The immortal legend of Harry Truman’s financial rectitude
By 
David Dayen pointed this out to me earlier this morning, from a long and otherwise very well done NYT editorial (gift link) on Donald Trump’s utterly unprecedented presidential, post-presidential, and then presidential again, venality, with a capital V:
When President Harry Truman left office in 1953, he did not even own a car. He and his wife returned to Missouri by train and lived for a time on his Army pension. He refused to take any job that he regarded as commercializing his public service, explaining, “I knew that they were not interested in hiring Harry Truman, the person, but what they wanted to hire was the former president of the United States.” Mr. Trump has said that when he leaves office, he plans to take with him a $400 million Boeing 747 that was a gift from Qatar, and to display it at his presidential library.
TL;DR for the Netflix and chill generation:
Truman had an enormous salary as president, several times larger in inflation-adjusted terms than the comparable figure today.
Truman embezzled about two and half million dollars, in 2025 money, from the White House expense account, and also didn’t pay the taxes he owned on the money.
A few years after leaving the White House, Truman claimed to Congress that he had netted only $37,000 on the $600,000 book deal for his memoirs after taxes and expenses. This was in the context of trying to wheedle a pension out of the federal government, with said wheedling being successful, as it resulted in the passage of the Former Presidents Act. In fact Truman had netted nearly $300K from the deal after taxes and expenses, which is about $3.5 million in 2025 dollars.
At the same time Truman was claiming to Congress that he would be “on relief” if he hadn’t sold “the family farm,” which he said he had inherited. In fact Truman didn’t inherit the farm, which his mother had been forced to sell many years earlier out of financial distress. Truman bought the farm when he was president, from a friend who had recently bought it and then sold it to Truman at cost in what certainly looks in retrospect like a sweetheart deal. Truman subsequently sold the farmland, which had an interstate highway built through it after his acquisition, for millions of dollars in 2025 money.
Truman went on Edward R. Murrow’s TV show in 1958, to further lobby the public for the passage of the FPA. (He used the same line he had used with Congress about being “on relief” if not for the sale of his “inherited” farm). Truman was paid several times the average America family’s annual income for this TV appearance.
Truman had a net worth of about $8 million in 2025 dollars when he left the White House, and of about $14 million in 2025 dollars when he was successfully shaking his tin cup to Sam Rayburn and John McCormack in 1958. And those numbers are only adjusted for inflation: adjusted for relative wealth, Truman was worth many tens of millions dollars, relative to the wealth of Americans at present.
BTW you can now find most of this information on a top secret site known as Wikipedia, although I haven’t checked on whether Truman’s latest biographer actually corrected David McCullough’s endlessly repeated fairy tales about how Truman had to take out a bank loan just to be able to afford to move back to Missouri.
Beyond all this, the editorialists are quite disingenuously ignoring the now well-known half century and more tradition of ex-presidents from at least Ford on cashing in on their time in office (Carter is really the only ex-president since then who showed even a little circumspection in this regard, instead of grabbing with both hands as they say).
This is unfortunate, because you can acknowledge this history while pointing out that Trump’s behavior is almost indescribably worse, both because of the sheer scale of his venality, which as the Times documents is well into ten figures at this point, and, far more scandalously, Trump is cashing in while he is president.
Continuing to hold up Harry “Sticky Fingers” Truman as a model of financial rectitude, while closing one’s eyes to post-presidential profiteering that has become completely routinized, only creates an opportunity for the classic cynical response that Trump only does openly what others try to hide (Again, this grotesquely understates the scale and brazenness of Trump’s unprecedented corruption).