The good news for Donald Trump is that he’s profiting to a breathtaking degree from the presidency. The bad news for the Republican is that Americans have noticed.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, for example, found that 66% of the public believes the president is using his office to enrich himself, up from 56% a year ago. A week earlier, The Associated Press released the results of its latest national poll, which similarly found that most Americans believe that Trump “is profiting off the presidency in unethical or illegal ways and is focused more on his wealth than helping people like them.”

Somehow, JD Vance has failed to notice what the American mainstream already understands.

On Saturday, CBS News aired a town hall event in Michigan where the vice president told host Tony Dokoupil, “I’ve not once seen evidence that Donald Trump has enriched himself.”

Two days later, the Ohio Republican sat down with Mark Halperin, who interviewed the vice president for a media outlet called 2WAY, and Vance continued to toe the line.

“I think the president’s allowed to earn a living and allowed to live his life, and I don’t see, again, the question is, is he profiting off of his office,” Vance said. “I just don’t see any evidence that’s true.”

This suggests that the vice president is either remarkably unobservant or deliberately unobservant.

This doesn’t have to be complicated. In the first year of Trump’s second term, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, including more than $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency-related income, according to his latest annual financial disclosure.

No other president in American history has ever seen such financial gains while in office, and as a recent analysis from The New York Times explained, “Mr. Trump’s profits are a haul once unimaginable for any leader of a liberal democracy, particularly a sitting American president. No modern Western leader has ever publicly disclosed such big windfalls while in office. The Trump family’s earnings, experts said, have moved him into an echelon of enrichment more associated with strongmen in Russia and Turkey.”

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut posted a related, seven-part response to Vance via Bluesky, highlighting a variety of other ways Trump has profited off his office, including lucrative stock trades.

“Listen man, we get it,” the senator concluded in a message directed at the vice president. “If you work for Trump, you agree to lie and let your boss steal from taxpayers. But NO ONE believes you.”

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