Lara Trump was sitting across from Katie Miller on Tuesday when she made the case.
Her father-in-law, she said, had been punished for getting into politics. The presidency had cost him. Zeros had come off his net worth. He was the only president in American history to walk out of the White House poorer than he walked in.
“I wish people knew how much easier his life would have been if he’d never gotten involved in politics.”
That is what she said, almost verbatim, on a podcast hosted by the wife of the White House deputy chief of staff, with a guest list that has recently featured the FBI director, the energy secretary, the health secretary, and Sean Hannity. She said it on Tuesday. Forbes published its most recent assessment of her father-in-law’s net worth in March.
The number was $6.5 billion.
LARA TRUMP: ‘His life would be EASIER if he never went into politics
He’s got LESS money than what he went in with
He’s doing what he thinks is RIGHT’ pic.twitter.com/dWoWWbonDV
— RT (@RT_com) April 22, 2026
The part she gets right
Lara Trump isn’t lying about the first term. Forbes had her father-in-law at $3.7 billion when he was sworn in for the first time in January 2017. By the time he boarded Air Force One for the last flight to Palm Beach four years later, the number was $2.5 billion. Hotel revenue had cratered in the pandemic. Banks that had done business with the family for decades stopped returning calls. The Trump name, for a window, was bad for licensing.
That is the version of the story Lara Trump told Katie Miller. And through January 20, 2021, it was true.
The part she leaves out
Then 2024 happened. Then 2025. Then crypto.
Forbes pegged Trump’s net worth at $2.4 billion at the start of 2024, when he was running for office again. Fourteen months into the second term, that figure is $6.5 billion. He climbed 118 spots on the Forbes 400. He now sits at number 201 on the list of the wealthiest Americans alive.
Forbes attributed roughly $1.8 billion of the gain to cryptocurrency, World Liberty Financial tokens, the TRUMP memecoin, and the USD1 stablecoin — none of which existed before he ran for office again. Another $400 million came from licensing. Trump Media and Technology Group, the Truth Social parent, lost roughly $1.3 billion in value over the same window. The crypto money covered that loss and kept going.
The presidency did not cost Donald Trump zeros. It added one.
The deals with names on them
In January, the Trump family office announced a $7 billion real estate project in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia. A hotel, a golf course, luxury homes. Trump posted a video on X saying he had nothing to do with the family business.
Later that month, The Wall Street Journal reported that an Abu Dhabi investment vehicle tied to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the national security adviser of the United Arab Emirates and the brother of its president, had bought 49 percent of World Liberty Financial for $500 million. The contract was signed by Eric Trump, Lara Trump’s husband. Roughly $187 million flowed to entities the Journal identified as controlled by the Trump family: DT Marks DEFI LLC and DT Marks SC LLC. Another $31 million went to entities linked to Steve Witkoff, the president’s Middle East envoy.
Shortly after the deal closed, the Trump administration approved the export of advanced AI chips to the United Arab Emirates.
The other thing she told Katie Miller
There was another quote on the podcast. It came a few moments after the part about the zeros.
Lara Trump was remembering something her father-in-law said in 2015, before he rode the escalator, before the red hats, before any of it. She remembered him telling the family that if he did this, he was going to do it the right way. And if doing it the right way meant he only got one term in office, then that was okay with him.
Between November 7, 2020, and January 6, 2021, Donald Trump’s legal team filed more than sixty lawsuits contesting the results of the election he had just lost. On January 2, 2021, the president of the United States called the secretary of state of Georgia and asked him to find 11,780 votes. Four days after that, a crowd walked from a rally near the White House to the Capitol.
Then they went inside.