Where Trump's money comes from (and other mysteries)

This week's newsletter covers a range of topics: The president's complex network of companies, how weather has gotten worse, a new tool to visualize the whole world at once. But I did reserve some time to call out a terrible chart from Fox News, so stick around for that!

Chapter 1
Most presidents don't have several hundred businesses

As you may know, federal officials and their senior staff are required to file annual reports detailing their income and debts. These financial disclosures are both detailed and vague, offering a sweeping overview of the often-complex finances of our elected and appointed leaders, but lacking specificity on just how large or small their finances actually are.

It is a tool that is particularly poorly suited for the current moment, one in which a dozen billionaires at one point served as or for the president. Billionaires spend a lot of money to figure out how to shield their assets through legal complexity, and boy is that obvious from their financial statements.

I raise the subject because ProPublica this week published a useful database of federal financial disclosures. It allows you to search the records of specific officials or to, for example, search for specific corporations in which multiple officials have invested. Would you be surprised to learn that 1 in 11 of the 1,500-plus officials included in the dataset have invested in Palantir? You probably shouldn't be.

ProPublica's work reminded me that it had been a bit since I looked at President Trump's financial disclosure. Back in 2019, I created a visualization of the complex network of limited-liability corporations (LLCs) that Trump's advisers had created to (presumably) shunt cash around. It was eye-opening, particularly as his allies began claiming that a few dozen LLCs created by then-President Joe Biden's son suggested nefariousness. Trump had hundreds.

According to his financial disclosure, he still does. The form requires that officials detail assets and income vehicles, including data on ownership. The chart below shows how those entities intertwine for Trump — nearly 400 of them that feed into one another and to Trump, his family and third parties.