Pod Insights If You're Listening Trump's rise from bunker boy to billionaire About this episode In 2020, Secret Service agents rushed Donald Trump to the White House bunker as protests raged outside. Trump was down on his luck…the media nicknamed him “Bunker Boy” and he had a measly $92 million in the bank.
Fast forward to his second term, and financial disclosures show he made more than $2.2 billion in a single year. The man who once dismissed crypto as a scam found his fortune transformed by meme coins, a hype-driven venture called World Liberty Financial, and a cast of podcast bros and pickup artists selling access to the most powerful man in the world. So is this just what being president looks like now?
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0:38 Speaker 03 This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uabakal and Gadigal people. Donald Trump gets very upset when he can't control the narrative.
0:48 Speaker 03 So there's possibly nothing in his first term that upset him more than when this news leaked.
0:55 Speaker 04 It was on Friday night that the Secret Service bundled the president into the bomb and plane-proof bunker under the White House, fearing the grounds of the executive mansion were about to be overrun.
1:07 Speaker 03 It was mid 2020. A hundred thousand Americans had died of Covid. Lockdowns were in place. The economy was struggling and people were in the streets protesting against police brutality and against Donald Trump specifically.
1:21 Speaker 05 I'm tired of my black men and my black women being shot.
1:24 Speaker 06 Just a block away from the seat of power, angry voices echoed through the night.
1:29 Speaker 03 As enormous protests raged outside the White House perimeter, the Secret Service decided that as a safety precaution, Trump needed to be taken to the White House bunker. Then they erected a large steel barrier around the White House grounds to ensure that nobody could get in. By the following morning, people were calling Donald Trump mean names.
1:51 Speaker 07 Hey bunker boy, you're supposed to be the leader of the free world. Bunker boy, as many are calling him. Bunker boy, Donny Trump, finally got.
2:01 Speaker 03 His wall. He was furious.
2:08 Speaker 03 He demanded that the person who leaked the news that he'd been taken to the bunker be put on trial for treason and then executed. This was a particularly low point in his presidency because at the time, his accountants reported that while he apparently had a net worth of over $5 billion, he only had about $92 million in actual cash on hand. Obviously, that's quite a bit of money, but it wasn't enough to give him lifelong security. See, the bunker under the White House might be able to protect him from an angry mob or an airstrike, but it wouldn't be able to protect him from legal trouble if he lost power at the upcoming 2020 election.
2:50 Speaker 03 Court cases, both criminal and civil, would end up costing him tens of millions in legal fees and potentially see him hit with a bill for hundreds of millions in damages. And yet, fast forward to Trump's second term in office, and a lot has changed. Firstly, he's not the bunker boy anymore, largely because the bunker is gone, along with the entire building on top of it. And secondly, he's got significantly more money in the bank. Newly released financial disclosures show the US president raked in more than $2.2 billion US dollars last year. Now, in an average month, he's earning twice as much money as he had in total
3:35 Speaker 03 back in 2020. His fortunes have changed, quite literally. So what happened?
3:49 Speaker 03 Well, last week, we talked about the secrecy surrounding his White House ballroom project. This story is very, very public. It involves podcasters, pick-up artists, and the one commodity that never loses its value: access to powerful people. Buckle up, because it's a lot. I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.
4:21 Speaker 03 Okay, so until very recently, Donald Trump didn't spend a whole lot of time talking about cryptocurrency. In fact, he thought the whole idea was a scam.
4:31 Speaker 05 Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam. I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar.
4:38 Speaker 03 If you don't know anything about cryptocurrency, don't worry. Neither does Donald Trump.
4:42 Speaker 05 We will create a framework to enable the safe, responsible expansion of staple, stable coins. Do you know what a stable coin is? Does anybody know? Please raise your hand.
4:54 Speaker 03 Now fortunately, most of the story is about people. And like almost everything these days, it starts with a couple of podcast bros trying to make money from their audience.
5:06 Speaker 04 We are starting a subscription-based, very intimate team experience. We're going to call it the Maverick Club.
5:11 Speaker 03 This is YouTuber and podcaster Logan Paul in 2020, launching an exciting new way for his fans to give him money.
5:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, the Maverick Club. Basically, you get an intimate access and experiential experiences into our life, a behind the scenes look at the things that go down here.
5:30 Speaker 03 Paul was launching the Maverick Club, which was basically a way for his fans to pay for even more access to his life using a new platform called Subify. This platform was run by a marketing bro named Chase Hero.
5:46 Speaker 04 Everyone, this is Chase Hero. He's a good friend of mine. He also built the Maverick Club.
5:49 Speaker 03 This partnership was a big deal for Chase Hero. While he was selling access to Logan Paul to fans, he was also getting access to Logan Paul himself. Up until this point, he'd lived a pretty, let's say, interesting life, doing online marketing for various products and dabbling in crypto trading to fund his, let's say, lifestyle. For years, I lived in the Caribbean. Half the year I lived, you know, six months apart from my wife.
6:16 Speaker 06 I missed my second daughter's birth because I was in Puerto Rico tripping on LSD.
6:22 Speaker 03 But that all changed after he linked up with Logan Paul. Chase's day job became spending every day with his new buddy.
6:30 Speaker 06 And I realized, you know, with your guys' help and showing me this industry and how amazing it is, how powerful it was to meet him.
6:35 Speaker 03 He started producing videos of himself doing martial arts and hanging out with Logan Paul and his gang.
6:41 Speaker 04 I wanted to give it to someone who was in the Maverick Club. I figured why not give it to the inventor of the Maverick Club, Chase Hero, ladies and gentlemen.
6:48 Speaker 03 Now, you might be thinking, how did this grade A dad with such impressive business acumen come up with a company like Subify? And the answer is he had help. Chase Hero's business partner was a guy named Zach Falkman, whose previous job was giving talks to dudes on how to pick up women. His business was called Date Hotter Girls and involved giving talks like this.
7:14 Speaker 07 Do you guys know those girls? The ones that like they walk and you're like, oh, this girl's just too hot not to approach. It doesn't matter that her mom's there, her dad's there, whatever. I was like, go up to this girl, tell this girl, if her parents weren't watching her like a hawk, you'd be trying to make out with her shamelessly right now.
7:30 Speaker 03 To be fair, I imagine this is a great way to give a girl your number if you want her to give it directly to the police.
7:39 Speaker 03 So these two guys, Chase and Zach, ran a business where they sold access to Podcast Bros. Well, they did for a while. By late 2023, the Maverick Club's social media accounts had gone dark and Logan Paul had stopped mentioning it on his show. It probably won't surprise you to hear that during this time, Chase and Zach also dabbled in cryptocurrency. They didn't have a whole lot of success themselves, but they'd seen people in their orbit make a great deal of money and Chase was sure that if they could crack the code, they could make a lot of money too.
8:16 Speaker 05 You can literally sell [BLEEP] in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin for a billion dollars if the story's right. Because people will buy it and that is what is going on in the crypto space.
8:27 Speaker 03 Chase could see that cryptocurrency trading was largely about hype, getting people interested in buying something with no inherent value through the power of marketing.
8:37 Speaker 05 I'm not going to question the right and wrong. Of all that, all I'm saying is, as a human being, you have the ability to make a ton of money right now.
8:48 Speaker 03 He didn't have the ability to do that himself, so he set out to find someone who could help create that hype. So he went to the one location where he knew very rich people hang out, the golf course.
9:02 Speaker 03 Let's see, Chase could hold up. In the summer of 2018, while golfing at the Shell Bay Club in Miami, Chase Hero bumped into the son of the club's owner. They got talking, and eventually Chase was introduced to his new friend's dad, the owner himself, a man by the name of Steve Witkoff. Now, we've done a whole episode on Steve Witkoff because he's one of Donald Trump's oldest friends. The two have been friends ever since Witkoff bought Trump a sandwich at a New York deli in the mid 80s. They have a shared interest in being rich, property development, golf, and meddling in the Middle East without knowing a whole lot about how it works.
9:44 Speaker 03 Witkoff was impressed by Chase Hero and Zach Falkman.
9:48 Speaker 04 I was introduced to Chase and to Zach. They look a little different than us because they dress a little different than us because that's the crutch. A few more tattoos.
9:57 Speaker 03 Like many crypto finance bros before them, Chase and Zach talked a big game about providing a way for people to access decentralized and frictionless finance using crypto.
10:09 Speaker 04 These guys are as smart as any currency traders I've ever met. And they began talking to me about decentralized finance, which means frictionless finance, and why it made sense for people.
10:20 Speaker 03 Witkoff wasn't entirely across all the details, but he was convinced the pair were going to revolutionize banking. So he set up a meeting so Chase and Mr. Date Hotter Girls could pitch their big idea to the Trump family.
10:34 Speaker 04 As I began to understand it, I said, who would understand this better than the Trump family? And so we had a meeting initially with Eric, Don Jr. And the president and his counsel.
10:47 Speaker 03 Of course, Trump wasn't actually interested in frictionless finance using crypto. But he was interested in the potential payday. This wasn't the first time that the Trump family had dabbled in this kind of thing. Blockchains and crypto and the such like. Trump had already tried selling NFTs or what he called digital trading cards. But they were really just a way for people to pay money to get access to him.
11:12 Speaker 07 I got some, uh, some breaking news here. Donald Trump is launching an NFT collection. If you buy forty five trading cards, you get to have dinner with him.
11:22 Speaker 03 This is crypto podcaster Farokh getting hyped about the potential to buy dinner with Trump.
11:28 Speaker 07 When you think about it, he's selling dinner with him for forty five hundred bucks. You're telling me we can't get good content out of this? And I don't like Donald Trump at all. I don't align with him whatsoever, socially, morally, economically. I mean, I hate him, but still, it's crazy.
11:45 Speaker 03 Less than two years after saying that he hated Trump and everything he stood for, Farokh found himself hosting the launch of Trump, the Witkoffs, Chase and Zach's new crypto venture, World Liberty Financial.
11:58 Speaker 07 Appreciate you for, for allowing me to interview you and, and your wonderful Mar-a-Lago home, which is truly an honor and I'm very grateful for it.
12:07 Speaker 03 Access is access, right?
12:08 Speaker 07 I remember the day your NFT collection came out. That was super cool and there was a chance to have dinner with you. And I remember just like scrambling to buy them.
12:18 Speaker 03 During the launch interview, Trump admitted he had no real idea of what was going on.
12:21 Speaker 04 I think crypto is one of those, uh, one of those things we have to do, whether we like it or not, might have to do it.
12:27 Speaker 03 He confessed that it was his sons Baron, Eric and Don Jr. who were really running the show when it came to his crypto dealings.
12:33 Speaker 04 Baron's a young guy, but he knows it. He talks about his wallet. He's got four wallets or something and I'm saying, what? He knows this inside out and Eric and Don know it so well.
12:44 Speaker 07 It's almost like younger people know it a lot better than older people, but I have a lot of respect for them.
12:52 Speaker 03 So let's get up to speed here. What is this crypto venture, World Liberty Financial? Well, the actual mission of the company isn't particularly clear, but that's by design.
13:05 Speaker 03 In simple terms, World Liberty Financial's apparent plan was something to do with...
13:10 Speaker 04 Decentralized finance, which means frictionless finance.
13:14 Speaker 03 But that's basically what every crypto company does. They say they're going to fix some problem or other using new technology. Then they whip up a whole lot of hype, making the company sound like it's going to change the world. Then they sell tokens so people can invest in the idea, very much like the way you buy shares on the regular stock market. But here's the thing, most of these companies never actually do the thing they say they're going to do. They create all the hype to bring in investors and then they kind of just keep the money. The system only really exists to turn hype into cash for the people starting the business. That's why, in order to make a profit, Chase and Zach really needed Trump's backing.
13:57 Speaker 03 So, in exchange for his enthusiastic, though slightly confused endorsement, Trump would own a 38% share of the company and take a percentage of the sales anytime someone bought a token. So it suddenly became very much in his interest that people invest in World Liberty Financial.
14:16 Speaker 07 You're going to be happy and you're going to love your crypto. And as long as you have crypto, you're happy.
14:21 Speaker 03 Now, for Trump, this was a pretty good deal because he took on no personal risk, aside from trusting Zach and Chase not to screw the whole thing up in a way that might embarrass him. Initially, the World Liberty Financial tokens did not sell well at all. Then, Trump won the US presidential election and everything started to change very quickly. The tokens began selling in their millions. World Liberty Financial, despite not providing any services or releasing any products, was raking in millions in investment. Through his share in the company, Trump was making a great deal of money too. There was clearly a lot of money to be made in the crypto world, so why not cut out the middleman?
15:08 Speaker 03 A few days before Trump returned to the White House, he decided to launch a cryptocurrency of his own.
15:21 Speaker 03 Yes, that is Snoop Dogg karaoke-ing to Fleetwood Mac. It's the 17th of January 2025, and he's one of the headliners at the Crypto Ball in Washington DC, celebrating Trump's upcoming inauguration.
15:42 Speaker 03 Sounds like a fun event. Anyway, midway through it, the crypto folks got some news.
15:48 Speaker 07 We're live at the Crypto Ball, and the official Trump token just launched. I'm one of the only people at this event that owns a token.
15:57 Speaker 03 The official Trump token, or the Trump coin, had been released for people to buy. In layman's terms, what Trump's team had done is create a billion digital Trump coins. Then, released 200 million of those coins to whoever wants to buy them. Demand for the coins sets the price.
16:20 Speaker 03 Trump then took a small percentage of every transaction as a service fee. He also had the option of selling some of his own 800 million coins if he wanted to. This kind of thing happens semi-regularly. They're called meme coins. People buy them for multiple reasons. On the first day of sale, people tend to buy them because they hope they can get in before a rush of other buyers do, and hopefully ride the price up as others try and do the same thing.
16:49 Speaker 05 They're really not treating it as a form of a very solid, legitimate investment that's going to result in their nest egg. They're really playing a game.
16:59 Speaker 03 Seeing if they get lucky. In just a few hours, if you time your buy and sell orders just right, you can make a lot of money. But to make the most of the situation, you need to sell the coin when you think the value has peaked. The price of one Trump coin increased from $1 per coin at the open to $74 a coin less than 48 hours later. The value of Trump's 800 million coins was theoretically like $12 billion. By the time Trump returned to the Oval Office after the inauguration events were over, the whole thing had settled down a little bit.
17:37 Speaker 03 A dollar Trump meme coin was fetching 37.5 US dollars and its total market value was 7.5 billion US. Trump was asked about this during his first press conference back in the Oval, surrounded by some of his billionaire friends.
17:51 Speaker 04 I don't know where it is. I don't know much about it, other than I launched it. I heard it was very successful. I haven't checked it. Where is it today? You made a lot of money, sir. How much?
18:04 Speaker 04 Several billion dollars, it seems like, in the last several days. Several billion? That's peanuts for these guys.
18:09 Speaker 03 You can hear by the tone in his voice that he still doesn't really believe this is real money. To Trump, assets need to be tangible, to be real, money in the bank, property, shares in a well-established brick and mortar company. This Trump coin felt to him like billions of dollars' worth of theoretical value, smoke in the wind, really, a mirage. And in many ways it was. When you hold such a large amount of a coin, there's no way for you to realise the actual value of those coins without flooding the market with them and crashing the price. He knew that he couldn't actually sell the cryptocurrency he owned, which is why he wasn't really paying attention to that.
18:54 Speaker 03 All he cared about were the individual trades that people were making. See, every time someone bought or sold a Trump coin, he took a percentage of the transaction fee. He was also being paid royalties by the company that set up the coin in the first place. So any money they made, he'd get a slice of that too. These arrangements went very well for Trump and his family, but barely anyone else.
19:22 Speaker 04 They sold that meme coin, which netted a huge amount of money for them, but left about a million investors, I think about $3 billion in the hole.
19:31 Speaker 03 The venture gained Donald Trump $635 million. And that's real US dollars, money in the bank, not theoretical crypto money. He was also still making a lot of money through World Liberty Financial's sales as more and more investors were buying in right around inauguration day. See, World Liberty Financial and the Trump coin were basically just the maverick club with extra steps to make it look more legitimate. Basically, an elaborate way for people to pay for access to important people. Tipping a large quantity of money into Trump coin or World Liberty Financial could get you direct access to Trump. It was something that Farokh noticed and pointed out on his crypto podcast.
20:15 Speaker 07 What do you feel about Trump's meme coin?
20:17 Speaker 02 Um, I actually don't know too much about it.
20:19 Speaker 07 Because they're hosting a dinner in May 22nd with access for the top 20 holders of the meme coin, 25 something like that. So there's some access clearly, but are you a top 25 holder of Trump's meme coin?
20:30 Speaker 02 Uh, no.
20:31 Speaker 03 People with connections to Trump's crypto businesses started getting favorable treatment from his administration.
20:38 Speaker 02 A crypto entrepreneur named Justin Sun came in and bought 200 million of them. If you have not heard of him, he's been charged and his company's been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission. And those are charges that he would very much like to go away.
20:53 Speaker 03 Wouldn't you know it, those charges were dropped. And it's not just people in the crypto world. Foreign governments were also getting in on the action.
21:03 Speaker 04 Four days before Donald Trump's inauguration last year, lieutenants to a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in the Trump's fledgling cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial.
21:23 Speaker 03 These deals really worked for Trump. The evidence is right there in his financial disclosures. Throughout 2025, Trump made $334 million in hard cash from World Liberty Financial, as well as his hundreds of millions from the Trump coin. But while those are the biggest generators of income, they're by no means the only ones. People who want things from the US president are giving him money in all sorts of ways.
21:51 Speaker 04 Since Donald Trump was re-elected, the Trump Organization has confirmed 10 new foreign developments.
21:58 Speaker 03 For context, in Donald Trump's first term, his property development company, the Trump Organization, did zero new deals in foreign countries. But now, it's an entirely different story. We're doing projects in Jeddah, we're doing projects in Oman, we're doing projects in Riyadh, we're doing projects all over the region. I'm doing a big hotel in Dubai as we speak. We're about to do one here in Abu Dhabi, which we're super excited about. There's also the free jet that Trump was gifted by Qatar.
22:25 Speaker 04 In the lead-up to an official visit to Qatar, Donald Trump indicated the administration would accept a used Boeing 747 as an unconditional donation by the Qatari government.
22:37 Speaker 03 Oh, and then of course, there are the lawsuits.
22:39 Speaker 04 He's made tens of millions more by filing off an outlandish, multi-billion dollar lawsuits that media companies settle just to keep him sweet.
22:49 Speaker 03 Broadcasters ABC and CBS, along with the owners of Facebook, Google and Twitter, have given him a total of $86.5 million in settlements to lawsuits that they almost certainly could have won if they took them to court. They all likely did that because they thought that paying the president a few million dollars would prevent him from causing them billions of dollars in regulatory problems. It's reasonably clear that all this money has flowed into Trump's pocket because he is the president and people want access to his power, not because his businesses are so successful. It's Chase Hero and Zach Falkman's business model, but at an unprecedented international scale.
23:34 Speaker 03 People aren't just paying for dinner with the president. They're paying him, hoping for favourable policy treatment.
23:41 Speaker 02 Some people have argued to us that it all happens out in the open. How can it be corruption when it's out there in the sunlight?
23:49 Speaker 00 Well, it doesn't look as scary or nefarious. And in fact, it normalises it. And it makes it look like it's OK. Nobody does it like this.
23:57 Speaker 03 Trump has found a security bunker that he never needs to be rushed into. It follows him everywhere, in the form of billions of dollars in cash. He can deploy at any time to protect him from basically anything that might come his way. Stopping him from doing this seems difficult under the current circumstances. Currently, the only people who could, Congress and the Department of Justice, don't seem that interested.
24:25 Speaker 03 I guess the biggest question we have to answer is, will this just be what every president does from now on?
24:40 Speaker 03 If You're Listening is written by me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is our resident crypto bro, Cara Jensen-McKinnon. It's produced by Adair Shepherd. On Tuesday, I'm checking in with the ABC's Americas editor, John Lyons, who famously got into a little bit of strife when he asked President Trump this question.
24:58 Speaker 07 It is inappropriate, President Trump, that a president in office should be engaged in so much business activity.
25:05 Speaker 03 Now that we know more about just how much money Donald Trump is making in his second term, I thought it'd be a good time to catch up with John again. In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now. We're going to look at how Trump's business dealings compare to other US politicians and what the chances are that this becomes the new normal. I'll see you then.
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