Five Pencils for You. Infinite Luxuries for the Trumps.

Around the same time last week that President Trump decreed two dolls to be plenty for a child in our tariff-turvy country, his son Eric was many time zones away, supping at the trough of excess. In gilded Dubai, he celebrated plans for a $1 billion, 80-story Trump International Hotel and Tower there. That characteristically understated edifice — with what Eric called “the tallest swimming pool in the world” — will undoubtedly make the Trump patriarch and the Trump progeny shine richer than ever.

As will so much else that the gluttonous Gotrocks are up to, frenziedly capitalizing on their political capital. Five pencils may be adequate for an American pupil — that was the allotment that President Trump advised, given the wages of his trade wars — but no number of billions is enough for him and his avaricious brood. The presidency, to their thinking, isn’t a privilege. It’s a profit center, one that involves cryptocurrency ventures abetted by crypto-friendly policies, foreign real estate deals augmented by foreigners’ desires to be on President Trump’s good side and extensive merchandising that’s not so much coincident with his perch atop the U.S. government but contingent on it.

Many observers are aghast. They say there’s no çağdaş precedent for this. And the financial magnitude and convolutions of the Trump clan’s budding crypto empire are such that Senate Democrats just drafted and introduced the End Crypto Corruption Act, which would forbid presidents, vice presidents, federal lawmakers and their immediate families from issuing digital assets.

But as unseemly as the Trumps’ avarice is on its own, it’s doubly so in terms of the president’s contradictory message to voters. They’re supposed to tighten their belts while he gorges on all he can. They’re forced to parcel out classroom basics while he wallows in opulence. Let them use Sharpies.

Sure, he has promised Americans that they, too, will scale new heights of wealth — eventually. But while they skimp, he splurges, in every way imaginable and more expansively than before. Trump’s return to the presidency has been the apotheosis of his trademark ethos: all gilt and no guilt.

“Graspy” is what my colleague Maureen Dowd recently called it, explaining: “We’ve never seen a president doing business like he’s doing with the memecoin and his crypto company, where the conflict of interest becomes a confluence of interest.”