The Trump Toll

The first year of the second Trump administration was a bountiful one for billionaires, including the President himself.

It was a bleak year for millions of babies here and around the world.

Trump and his family added about $4 billion to their personal bottom line in 2025, according to Forbes and other financial news organizations. That’s billion with a b.

The total wealth of the 935 U.S. billionaires increased by 22 percent last year, reaching approximately $8.2 trillion. The combined wealth held by the top five U.S. billionaires is more than $1 trillion. That’s trillion with a t.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress cut more than $1 trillion from programs that feed, clothe, shelter, educate, immunize, and provide health care and medicine for children here and around the world.

More cuts are coming.

Last year, for every $100 in discretionary federal spending, the U.S. devoted $1.59 to children under the age of three. Trump’s proposed 2026 budget would reduce that to 88 cents, accounting for inflation.

“Budgets are moral documents. They reveal what a nation chooses to invest in and whom it chooses to value,” Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus on Children, a nonpartisan advocacy group based in Washington, wrote last month in his annual report, “Babies in the Budget.”

“A nation that underinvests in babies pays the price later — in higher health care costs, weaker educational outcomes, lost productivity and wages, deeper inequality, and an uncompetitive future,” Lesley wrote. “Conversely, a nation that puts babies first reaps returns for generations. This is not ideology. It is economics. It is neuroscience. It is common sense.”

In 2025, it was not common practice.

USAID

Beginning last February, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, presided over the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), America’s foreign aid program.

At Trump’s behest, Musk laid off nearly all of USAID’s 13,000 employees and canceled nearly all of its aid contracts around the world.

Maternal and child health aid was reduced 88 percent. Epidemics and emerging disease surveillance was reduced by 87 percent. Programming for family planning and reproductive health was reduced 84 percent.

“USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die,” Musk, an immigrant from South Africa, explained on X a year ago.

Not everyone sees it that way.

USAID funding “has played a decisive role in reducing preventable mortality over the past two decades,” The Lancet, a highly respected, peer-reviewed medical journal, reported earlier this month.

USAID’s efforts to combat infectious diseases and malnutrition have saved 92 million lives — including 30 million children under age 5 — over the past two decades, The Lancet reported.

The Lancet’s study projects that global aid cuts could lead to as many as 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030. About 2.5 million of those deaths are projected to be children under the age of 5.

The dismantling of USAID “has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children,” according to Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols.

Musk ended 2025 with a net worth of $428 billion, according to Forbes.

The USAID (and related State Department) cuts saved U.S. taxpayers about $50 billion.

ICE

While the Trump administration was demolishing U.S. foreign aid to children around the world, it was detaining and deporting foreigners and their children in the U.S.

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” enacted by Congress last summer, nearly doubled funding for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), adding $75 billion to the agency’s budget over the next four years.

ICE’s annual budget is now larger than the combined budgets for all local and state law enforcement agencies, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute.

While Musk was firing nearly 12,000 USAID workers, ICE was hiring 12,000 additional armed and masked agents to track down, detain, and deport “the worst of the worst illegal aliens.”

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security reported that “DHS removed more than 670,000 illegal aliens including murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists from American communities and another two million have self-deported” in 2025.

But according to DHS records analyzed by the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, only 5 percent of those detained and/or deported by ICE have been convicted of violent crimes. More than 70 percent of them do not have criminal records.

Unauthorized entry into the U.S. is a misdemeanor, not a felony. Being in the U.S. without authorization is a civil offense, not a criminal one.

The Trump administration “is wasting billions of dollars on deporting peaceful people who are a fiscal and economic benefit to the United States and are valued by their U.S. citizen families and friends,” David J. Bier, director of immigration studies for the Cato Institute, wrote last December.

As of January, about 73,000 people are being held in ICE detention facilities, a record high. Most of them are families — fathers, mothers, and their children who have been taken out of their homes, cars, businesses, and neighborhoods by armed men wearing masks.

That includes at least 3,800 children — and 20 infants — since Trump took office last year. At least 1,000 children were held longer than 20 days, a court-ordered limit on child detention. At least 32 people died in ICE custody last year and at least 8 have died or been killed this year.

Trump’s mass deportation campaign has focused on large cities led by Democratic mayors, including Memphis.

ICE’s forces have been bolstered by local and state police forces through 287(g) agreements that deputized local officers to identify, process, and detain noncitizens for potential removal during their regular duties or while in jail.

In December 2024, there were 135 such agreements across the country. A year later, there were 1,236 in 40 states, including more than two dozen in Tennessee.

Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner signed a formal 287(g) agreement with ICE in November. Bonner said the agreement only allows ICE officers to “identify and process” immigrants currently in jail.

“Hundreds of Memphis families have been separated, their children traumatized, and vital portions of our community torn apart,” Tyler Foster, vice president of Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope (MICAH), wrote to Mayor Paul Young earlier this month.

SNAP

The surge in ICE funding came from last summer’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — as named by Trump and approved by Republicans in Congress.

The bill was especially beneficial for the wealthiest U.S. citizens.

It reduced taxes by $500 billion for the 200,000 households with annual incomes of more than $2 million. Overall, it provided $1.4 trillion in tax cuts to households with incomes over $500,000 a year.

The bill was especially harmful to the poorest U.S. babies and children.

It reduced federal Medicaid spending by around $800 billion and federal spending for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by $187 billion over a decade. Those were the largest cuts in each program’s history.

Medicaid and SNAP account for nearly half of all federal spending on infants, babies, and toddlers. Around 50 percent of U.S. children depend on some form of Medicaid for healthcare coverage. About 60 percent of SNAP recipients are in families with children.

First Focus on Children estimates that 34 million children, or roughly 45 percent of all U.S. children, now rely on SNAP or Medicaid. Roughly 14 million children are in “double jeopardy,” at risk of losing both food and health care benefits.

“Tennessee already struggles with high rates of medical debt, hospital closures, and child hunger,” said Michele Johnson, executive director of the Tennessee Justice Center. “This bill will make those problems worse and push more families into crisis.”

That doesn’t count the unknown number of children and families who will lose health care coverage due to Trump-led cuts and other changes in the Affordable Care Act.

Insurance premiums will more than double this year for most ACA recipients, according to estimates from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a nonpartisan health policy research group.

One million fewer people enrolled in an ACA plan this year. Up to 16 million people are projected to lose health care coverage by 2034.

“The combined effect of these policies is expected to disproportionately impact lower-income, working-class, and minority communities,” the Economic Policy Institute reported.

The immigration crackdown isn’t just keeping kids from going to school.Three in 10 immigrant parents report their children delayed or skipped health care in the past year.

“These are children going without preventive checkups, treatment for illness, or management of chronic conditions at a critical time in their development,” KFF reported in November.

The immigration crackdown and the safety-net cutbacks are putting millions of children into a triple jeopardy.

“When about half of children depend on Medicaid and CHIP for health care coverage, and a quarter have an immigrant parent, it’s important to understand how these policy threads weave together — and how they intensify an already dire situation for student mental health,” Anne Dwyer, a professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, wrote last month.

People who care for children are seeing the dire impact.

Physicians at LeBonheur Children’s Hospital treated about 50 fewer patients for gunshot wounds last year, as compared to 2024. But the number of children treated for abuse was higher than ever.

“The number of gunshot victims already was declining before the Memphis Safe Task Force, but we’ve received even fewer since, and that’s great,” said Dr. Regan Williams, LeBonheur’s medical director of trauma services. “What worries me most are the children we’re not seeing,” Williams said. “The children who are not coming to the hospital because their families are afraid of ICE.”

$TRUMP

A few days before Trump started his second term in January 2025, the Trump family started selling two meme coins — $TRUMP and $MELANIA. The two crypto coins earned the family $300 million, according to Forbes.

Overall, the Trump family has received about $1.4 billion from crypto projects since he was re-elected, according to financial analyses by the Financial Times and other independent news organizations.

Billionaires were happy to help.

In February 2025, Justin Sun, a Chinese-born crypto billionaire, bought $75 million in crypto tokens from the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, a private firm that borrows, lends, sells, and trades cryptocurrency. Sun’s stake helped bring in an additional $550 million to the company.

A few days later, the Securities and Exchange Commission put on hold its pending case against Sun, who was charged in 2023 with selling unregistered crypto securities.

Last March, World Liberty announced that it would sell USD1, a type of cryptocurrency known as stablecoin, backed with short-term U.S. Treasury bills.

Last May, Eric Trump and Justin Sun announced that a company owned by the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates was buying $2 billion worth of USD1.

Two weeks later, President Trump declared that the U.S. would provide advanced computer technology to the U.A.E.

Last summer, U.A.E. officials said they plan to use the Trump family’s USD1 cryptocurrency as payment for a stake in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.

Binance’s controlling stockholder is Changpeng Zhao, another crypto billionaire. In 2023, he pleaded guilty to charges he enabled money laundering during his time leading the company. He spent four months in prison.

Last June, a new Emirati fund, the Aqua 1 Foundation, announced that it would buy $100 million in World Liberty tokens.

Last October, Trump pardoned Zhao.

Trump made another $27.7 million last year by licensing his name, according to his 2025 financial disclosure form. That includes $1.1 million from a Trump guitar, $2.8 million from Trump watches, $2.5 million from “sneakers and fragrances,” $3 million from an illustrated book called “Save America,” and $3 million from a “God Bless the USA” Bible.

Billionaires also added to other portions of the Trump family’s 2025 portfolio.

A week after Trump took office for the second time, Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) agreed to pay the President $25 million to settle his 2021 lawsuit against the company.

Meta is owned by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, the fourth richest man in America.

In February, X agreed to pay Trump $10 million to settle his 2021 lawsuit against the social media company. X is owned by Musk.

In July, Paramount (which also owns CBS) agreed to pay Trump $16 million for what he claimed was the deceptive editing of a 2024 Kamala Harris interview.

Three weeks later, the Federal Communications Commission approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance. Skydance (and now Paramount and CBS) is owned by billionaire David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, the third richest man in America.

In September, Google (which owns YouTube) agreed to pay Trump $24.5 million to settle his 2021 lawsuit against the company. Google is owned by Larry Page, the second richest man in America.

Last summer, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced AI contracts of up to $200 million each with four AI companies either owned entirely or largely by Google, Amazon, and X.

Last week, Hegseth announced that the U.S. military will begin integrating Musk’s artificial intelligence tool, Grok, into “every unclassified and classified network” throughout the Pentagon.

In previous weeks, Hegseth made similar announcements about Blue Origin (owned by Bezos) and Gemini (owned by Page).

Trump is now worth a record $7.3 billion, up from $4.3 billion in 2024. The $3 billion gain vaulted him 118 spots to No. 201 on The Forbes 400.

“I think everybody, the American public, believe it’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters last year.

KIDS

About a year ago, the White House trumpeted the President’s efforts to help children.

“President Donald J. Trump knows America’s children are our future — and he’ll never stop fighting for their right to a healthy, productive upbringing and childhood,” the White House announced.

The announcement listed six achievements.

• President Trump made it the official policy of the U.S. government that there are only two sexes.

• President Trump ended the unfair, demeaning practice of forcing women to compete against men in sports — which resulted in the NCAA changing its rules.

• The Department of Education launched investigations into the California Interscholastic Federation and the Minnesota State High School League over their failures to comply.

• Health systems across the nation stopped or downsized their sex change programs for minors following President Trump’s “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” executive order.

• President Trump ended the radical, un-American indoctrination of America’s children by eliminating support for divisive, radical “gender ideology” and “equity ideology,” and protecting parents’ rights.

• President Trump banned COVID-19 vaccine mandates at schools that receive federal funding. 

David Waters is Distinguished Journalist in Residence and assistant director of the Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis.