I realize that everyone else in the universe is focused on today’s elections, but I nonetheless can’t get a news article from last week’s New York Times out of my mind. In “Trump Erupted After Learning of Alina Habba’s $50 Million Deal,” Tyler Pager explains what prompted the president’s anger. Here’s the lead:
President Trump erupted last week after he learned that one of his former lawyers, Alina Habba Mildon, secured a contract worth more than $50 million to work for a billionaire Venezuelan family.
Was the president angry because a big payoff to a former presidential aide appears unseemly? Not quite.
Angered at the size of Mrs. Mildon’s deal, Mr. Trump has told aides and allies that she should donate a portion of that money to his future presidential library or another Trump-related entity, according to multiple people briefed on the conversations.
Mrs. Mildon’s employers agreed to a gigantic salary—and the agreement coincided with a grant of a gigantic presidential favor to her employers.
The contract calls for the Herrera family to pay Mrs. Mildon $10 million a year for four years along with a variety of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Times.
Mrs. Mildon formally began her work for the family on Jan. 1. Weeks later, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Herrera a full and unconditional pardon for his misdemeanor campaign finance violation. Mr. Herrera had faced felony bribery charges but struck an unusually lenient plea deal in 2025. Mrs. Mildon previously said she played no role in Mr. Herrera’s pardon.
So what is the president actually upset about? The article suggests that Donald Trump is not especially concerned about the size or impropriety of the payment. Rather, the story signals that he wants a piece of the action.
In calls with allies last week, Mr. Trump raged about the scale of the contract and said he wanted Mrs. Mildon to give a portion of the money to one of his causes.
This is not the first time that the President has strategically expressed such concerns: note the before-and-after events just below.
Earlier this month, Mr. Trump distanced himself from two of his top advisers who are guiding the Republican Party’s midterm strategy after The Times reported that the men, James Blair and Chris LaCivita, were each paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide counsel to Republika Srpska, a pro-Russian Balkan government.
After Mr. Trump’s public condemnation, Mr. Blair and Mr. LaCivita said they were donating the consulting fees they earned for advising the government to Mr. Trump’s presidential library fund.
Mr. Trump suggested to reporters that he did not explicitly ask the two to make the donations.
“They took the money and they gave it to essentially a charity,” he said, adding, “I think it was a very nice thing to do.”
Mr. Trump is looking to raise $1 billion for his presidential library, which is planned for Miami.
It is almost impossible for an office as large and consequential as the modern American presidency to be entirely free of influence-peddlers. But no other incumbent president in modern history has so brazenly and unembarrassedly used the office to enrich himself. And it is quite a stretch to call a presidential library fund “essentially a charity,” as if no part of a billion-dollar endowment could ever be used to benefit the president personally; notably, no one can say for sure what will be done with the Air Force One 747 that was given to the USA by the Qatari royal family—and that will revert to Trump’s presidential library in two years.
The American public now receives the gift of new frontiers in presidential corruption, and poll results suggest that they have noticed. That’s not even counting the mechanisms described above that Trump has used to exploit the influence-peddling of his own associates: these mechanisms are—not to put too fine a point on it—kickbacks.
