. Now, it is not a formal legal conflict of interest, but it does create the appearance

of a conflict of interest on a scale that we have perhaps never seen for a commerce secretary.

Similar to the kind of the scale of a conflict of interest that we're seeing with the president and his sons, it's just at a level that it just really doesn't have precedent in American history. But is it technically illegal, you know, it's not as far as I can tell. But it just creates a blending, what the thing is, in the United States, we are used to separating

the job of running the federal government from the job of running your private businesses. And, you know, we're not the Middle East where, you know, you're run by, you know, these, the royal family and the royal family is both the government and the profit-making. You, you know, the royal family's, they are, they own the oil company, they own, they own everything.

They own the economy and they are also the decision makers and there's a blending of those roles, which is that's the way it works in the Middle East, in the sovereign, you know, world. But that's not the way it works in the United States. We've had a tradition where the people that run the government, they disassociate themselves

from the private sector interest, they put their holdings and blind trust, you know, they have, and, and they attempt to avoid conflicts of interest. But the Trump family has chosen to act differently. And there are, there are no formal federal prohibitions on doing what they're doing. But it's raising a lot of questions and it's also keeping us quite busy as reporters,

because we're determined to examine each one of these relationships, to document it, to bring the facts out, to make it transparent, and, and so people can at least know about what's happening. Well, let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter

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We'll talk about it on NPR's pop culture happy hour. Listen via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with New York Times reporter Eric Lipton.

He's been investigating how President Trump and his family have profited from self-enriching White House dealmaking the conflicts of interest these deals present and the ethical questions they raise. This year he won his fourth Pulitzer Prize. So let's talk about another sector that the Trump family and the Lutnik family are profiting

from. And this is nuclear technology. So one of the big recent events in the nuclear story is that Trump had seemingly made

That deal apparently fell apart.

“Can you just say a little about the deal on how it fell apart before we get into the conflicts”

of interest? Yes, so there was an agreement which had been years in the making to allow Saudi Arabia to have access to civilian nuclear technology for the United States to allow them to build nuclear power plants. It's a way of diversifying their economy and also to start to move away from fossil fuels.

There's the many, the Middle Eastern governments are trying to, they've been so dependent on fossil fuel wealth that they're trying to diversify themselves.

And so they, for, you know, dating back to Trump's first term, they wanted access to the

Westing House, which is an American-based Canadian-owned company that builds these massive nuclear power plants, they've wanted access to that technology. And so for the first time, the United States is now saying we will let you, you know, buy that technology and actually build nuclear power plants with it and also share the uranium, which has to power those plants.

And that's where the concern comes because that same uranium could be processed ultimately if it's not handle properly and made into plutonium or other radioactive materials that can be used in nuclear weapons. So there's some concerns about non-proliferation that result from that deal.

“But that's, that's what Trump has agreed so far to share the civilian nuclear power”

technology with Saudi Arabia. But that deal fell apart. That deal is in a, it's unclear whether or not it's going to move ahead because shortly after he announced that there was a fair amount of criticism.

And then the president said publicly, for the first time, that in order for Saudi Arabia

to get this, it would have to agree to the Abraham Accords, which is the normalized relations with Israel. And Saudi Arabia has been reluctant to do that because of the complicated nature of what's going on in the Middle East. So that trumps the man that they agree to the Abraham Accords and exchange for access to

civilian nuclear could mean that the deal does not move forward. So tell us a little about the plans that Trump's sons have in the nuclear industry. And whether it's directly related to the Saudi deal or not, Trump is trying to emphasize

“nuclear power and that means that nuclear technology will be in more demand.”

I mean, it's sort of similar to what we've seen with cryptocurrency and with mining and with the predictions markets, again, the Trump's sons and president Trump himself are moving to invest in the nuclear power sector right now. And it is one of the president's top initiatives and again, the commerce sectories involved in this.

The United States is needs more electric power, desperately because the AI data centers are consuming a massive amount of electricity. Also just consumers, air conditioning, electric vehicles, we need more electricity. And we aren't building enough electric power plants. So one way to deal with that is to build nuclear power plants, which we haven't done on a

large scale in decades in the United States, because it concerns about the safety of nuclear power. So the Trump administration is pouring massive amounts of federal funds to incentivize more nuclear power being built both in the United States and internationally. We are also pushing our allies to buy the Westinghouse AP 1000 nuclear power plant design

and to build it in Eastern Europe and to build it potentially in the Middle East. So we are now a merchant of nuclear power globally because the president of Trump and Howard Lotnick and the Department of Energy. But again, this pattern that we've seen elsewhere is what's happening at the same time as the United States is pouring tens of billions of dollars behind this sector.

The president Trump and his sons and the lotnick family are also investors are making fees on the same sector. Trump media, which the president is one of the largest shareholder of which owns true social where he posts all of his social media, suddenly, oddly, late last year, they announced that they are moving into the nuclear power sector.

I mean, it was a very weird social media company that's going to become a nuclear power company. So they announced that they are going to merge with a nuclear-efficient company, which is another part of the nuclear sector that the federal government is helping try to boost. So that that merger still has not happened, but the president himself could be financially benefiting from the push to build more nuclear power because Trump media is going to become

a nuclear power company itself. And the Trump's sons are also stakeholders in that company. Separately, the Trump's sons have bought into another company that is trying to help build the nuclear power plant complex in Texas. And then, again, the lotnick kids are helping a lot of these nuclear startups raise capital

in the private sector market.

So it's a pattern that we've seen in cryptocurrency and critical metals and nuclear power

that involve the families.

Is there any oversight about this? Is there any regulatory agency or anything that has to approve these deals? The business deals are being largely being approved by the export import bank and how a lotnick is on the board of the export import bank. And so are other cabinet members.

“So just really important to reiterate that both the lotnick family, the Trump family,”

I mean, they don't see this as a conflict of interest. The family sees themselves as patriots that are helping build important economic sectors in the United States. And that there is no insider information. There's people that are trying to make money to build the economy.

With an alternate way of looking at it.

At a minimum, there's an appearance of a conflict of interest. And there's an intertwining of the federal interest and private interest, which is really unusual. And it creates -- it undermines our confidence that the decisions are being made based purely on the merits. And it does create the appearance that some of these decisions are being motivated by desire for individual families to profit. And it's hurtful to our confidence in the integrity

of our government that there is this blurring of a line, which just traditionally, United States has really been committed to separating the personal financial interests of business people and the operations of the government that is trying to help the public at large. What has Trump or the White House or a lotnick or the Commerce Department had to say to you

“about when you ask them about potential conflicts of interest or ethical violations?”

I mean, I engage with them pretty intensely. And they're generally very responsive. And we go back and forth if they think something is factually incorrect. I really appreciate their willingness to engage with me. They've generally just reiterate what I reiterate, which is that the White House says that the president has no conflicts of interest and all he's doing is trying to help the American people. The Trump sends consistently say they are private business people who

are successful at what they do. And they're -- and the lotnick sons say that they through cancer, that they've been in these sectors for a long time and they're continuing to help private businesses raise capital. So I engage with them each time and I get statements from them and we include the statements and the stories. So you've pointed out how the Trump family and the lotnick family are profiting in the sectors that Trump and lotnick regulate.

Is that happening in other areas too? And I'm thinking specifically of Steve Woodcock, who is the main Middle East negotiator, special envoy, and his sons are involved with investments.

“And they've worked with Trump's sons on some things. Can you talk about that a little bit?”

That's right. And it's, again, super odd. We have these trio of sons. The Trump's sons, the lotnick sons, and the Wick House sons. And the Wick House are deeply involved in world liberty financial, which is the cryptocurrency company that President Trump and his sons help found just before he returns to the White House. And that is actually, you know, the one of the

biggest sources of income of the $2.2 billion that Trump made in 2025, $1.4 billion came from

cryptocurrency. And world liberty is a huge source of that. And so, and the Wick House sons are helping run world liberty at the same time as Steve Wickcock was involved in negotiations in the Middle East that benefited some of their business partners. So, each one of these is so complicated. You could talk about it for hours. And it's quite a maze of challenges to deconstruct and explain. But it is in a bit crazy that there are three different sets of sons of prominent leaders

in the current administration that are involved in business deals that benefited from or intertwined with what their dads are doing in office. Let's touch on the predictions market, which it's such a controversial market right now. You can bet on anything. There's insider training, including the guy who runs Trump's teleprompter, was involved with an insider trading thing because he read the speech and he knew what Trump was going to say. So, what are the business deals that the

Trump family is involved with in the predictions market? So, again, you have a president who's setting policy by appointing a leadership at the Community Futures Trading Commission, which oversees the predictions markets. At the same time, as the Trump sons are advisors to or have financial ties to both of the two major predictions markets companies, polymarket and Kashi. So, my two colleagues, Sharon LaFranier and Davy Effie Bellamy have largely been

covering the predictions markets actions. But it's another venue where there are these overlaps

is offering to sell immediate knowledge of what his true social postings are, which are immediately

affecting the markets and particularly affecting the predictions markets. You know, if you pay them a special fee, you can instantaneously get access to the content of Trump's social postings and it creates an appearance of an insider trading, you know, transaction. And, you know, Trump is the primary shareholder of media and his sons are involved in running the company. So, and Trump media itself is looking to move into the prediction markets. You know, it's just everywhere you look,

there are blurring of lines. So, is Congress, which is controlled by Republicans,

“investigating any of the stories that you have investigated and reported?”

I mean, the Democrats continue to send letters to these agencies and to the White House,

asking questions about many of these stories. We see those letters, but no. I mean, the Republicans who have subpoena power in both the House and the Senate, they're working on, you know, investigating Fauci and the pandemic or our other matters that they're not. No, there's not a single open investigation other than outside of Epstein that has an anyway touched on Trump that I'm aware of. None of his business operations have been subject to any congressional oversight by a majority

committee. And the Democrats are writing these letters and they generally don't even get responses. So, the Congress has decided not to commit oversight to this topic, and that's just the fact that I'm at at this point. Well, let's take a short break here. My reintroducing my guest is

“four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Lipton of The New York Times. We'll be right back”

this is fresh air. From the light bulb to the internet, human history has been driven by innovation and shortwave is exploring how the technology of tomorrow will transform our future. Would you write in a flying taxi? Will AI models fight wars? Here about the technological frontier every Monday on tech camp, the new series from SureWave. Listen on the Empire app or wherever you get your podcasts. Since the 1970s, abortion on screen has been portrayed as either a medical necessity

or a dangerous decision. On it's been a minute, we discuss how the many depictions of abortion have shifted with the politics of the times. Watch the full it's been a minute episode on YouTube or listen to the Empire app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with New York Times reporter Eric Lipton. He's been investigating how President Trump and his

family have profited from self enriching White House dealmaking. The conflicts of interest these business deals present and the ethical questions they raise. This year, he won his fourth Pulitzer Prize. One of the things I'm wondering about interviewing you is how do you keep all these facts in your head? Because each of the sectors that we've been talking about, the financial schemes and the companies that bought companies that changed their names, that won public and so on,

they're each one of them is so complicated and it must have taken so much work on the part of you and your fellow reporters. So you do the work, you report it, but now you're still remembering it. How do you do that? One of the things whenever I start one of these stories is I build a chronology. It's just like you're working on a term paper in college or high school. I build a really detailed chronology of the sequence of events and I have as many primary sources with

links to the original documents in that chronology and that becomes my guide post to the players and the individual actions and the sequence of events and once you have that chronology, you can see the interplay between what's happening in the government and what's happening in the private sector, who the individuals are and the chronology to some extent becomes the story. Because as those different events are happening and they're intertwined, it's almost that

narrative emerges from the chronology. So for each one of these investigations that I'm doing, I have a master like very detailed day by day chronology of the events, the players, the companies, the public sector of actions, the private sector actions and then the process of working on the

story of basically memorizing the chronology. And I also use the fact check because every single

fact has to be so carefully fact checked because if I make any mistake, believe me, they will pound me and they will try to undermine the substance of the story based on a small factual error. But if I have that date through a document that's linked to my chronology, then I know that

“it's accurate. And so those chronologies are really important for me and each one of these investigations.”

Are they in like word document kind of styles or like some kind of spreadsheet?

and lengths each entry. So that just basically everything has a link to a primary dot. I don't

“link the secondary sources. I link the primary government documents or SEC filings are business,”

you know, announcements. And it's like, I love my chronologies because it's like, it is, it is the spine of the stories right there. And I wait until the story emerges. And it helps me pick my characters and it helps me pick my dramatic moments. And it helps me pick them, you know,

where do I want to really drill down and like report out a moment that is critical? Like for example,

the moment that that Howard Lotnick meets with the president of the Kazakhstan at the St. Regis Hotel in October of 2025 to try to bring that tungsten deal. You know, we my colleague Paul Sonny and I were working in that story. And the chronology showed us that this was a moment. We really wanted to report out. We were using photographs. We figured out what hotel it was. We then got photos of the room. We figured out what the name of the room was. We got the scene.

I found audio of that of that day because the president of Kazakhstan posted a clip from the meeting he had with Lotnick. And those are the pieces of the narrative that came together. And that was

“because the chronology told us this is a moment we want to pull out. And that's how I do these”

investigations. I develop the chronology. The chronology tells me, you know, as a writer, the chronology is your friend. Because the story happens in an narrative. And there's narrative moments, there's drama that happens in certain narrative moments. And you want to pull out that drama. This is non, you know, this is non-fiction drama. But you want to let the chronology tell you that story. And so I mean, but to the answer question is how do I keep track of all these

facts? Is I have a really solid document that said that the base of each one of these stories. And that can show you to the timing of investments versus policy. Exactly. And how intertwined they are. And I was looking at that time frame of the Saint Regis meeting with the first investment that the Trump suns were involved with with that Saint company. But it was

“before the before the public announcement. And that's all in the chronology. And it was like,”

only once that's lined up, do you see, here's what this, here's really the story. And I don't

try to start writing a story like this until it's like, I let it, I let it kind of emerge to me. Like, let the story kind of unfold. And the characters in the moments and the narrative, the narrative peaks. I mean, it's all, it's about storytelling. I mean, each one of these stories is basically a back story. It's like a narrative back story of how does this deal come together. And then we're writing. All right. It's been great to talk with you and you're actually in the

W. H. Y. Y. studio today as opposed to being in Washington. So we get to actually see each other which has been delightful. Right. So thank you so much for coming to the studio. Thank you so much for this interview and for all the great reporting you've done. Thank you. It's always great to speak with you. It's one of the best opportunities to have long foreign conversations in radio.

So I always have a great time talking to you and having an opportunity to really get deep on stories.

Eric Lippton is an investigative reporter for The New York Times. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, my guest will be writer Claire V. Watkins, like the character in her new novel, Watkins lives in the desert in an area being developed by an energy company wreaking havoc on the ecosystem. Her previous novel drew on the life of her father, Paul Watkins. He was a teenager when he joined the Manson family. I hope you'll join us.

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