That’s fair enough. It’s an open message board, anyone is free to respond to any questions or posts anyway they want to.
The reason I asked Phillyguy that question specifically is due to his statement that “Trump is above the law.” Functionally speaking, and in light of recent events, I can’t disagree with that on an observational level. And given what I know about his posting history I don’t think he made that statement lightly. So I was curious what his response would be to my follow-up query.
Given your response, I’m guessing you would not have agreed with the original observation. Or at least he’s only above the law in the sense that the Republican party is choosing not to hold him accountable. Which may be a distinction without a difference.
Again though, this feels like a hijack in P&E and there’s probably better threads to pursue this line of discussion if we wish to do so. I’ll be bowing out at this point.
Given that this is P&E, I hope this is an okay post. I don’t think it’s the kind of post that anybody would take the time to generate from scratch, I suspect it is accurate info, and I think it puts a very fine point on what I think we’d all agree is an important issue.
But it is generated with AI.
If George Washington had earned as much in his final year as President as we recently learned that Trump had in the first year of his second term, then -- reverse-indexed for inflation -- what would he have earned, and -- in contemporary dollars -- what could he have purchased with that amount of money?
This is one of those questions where the arithmetic is almost the least interesting part.
Using the recent disclosure figure of roughly $2.2 billion in 2025 income (reported in 2026), let’s do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. ([The Washington Post][1])
Historical CPI calculations over more than two centuries are necessarily approximate, but a reasonable conversion is that $1 in the late 1790s had purchasing power roughly comparable to $25–30 today.
That gives:
$2.2 billion (2025 dollars)
÷ ~28
≈ $79 million in 1797 dollars
Call it $75–90 million in George Washington’s last year as president.
Now the fun part.
That would have been an almost unimaginably large annual income in the 1790s.
For perspective:
The entire Louisiana Purchase cost the United States $15 million in 1803.
Your hypothetical President Washington’s annual income could therefore have purchased about five Louisianas.
The entire annual federal budget of the young United States was only on the order of a few million dollars. Your hypothetical Washington would have been earning many times the federal government’s yearly expenditures.
Washington’s own estate, Mount Vernon, while one of the finest plantations in America, was worth only a tiny fraction of that amount.
So if “Hypothetical Corrupt President Washington” had somehow received the purchasing-power equivalent of President Trump’s reported income, he could have:
purchased the equivalent of several entire states,
bought thousands of the finest Virginia plantations,
financed a substantial navy out of pocket,
or effectively become wealthier than the federal government itself in terms of annual cash flow.
The comparison also illustrates why inflation alone doesn’t tell the whole story.
An $80 million annual income in 1797 wasn’t merely “very rich.” It would have represented an extraordinary concentration of economic power in a nation whose entire economy was tiny by modern standards. Relative to the size of the United States, it might actually be more astonishing than $2.2 billion is today.
One final historical irony: George Washington spent a surprising amount of time worrying about the appearance of public virtue and the precedents the presidency would establish. Whatever one’s views of modern politics, it is difficult to imagine Washington being comfortable with contemporaries saying, “He earned enough this year to buy the Louisiana Territory several times over.” That observation would likely have troubled him as much for its implications about the office as for the number itself.
More perplexing to Washington, I think, would be the fact that Trump received this money despite creating no product, providing no service, and not even having the need for any employees.
Washington was a businessman - he had the largest whiskey distillery in the nation. I doubt he’d have a problem with somebody like Bezos in charge. And I don’t think he’d consider proceeds from Trump’s resorts (assuming those are turning a profit) to be strange or unseemly.
But I suspect that he’d look at Trump’s crypto activity and quickly conclude that it was merely corruption, avarice, and graft.