Murdoch Paper Eviscerates Trump After Bombshell Disclosure

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal pulled no punches in a scathing editorial aimed at the Trump family.

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The paper, which tore into Donald Trump for his “self-defeating” obsession with tariffs just last month, criticized the Trump family for what it described as “profiting off the Presidency in ways that demean the office” following the release of Trump’s financial disclosure on Tuesday.

The report also showed that the 80-year-old netted $635 million from the $TRUMP memecoin he launched just before his inauguration. In total, the president made $1.4 billion from crypto last year.

“The Trump clan is cashing in on the Presidency in big and sketchy ways‚” the Journal’s editorial board wrote, before detailing just how sketchy some of the Trump family’s financial connections are.

The editorial board notes that the Journal has previously reported on some of the deals World Liberty Financial has made “with foreign actors that may have been trying to buy influence with the Administration,” including a crypto firm based in the United Arab Emirates and the government of Pakistan.

Noting that the UAE used World Liberty’s stablecoin to invest in Binance, the editorial board then points out that Binance pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws and Iran sanctions in 2023. Trump pardoned Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act and served a four-month jail term in 2024, in October last year.

The Murdoch-owned paper’s editorial board also accused the Trump administration of causing “an industry gold rush” by providing billions of dollars in financing to critical mineral developers in order to secure U.S. supply chains and prevent China from weaponizing its dominance.

Also highlighted in the editorial are the capital gains Trump received from mineral developer MP Materials after the Pentagon announced it was taking a 15 percent stake in the company, and the investment Donald Trump Jr. made in Vulcan Elements three months before it received a $620 million government loan. It also noted that a firm partly owned by Trump’s two eldest sons invested in a company supporting a tungsten mining project in Kazakhstan before the White House announced a minerals agreement with the country.

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“The Trumps are seeing their opportunities and taking them, in the tradition of what Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunkitt called ‘honest graft,‘” the board argued. “Assuming all of this is legal, it’s still an unseemly display of using the Presidency for family profit.”

The theory of “honest graft”—the idea that a politician can serve the public while profiting from their service at the same time—has cropped up time and time again during both of Trump’s terms in office. The Atlantic invoked it in 2016 after then-President-elect Trump told the New York Times, “In theory, I could run my business perfectly, and then run the country perfectly.”

The Washington Post made reference to it in July 2025 when Jack Shafer argued that Plunkitt’s example “has served Trump throughout his career.”

“The two men, separated by a century, are spiritual siblings, united by the belief that the highest uses of politics are to enrich yourself and punish your foes,” Shafer wrote.

When asked about his finances by reporters on Wednesday, the president bluntly responded, “You know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up. Everybody’s profiting.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board ended its piece with a warning that the Trump family’s dealings could cost Republicans dearly.

“If Democrats take back the House or Senate this November, they will have a field day probing the Trump family deals,” the board wrote. “Charges of GOP corruption will resound through 2028. This will feed the left’s class warfare and facile narrative that billionaire ‘oligarchs’ are getting rich off government.”

“Foreigners may come to think they can buy American goodwill or favors if they cut the Trumps in on the action. Americans, and especially his supporters, deserve better from this or any President.”

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