The one man whose ‘lucrative presidency’ is not enough

Donald Trump was born to Fred and Mary Anne Trump in 1946, in the wealthy Jamaica Estates, in the borough of Queens, New York. A “rebellious and braggadocious personality,” in his youth, little, it seems, has changed.
Trump was privately educated and attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he learned, 'First, they taught you all the rules and regulations. Then they taught you that they are really meant to be broken.' He worked initially in Trump Real Estate, for his father, but soon gained prominence, sometimes notoriety, within real estate circles and has, throughout his career, been on a roller-coaster ride of million-dollar deals, bankruptcies, television and gossip columns.
Trump has been a compulsive litigant, more than 4,000 times, including filing for Chapter 11, business bankruptcy, on several occasions, allowing them to continue functioning while the banks restructured debt and ‘wrote down’ Trump’s shareholdings. He is unapologetic concerning his ‘frequent’ use of the legal process saying he had, “brilliantly used the laws of this country... doing a great job for my company, for myself, for my employees, and my family.”
Interestingly, prior to assuming the presidency in 2024, Donald Trump’s wealth was assessed by Forbes Magazine as having a net worth of $4 billion, but now has an accumulated wealth of $6.2 billion due mainly to what Forbes termed his “presiding over the most lucrative presidency in American history.”
President Trump has had an equally turbulent private life, being three times wed, first to Ivana Selnickova in 1977, to Marla Maples in 1993, and to his current wife Melania Knauss in 2005, ensuring that Trump was never far from the headlines. He is currently embroiled in the sordid Jeffrey Epstein investigations, with allegations of him in the ‘Epstein Files’ being more ‘indelicate,’ than he would wish us to believe. Presidentially, he has, without justification, and in the most arrogant, dismissive manner, alienated Ukraine, Mexico, Venezuela, Greenland, Canada, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Nato, and the Paris Climate Accord (COP21), kidnapped an elected leader (Nicholas Maduro), imposed global trade tariffs, rolled back environmental standards, sacked 30,000 plus federal employees, and created ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who make the KKK look like boy scouts, and that’s just the tip of the confrontational iceberg that is Trump’s presidential style.
This then, is the man who, on the flimsiest of pretexts, with, it appears, little consideration for friend and foe alike, on February 28, 2026, authorised the bombing of Iran, seeking to end the reign of the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and thoughtlessly creating a global crisis in energy, air travel, and finance, that was clear and obvious to most commentators and media.
He has left friendly nations of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait out in the cold, their citizens and infrastructures exposed to Iran’s missile attacks, inflicting ‘proxy warfare’.
America is not protected by its millions of people, its wealth, or its military might, but by its distance. It ‘fights,’ inflicts, a safe distance from the anguish that all of Europe, most of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific have known, of invasion or attack, of bombs, bullets, death, and destruction. For them, war is easy!
America, you gave power to a man you knew lacked respect, for whom only wealth and power matter, to whom the truth is a stranger, and for whom the world would never be enough! America, you did this, you elected this caricature, knowing him. Did you really think he would change... or what were you thinking?

Ray Petersen The writer is a media consultant