When Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird first premiered in London’s West End eight years ago, Donald Trump was a year into his first term. Now the play is back at Wyndham’s Theatre, and Trump is again in the Oval Office – and the production’s message, the New Statesman notes, “has only strengthened”.
The play, set in Depression-era Alabama, follows Atticus Finch (Richard Coyle) defending Tom Robinson (Aaron Shosanya), a black man accused of raping a white teenage girl. In one scene, the accuser Mayella (Evie Hargreaves) shouts from the witness stand: “America was built by white people!” The reviewer observes that, watching the line, “you cannot help but think of the fear in American cities as Ice agents prowl the streets, and that a growing faction of the Maga movement would agree with Mayella”. To Kill a Mockingbird, the New Statesman concludes, “is a stark reminder that Trump’s America has taken two steps back”.
“Trump added $1.4bn to his fortune in his first year back, while a London play highlights racial regression.”
While the play underscores the country’s racial regression, new figures reveal the extent to which the president has personally profited from his return to power. According to Forbes, in his first year back in the White House, Trump added about $1.4bn to his fortune. When he started running again he was worth about $2.4bn; he is now worth around $6.5bn – nearly tripling his money by becoming leader of the free world.
Most of the increase came from crypto – a memecoin and a family firm called World Liberty Financial that barely existed before he ran. Days before his inauguration, an Abu Dhabi fund poured $500m into it, sending roughly $187m towards Trump family entities. Shortly afterwards, his administration waved through the export of advanced AI chips to the UAE.
Reuters estimated that while Trump and his sons made at least $2.3bn from their main crypto ventures, ordinary punters they lured in lost almost exactly the same. “He didn’t conjure that wealth from thin air,” writes a former Kamala Harris campaign worker in the Metro. “He moved it, out of hundreds of thousands of small pockets and into his own.”
The most galling aspect, the Metro piece notes, is that almost none of this is illegal. Every other federal official must avoid decisions that fatten their own bank balance – but the president has always been exempt. Past occupants of the office squared that circle by locking their wealth in blind trusts. Trump has quietly rewritten the whole thing into a single word, said three times: “me, me, me.”
To Kill a Mockingbird plays at Wyndham’s Theatre until 12 September.