Trump Dodges on 60 Minutes Sunday When Ross Douthat Presses Him on a Forbes Report That His Net Worth Rose $3 Billion Since He Returned to Office, Replying "Well, So Did Everyone" and "You Should've Had Stock"
Monday, November 9, 2026
Ross Douthat put the Forbes report to President Trump directly on 60 Minutes: the magazine reports that Trump's net worth has risen $3 billion since he returned to office. Trump did not dispute the figure — he spread it around. "Well, so did everyone," he said. Douthat answered that his own had not risen $3 billion, "for the record." Trump: "Well, you should've had stock — you should've had stock." That is the exchange as the interview carried it: the $3 billion is Forbes' report, put to the president by his interviewer, and the president's answer is that the rise was not his alone.
His fuller answer is that the money is simply not where his attention is. Trump said he devotes "almost no time" to his net worth: "And I guess it's gone up. I don't even know." A son watches the money, he said; he takes no presidential salary; and most of the money sits with Wall Street firms in index funds — "I have no idea what the hell they're buying." His argument, in his own terms, runs through that answer: his wealth sits in the same market everyone else's savings sit in, and if the market has risen, his holdings rose with it — the same rise available to anyone holding stock. That is the context of "so did everyone": not a denial of the Forbes figure, but a claim about what produced it.
Douthat pressed a sharper version of the charge — the family's World Liberty Financial venture — and pinned the implication on the question itself: that people who want things from the government might buy into it. Trump's answer: "Because I know nothing about it." He said he was not divested when he came into office, that the questioner chooses the framing, and returned to his standing position that his business affairs are handled by his family while he runs the country. The charge is Douthat's, stated as his; the denial is Trump's, in full: he says he knows nothing about the venture's dealings.
What this means: for ordinary households, the same market Trump pointed to is where working families' retirement savings sit — index funds and 401(k)s rose with the market he cites, and his stated case is "the highest stock market in history" lifting savers broadly, not one man's fortune. Douthat's counter in the same interview was the cost of living voters feel at the register, and Trump's own answer there was that his side's problem was "bad messaging," not the economy itself. Both halves of that argument are in this one interview, in their own words: a rising market his supporters can check in their own accounts, and prices his critics say families still feel. The Forbes number is the headline; the argument underneath it is about whose experience of this economy counts.
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