Since Trump Took Office: Beef Up 24%, Diesel Up 41%, Debt Up $3.7 Trillion

He campaigned on the price of groceries. Nineteen months in, here is the receipt, pulled almost entirely from the government's own data series, from industry trade groups, and from the administration's own filings.

Every line below has a link. Where a number is contested, we say who contests it. Where the news cuts against the argument, we print it anyway, because a ledger that only runs one direction is not a ledger.

Three notes on method. First, the window is January 20, 2025 through the latest data available in August 2026, which for most federal price series means July 2026. Second, several federal statistical series have gaps in this period: the Bureau of Labor Statistics canceled the October 2025 CPI report outright and canceled the October 2025 jobs report entirely after the shutdown (BLS), and the President fired the BLS commissioner on August 1, 2025 after a weak jobs report (Washington Post). A review by the Peterson Institute concluded there was no evidence the data itself was rigged (PIIE), and we are treating the data as sound. Third, per this site's standing policy, claims made by the Justice Department, the Pentagon and the VA about their own conduct are labeled as what they are: statements by an interested party.

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Groceries

• Overall prices are up 5.1% since January 2025, from a CPI index of 317.671 to 333.918 in July 2026 (BLS via FRED).
• Groceries specifically are up 3.4% over the same window, using the food-at-home index (BLS via FRED).
• Ground beef: up 24.2%, from $5.545 a pound to $6.885 (BLS via FRED).
• Sirloin steak: up 22.0%, from $11.965 a pound to $14.592 (BLS via FRED).
• Coffee: up 32.7%, from $7.019 a pound to $9.317 (BLS via FRED).
• Bananas: up 4.7% (BLS via FRED).

To be fair, and this matters: several staples are meaningfully cheaper than they were on Inauguration Day.

• Eggs: down 55.8%, from $4.953 a dozen to $2.189, after peaking at $6.227 in March 2025 during the avian flu shortage (BLS via FRED).
• Butter: down 20.2% (BLS via FRED).
• White bread: down 5.5% (BLS via FRED).

Fuel and power

• Regular gasoline: up 28.9%, from $3.109 a gallon the week of January 20, 2025 to $4.006 the week of August 10, 2026 (EIA via FRED). Worth noting honestly: gas actually fell to $2.779 by January 2026 before spiking from March 2026 onward, peaking near $4.50 in May.
• Diesel: up 41.5%, from $3.715 a gallon to $5.257, with a peak near $5.64 in April and May 2026 (EIA via FRED). Diesel is the freight number, which is why it shows up later in the price of everything that arrives by truck.
• Residential electricity: up 10.1%, from 17.9 cents per kilowatt-hour to 19.7 cents (BLS via FRED).

Beef, and who got the contract

• The U.S. cattle herd is at 86.2 million head, the smallest since 1951, a 75-year low (USDA NASS).
• Four companies control more than 80% of U.S. beef processing (NPR).
• On October 20, 2025, the administration moved to quadruple Argentina's beef import quota, from 20,000 metric tons to 80,000, with the Agriculture Secretary suggesting 100,000 was possible (KCUR).
• Argentina sold the U.S. more than $801 million in beef and bought $7 million of ours, according to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, whose CEO Colin Woodall said the plan "only creates chaos at a critical time of the year for American cattle producers, while doing nothing to lower grocery store prices" (NCBA).
• Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) publicly opposed it, arguing the answer was more processing plants to compete with the big four packers, not more imports (WGEM).
• Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) broke with the White House on it too, saying publicly that increasing imports was not the way to bring prices down (KCUR).
• Eleven days earlier, Treasury finalized a $20 billion currency swap line for Argentina, drawn on the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which holds roughly $22 billion. It was the first large-scale U.S. rescue of a foreign government since the 1995 Mexico loan (Council on Foreign Relations).
• Told ranchers to lower their prices. On October 22, 2025, the President posted that ranchers were doing well only because of his tariffs and that "they also have to get their prices down" (reporting on the post).

Farmers

The figures in this section come largely from the American Farm Bureau Federation's market analysis, which is drawn from federal court and USDA data. The Farm Bureau is the country's largest farm lobby, not a statistical agency. It is also not an adversary of this administration, which is part of why its numbers are worth reading.

• Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies hit 315 in 2025, up 46% from 216 in 2024, which was itself up 55% from 139 in 2023 (American Farm Bureau Federation).
• Wisconsin filings rose 700%. Iowa rose 220%. Arkansas roughly doubled to 33, the highest in this century (AFBF).
• Farm sector debt is forecast to hit a record $624.7 billion in 2026 (USDA ERS).
• USDA cut its 2025 net farm income forecast by $25 billion, to $154.6 billion, with the Farm Bureau noting income stability "continues to be supported by government assistance rather than stronger market conditions" and that "many operations remain below breakeven" (AFBF).
• Direct government payments to farmers are forecast to rise from $30.5 billion in 2025 to $44.3 billion in 2026 (AFBF). Farm income is not recovering. It is being subsidized, by the taxpayer, at an increasing rate.
• Soybean exports to China fell 77.9% in the first eight months of 2025, from 985 million bushels to 218 million. For three straight months the U.S. shipped China essentially none (AFBF).
• Total U.S. farm exports to China are forecast at $9 billion in 2026, down from $17 billion in 2025 and more than 50% off the 2022 peak (AFBF).
• A $12 billion farmer bailout was announced December 8, 2025, funded through the Commodity Credit Corporation out of tariff revenue (Forbes).
• Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) had asked for $20 billion, nearly twice what farmers got (Hawley's office).

Foreign firms, American ground

• Nippon Steel completed its purchase of U.S. Steel at roughly $14.9 billion, approved by the same administration that spent 2024 campaigning against the deal (CNBC).
• A UAE state-linked firm, MGX, bought nearly half of the Trump family's World Liberty Financial for $500 million just before the inauguration (NBC Washington).
• MGX then used World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin to close a $2 billion investment into Binance (The Block). Binance's founder was pardoned later that year. Binance denies the two are connected, and no source cited here establishes that they are. The timeline is offered as a timeline.

Jobs

• Net job growth from January 2025 through June 2026 was 716,000, about 42,000 a month. Over the prior 17 months it was 2,007,000, about 118,000 a month (FactCheck.org).
• July 2026 lost 23,000 jobs outright (BLS).
• BLS revised March 2025 payrolls down by 911,000 jobs, the largest such revision on record (BLS).
• Labor force participation fell from 62.6% to 61.4%, near the lowest since the pandemic (BLS). People who stop looking for work stop counting as unemployed, which is one reason the headline rate can hold steady while fewer Americans are working.
• Long-term unemployed rose from 1.44 million to 1.8 million, and from 21.1% of the unemployed to 25.5% (BLS). One in four unemployed Americans has now been out of work more than six months.
• U-6, which counts the underemployed and the discouraged, sits at 7.9%, against a headline rate of 4.1% (BLS via FRED).
• 4.8 million people are working part-time because they cannot get full-time work (BLS).
• The federal workforce shrank by about 317,000 in 2025, per the Office of Personnel Management, including roughly 144,000 deferred resignations, 21,000 buyouts, 17,000 reductions in force and 7,000 probationary terminations, partly offset by about 68,000 new hires concentrated in immigration and border enforcement (reporting on OPM figures). GAO's independent count found about 134,000 separations at the 24 largest agencies in the first six months of 2025 alone (GAO).
• Employers announced 1,206,374 job cuts in 2025, up 58%, the seventh-highest annual total since 1989. Announced hiring plans totaled 507,647, the lowest since 2010 (Challenger, Gray & Christmas).
• Manufacturing lost about 108,000 jobs in the first year, per a Joint Economic Committee analysis of BLS data (JEC Democrats). This one comes from the committee's minority staff, so treat it as a partisan read of nonpartisan data.

Two honest counterpoints. The unemployment rate barely moved, from 4.0% to 4.1% (BLS). And announced layoffs in 2026 are running 41% below 2025, with July 2026 the lightest month in two years (Challenger). Firing spiked in 2025 and has since eased. Hiring has not come back with it, which is why participation keeps falling while the headline rate holds steady.

Healthcare

• ACA benchmark premiums rose 26% for the 2026 plan year (KFF).
• What subsidized enrollees actually pay out of pocket rose 114%, from an average $888 a year to $1,904, after the enhanced tax credits expired December 31, 2025 (KFF).
• Insurers have proposed a median 15% increase for 2027, a second consecutive year of double digits (Peterson-KFF).
• CBO projects 10 million more uninsured Americans by 2034 as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (via AHA).
• Federal Medicaid spending is cut by $911 billion over ten years under the same law (KFF).
• Rural areas absorb $137 billion of those cuts. The rural hospital fund created to offset them is $50 billion, covering about 37% of the damage, front-loaded while two-thirds of the cuts land after 2030 (KFF).
• 417 rural hospitals are rated vulnerable to closure (Chartis, via Fierce Healthcare).
• Medicare Part B premiums rose 9.7%, from $185.00 to $202.90 a month, with the deductible up $26 to $283 (CMS).
• CBO warned the bill would trigger roughly $490 billion in automatic Medicare cuts over 2027 to 2034 under statutory pay-as-you-go rules (CBO). Congress then waived the entire $3.4 trillion PAYGO scorecard in a November 2025 funding bill, canceling the sequester without paying for it (CRFB). The Medicare cut was averted by abandoning the rule that was supposed to force fiscal discipline in the first place.
• A CMS rule finalized April 2, 2026 eliminated 11 Medicare Advantage quality measures, a change CMS's own estimate says routes an extra $18.6 billion to insurers over a decade, up from the $13.2 billion projected when it was proposed (STAT).
• Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) voted against the bill. Collins cited an estimated $5.9 billion hit to Maine and a threat to "the very existence of several of our state's rural hospitals" (FactCheck.org). Tillis announced he would not seek reelection days later (CBS News).
• Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) cast the deciding vote for it while calling the process "an awful process, a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline" and saying "my sincere hope is that this is not the final product" (Axios).
• Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) voted for the bill and then, two weeks later, introduced legislation to undo its Medicaid cuts, saying "now is the time to prevent any future cuts to Medicaid from going into effect" (Axios).
• The U.S. recorded 2,289 measles cases in 2025, the most since 1992 (CDC). By late July 2026 the year's count had already passed all of 2025 (PBS NewsHour). HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed all 17 members of the CDC's vaccine advisory committee on June 9, 2025 (STAT).

To be fair: employer family premiums rose 6% in 2025, to $26,993, which is actually slightly less than the 7% increases in each of the two prior years (KFF). If you get insurance through work, this part of the story has not changed much.

Surveillance

• Roughly 120,000 automated license plate readers are now mapped across the country, with Flock Safety crossing 100,000 cameras in mid-2026 (Stateline).
• Flock now serves more than 6,000 communities and agencies across 49 states (Stateline).
• Customs and Border Protection had access to more than 80,000 Flock cameras nationwide through an undisclosed pilot program (404 Media).
• A Texas deputy ran a nationwide plate search across 83,345 cameras looking for a woman who had ended a pregnancy, reaching into states where abortion is legal. The search was logged internally as a "death investigation" and described publicly as a welfare check (EFF, 404 Media).
• More than 50 local agencies canceled, suspended or rejected Flock in 2026 alone, most citing unauthorized federal data sharing (Stateline).
• Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) announced a bill on July 25, 2026 to strip federal funding from departments that deploy Flock cameras, saying they "surveil law abiding citizens" (Newsweek).
• The Cato Institute published "The Digital Panopticon: Why Automated Surveillance Threatens a Free Society" on August 13, 2026 (Cato). Reason has argued warrantless plate-reader use is unconstitutional (Reason). This is not a left-wing objection.
• ICE received roughly $75 billion in new funding in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, against a typical annual budget near $10 billion (NPR).
• Palantir holds a $30 million ICE contract for "ImmigrationOS" running through September 2027 (American Immigration Council), plus a sole-source case-management contract the ACLU puts above $145 million (ACLU).
• Clearview AI signed a $9.2 million ICE facial recognition contract in September 2025, its largest government deal ever and four times its previous ICE contract (Forbes).
• ICE deployed "Mobile Fortify," a handheld face-scanning app with no opt-out, including at least one reported case of a U.S. citizen told he could be deported on the basis of a biometric match (EFF).
• The IRS agreed to share taxpayer data with ICE on April 7, 2025. ICE requested records on 1.27 million taxpayers; Treasury identified 47,489 matches and disclosed them in August 2025. The acting IRS commissioner raised legal objections; the commissioner who approved the disclosure was removed days later (FedScoop).

Data centers

• Executive Order 14156, signed January 20, 2025, declared a national energy emergency (Federal Register).
• Executive Order 14318, signed July 23, 2025, is titled "Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure" (Federal Register). This is the order that directs federal agencies to speed environmental and permitting review for large data centers.
• Executive Order 14363, signed November 24, 2025, launched the "Genesis Mission" (Federal Register).
• The Stargate project alone plans nearly 7 gigawatts of capacity and more than $400 billion in three-year investment across sites in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio and Wisconsin (OpenAI).
• PJM's capacity auction price went from $28.92 per megawatt-day to $269.92, then to $329.17. PJM's own independent market monitor attributed 63% of the first increase to data centers, or $9.3 billion in added cost passed to ratepayers in a single year (IEEFA).
• That showed up as about $21 a month on D.C.-area Pepco bills, $18 in western Maryland and $16 in Ohio (IEEFA).
• Virginia gave up $1.6 billion in tax revenue to data center exemptions in fiscal 2025 alone, a 118% jump over the prior year (The Register).
• Brookings found the payoff is about 100 to 200 jobs per county over a facility's first decade, with no measurable increase in local wages (Brookings).

The war

Casualty accounting in this period is contested, so read this section carefully. What follows is what the Pentagon has confirmed, followed by what independent reporting disputes.

• 18 American service members have been killed in the 2026 Iran conflict, each identified by name by the Pentagon. That figure is not in dispute (Task & Purpose, July 26, 2026).
• 624 have been wounded, per the Defense Casualty Analysis System, a figure that jumped by nearly 200 in a single overnight update from a previously disclosed 420 (Task & Purpose).
• The Pentagon moved casualties occurring after July 7 into a separate "Overseas Operations" category, which has the effect of resetting the 60-day War Powers Resolution clock for acting without congressional authorization (Task & Purpose). This is the Pentagon's own accounting decision, and it is why the totals are hard to pin down.
• A FOIA-based investigation found injuries including at least 170 cases of head trauma, along with shrapnel wounds, broken bones and traumatic brain injuries not itemized in the public monthly totals (Military Times).
• At least 66 strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed at least 221 people since September 2, 2025 (InsightCrime).
• Almost none of those killed have been publicly identified or charged with any crime (InsightCrime).
• The first strike included a second attack on survivors clinging to the wreckage, ordered by the JSOC commander, who was later nominated to lead Special Operations Command. The Secretary of War said he "made the right call" (The Intercept).
• Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) on the same strike: "If it was as if the article said, that is a violation of the law of war," and "when people want to surrender, you don't kill them." House Armed Services Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said it "would be an illegal act" (PBS NewsHour).
• The Pentagon's own report to Congress acknowledged 153 civilians killed and 243 injured in Yemen in 2025, up from 1 civilian death in 2023 and 2 in 2024. Airwars, an independent monitor, puts the figure at 258 or more (CBS News).
• The Yemen campaign cost about $1 billion in its first weeks, including seven MQ-9 Reaper drones shot down, roughly $200 million in aircraft (NBC News).
• The Latin America buildup and boat-strike campaign cost at least $4.7 billion between August 2025 and March 2026, a figure Brown University's Costs of War researchers call "almost assuredly an undercount" because of Pentagon nondisclosure (The Intercept).
• CBO put the cost of National Guard deployments to American cities at $496 million in 2025 and roughly $1.1 billion in 2026 if continued at then-current levels, or about $55 million a month for the D.C. deployment alone (CBO).
• Courts repeatedly found those deployments illegal. Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, ruled the Portland deployment violated federal law and the Tenth Amendment (Oregon Capital Chronicle). Judge Jia Cobb ruled the D.C. deployment unlawful (CBS News). The Supreme Court declined to reinstate the Illinois deployment, finding the government "failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois" (NPR).
• Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) co-sponsored a bipartisan war powers resolution, saying "the Constitution does not permit the executive branch to unilaterally commit an act of war against a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked the United States" (Rep. McGovern's office). Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called escalation in Venezuela a "prelude to an invasion" and said it "cuts directly against President Trump's America-First instinct to keep us out of unnecessary foreign entanglements" (Spectrum News).
• The VA shed more than 40,000 employees in fiscal 2025, including about 3,000 registered nurses and 1,000 physicians, per a report from the ranking member of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee (Government Executive). That is a minority-staff report, so weigh it accordingly. The VA, an interested party, counters that it cut the claims backlog 57% over the same period (VA).

Epstein and Maxwell

• Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the President's former personal defense lawyer, personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell over two days, July 24 and 25, 2025 (DOJ transcript.pdf)).
• One week later, on August 1, 2025, Maxwell was moved from a low-security prison to FPC Bryan, a minimum-security camp in Texas (CNN).
• Bureau of Prisons policy normally bars registered sex offenders from minimum-security camps. A former BOP assistant director called the transfer "highly unusual" and said overriding the designation would take "a tremendous amount of work." Neither DOJ nor BOP gave a specific public justification (Fox News).
• She has not been pardoned. Her attorney says she will ask once "Epstein news dies down" (Forbes).
• The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House 427 to 1 and the Senate unanimously, and was signed November 19, 2025 (Congress.gov). It only reached the floor because Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) forced it there with a discharge petition (CBS News).
• Four months earlier, on July 16, 2025, the President had called the whole thing "a big hoax" perpetrated by "Democrats and some stupid Republicans" (NPR). He reversed on November 16 and signed three days later (Al Jazeera).
• DOJ says it has published roughly 3.5 million pages (DOJ). That is the Department's own count, unaudited, and it withheld material under an "ongoing investigation" exemption (NPR).
• The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify in March 2026. The "cover-up" framing is the language of the committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. Robert Garcia, not the committee's (Oversight Democrats).
• Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) resigned from Congress over it, effective January 5, 2026, saying "standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich, powerful men should not result in me being called a traitor" (CNBC). She said the President told her his "friends will get hurt" by the files' release (MS NOW).

Pardons

• Roughly 1,600 people have received clemency, of whom about 1,500 were January 6 defendants (ProPublica).
• More than 600 of them had been convicted of or pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting or obstructing police officers (summary of the proclamation). Fourteen seditious conspiracy sentences were commuted. The Proud Boys leader serving 22 years got a full pardon.
• About 10 of the non-January-6 recipients went through the formal Justice Department pardon process. Roughly 10,000 petitions from ordinary applicants remain pending (ProPublica).

Restitution figures in the bullets below come from a case-by-case compilation published by the California Governor's office, drawn from court judgments. The compiler is a Democrat. The underlying judgments are public record, and each conviction is separately linked.

• Trevor Milton, the Nikola founder convicted of securities fraud, was pardoned March 27, 2025 (CNBC). Prosecutors had sought roughly $675 million in restitution, most of it to shareholders he defrauded (case tally). He had donated $1.8 million to the campaign (Malay Mail).
• Lawrence Duran, who ran what prosecutors called the largest therapy-related Medicare fraud in history, had his sentence commuted. The scheme billed up to $205 million in false claims, and the clemency order specified he would owe no further fines or restitution (Truthout). Court records put the erased restitution at $87.5 million (case tally). That was Medicare money. It was yours.
• Jason Galanis and Devon Archer were convicted of defrauding the Oglala Sioux Tribe's investment arm in a $60 million bond scheme (Native News Online). Galanis was commuted, erasing $84.8 million in restitution. Archer was pardoned, erasing $43.4 million (case tally).
• Carlos Watson of Ozy Media was commuted hours before he was due to report to prison, and the SEC dropped its related civil case that September (CNBC). Restitution erased: $36.8 million (case tally).
• Todd and Julie Chrisley were pardoned May 28, 2025 after convictions for bank fraud and tax evasion (NPR), erasing roughly $22 million in restitution between them (case tally).
• Paul Walczak, convicted of more than $10 million in payroll tax fraud, was pardoned. His mother attended a $1-million-per-person fundraiser roughly a month before (The Hill).
• Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, was pardoned October 23, 2025. His company had paid more than $4 billion in penalties in the 2023 resolution; the pardon covered his personal Bank Secrecy Act conviction, not the corporate fine (DOJ, 2023 case, CNN). Binance had by then closed a $2 billion investment denominated in the Trump family's own stablecoin, and its CEO has publicly denied any link between that business and the pardon (CNBC).
• Michele Fiore, a Las Vegas politician convicted of diverting more than $70,000 raised for a fallen-officer memorial statue to cosmetic surgery and her daughter's wedding, was pardoned April 23, 2025 (DOJ pardon warrant).
• George Santos had his seven-year sentence commuted after serving less than three months (ProPublica).
• Two separate tallies put the total restitution, fines and forfeiture erased at more than $1.3 billion, one from House Judiciary staff (via ProPublica), one from the California Governor's office, which puts the full figure near $2 billion (Office of Gov. Newsom). Both compilers are Democrats. Both are drawing from court judgments that are public record, and the underlying case numbers above check out individually. No nonpartisan outlet has published a competing audit.

Monuments

• The White House ballroom now costs $600 million. The contractor notified the White House of the increase on March 5, 2026. The reported breakdown: $293 million private, $155 million Secret Service, $149 million White House Military Office, $3 million Executive Residence. That is about $307 million in federal money, on a project repeatedly described as costing taxpayers nothing. The reporting is USA Today's; the copy linked here is hosted by House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark, whose office publicized it (USA Today reporting, via Rep. Clark's office). The White House disputes the categorization, arguing the security items are separate from the ballroom.
• The East Wing was demolished starting October 21, 2025, three months after the President said the project "won't interfere with the current building" (PolitiFact).
• A federal judge ordered construction halted on March 31, 2026, ruling that "no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have." The National Capital Planning Commission approved the project two days later (PBS NewsHour).
• Ballroom donor companies hold $279 billion in federal contracts (Washington Post), and Public Citizen found $50 billion in contracts awarded to them since the demolition began (Public Citizen). The donations are tax-deductible.
• The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was repainted "American flag blue." The President said the work cost $1.5 million to $2 million. Federal contract records show at least $14.8 million awarded (PBS NewsHour). Painting finished June 4, 2026 and the basin was refilled, so the project was not abandoned. The gap between the claim and the contracts is the story.
• The Rose Garden lawn was replaced with a stone patio modeled on the one at Mar-a-Lago (NPR).
• The June 14, 2025 military parade cost about $30 million in Army funds, against a pre-event estimate of $25 million to $45 million (Stars and Stripes).
• The Kennedy Center board approved $257 million in renovations funded through the reconciliation bill, and voted to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center (Fox News).
• $40 million was appropriated for a National Garden of American Heroes. As of April 2026, it appeared unlikely a single statue would be ready for the unveiling (CNN).
• A proposed triumphal arch near the Lincoln Memorial carries an estimated $100 million price tag (TIME).
• The Air Force confirmed a roughly $400 million taxpayer cost to retrofit the 747 gifted by Qatar (Bloomberg). Earlier outside estimates approached $1 billion (Forbes).
• The U.S. Mint began striking a $1 coin bearing the sitting President's face for the 250th anniversary, a move legal scholars argue conflicts with the 1866 statute barring living persons from U.S. currency (NPR).
• Taxpayer cost of golf and Trump-property trips is estimated between $70 million and $138.6 million, but there is no GAO audit of the second term, so treat every figure in that range as a watchdog estimate rather than a confirmed number (tracker aggregation). For scale, GAO's audited figure from the first term was $13.6 million for four Mar-a-Lago trips.

What the family made

• Forbes put the President's net worth at $6.5 billion in March 2026, up $1.4 billion in a year (Forbes).
• His 2025 financial disclosure reported more than $1.4 billion in crypto income: about $810 million from World Liberty Financial token sales and a business-interest sale, $636 million in memecoin royalties, and $196 million from a stablecoin equity sale (TIME). The prior year's figure was $57 million.
• 988,905 people who bought the $TRUMP memecoin lost a combined $3.81 billion through June 2026, while the affiliated entities collected the $636 million in royalties. The token is down more than 97% from its peak (Nansen data, via TNW).
• Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.'s stake in American Bitcoin was worth more than $1.5 billion when it debuted on Nasdaq September 3, 2025 (Fortune). Crypto valuations move fast, so read that as a snapshot.
• Bloomberg estimated total family wealth grew nearly 70% over roughly fifteen months (via Yahoo Finance). That is a wider scope than the Forbes figure above, which covers the President individually, so the two percentages are not meant to match.

To be fair, one family asset went the other way. Trump Media reported $3.68 million in 2025 revenue against a $712 million net loss, and the stock fell 54% in the second week of August 2026 after a planned crypto deal collapsed (Motley Fool). The public-company bet has been a disaster. The crypto bets, funded in significant part by foreign sovereign money, have not.

The debt

• On January 21, 2025, the first business day of the term, the gross national debt was $36,218,258,403,326.35.
• On August 13, 2026, it was $39,934,816,207,844.37.
• That is an increase of $3.72 trillion, or 10.3%, in nineteen months (Treasury, Debt to the Penny).
• The fiscal 2025 deficit came in at $1.8 trillion, roughly the same as fiscal 2024 despite $118 billion in additional tariff revenue (CRFB).
• Fiscal 2026 was already $1.4 trillion in the hole through nine months (CBO).
• CBO scored the One Big Beautiful Bill Act at $3.4 trillion in added deficits over ten years (via Senate Budget Committee). The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget's dynamic score, which credits the bill for the growth it generates and then adds the interest on the borrowing, put it at $4.7 trillion (CRFB). Even scored generously, it does not pay for itself.
• Customs duties totaled $195 billion in fiscal 2025, more than 250% of the prior year (CRFB). The deficit did not move.
• The Yale Budget Lab estimates tariffs cost the average household $650 to $780 a year, or $1,130 to $1,340 if made permanent (Yale Budget Lab).
• Net interest on the debt went from $345 billion in fiscal 2020 to $970 billion in fiscal 2025, and now runs near $87 billion a month, exceeding annual defense spending (Taxpayers for Common Sense).

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What we could not verify

A ledger is only as good as what it admits it does not know.

We could not find a nonpartisan audit of total restitution erased by pardons; the two tallies above are both Democratic. We could not find a GAO audit of second-term travel costs, so the golf figure is a range from watchdogs. We could not find an official government total for the combined cost of the Yemen, Iran, Caribbean and Venezuela operations, because the Pentagon has not published one, and the researchers who tried say their own numbers are undercounts. The exact number of American wounded in the Iran conflict is disputed between the Pentagon's own system and independent reporting that says the count is low. Manufacturing job losses come from a congressional minority staff analysis. And the claim that data centers pay for themselves in local jobs is contradicted by Brookings but has not been the subject of a federal audit.

Where a number was soft, we said so. Where a number cut the other way, we printed it. Nothing above requires you to accept a characterization. Every line is a figure and a link, and most of the links go to the government's own servers.

Check them.