How a Trump Fort Knox Audit Would Affect You

Back to where we started.

Again.

This is the déjà vu we’re working with today: “TIME TO AUDIT FORT KNOX.”

No need to tell you who posted that; you know. I’ll just say it appeared on Truth Social on May 31.

We’ve been here before. A few times over the last few months. And it’s always the same: stir up the tempest… then put the teapot away and, like an addled dog who sees a squirrel, bark about something else for a while.

But in today’s dispatch (and tomorrow’s) we’re going to play this game.

We’re going to assume Fort Knox is, indeed, finally audited more than 70 years after the last legit audit. Because see, there’s an issue here that approximately nobody appears to be thinking about: Why now, and what does an audit actually accomplish?

At this point in America’s economic history, the question isn’t, “Does the gold really exist?”

It’s “What is the gold really worth, and what does the Trump administration really want to do with the gold?”

That answer could reshape the dollar, the debt conversation, and your cost of living—in that order. And after that, it starts an arms race in gold that ends with China saying, “Hold my beer…” as it announces a number America does not want to hear.

Let’s start with arguably the most absurd number in modern American finance: $42.22.

That’s the value of each ounce of gold Uncle Sam theoretically holds in his treasure chest. Government established that number in 1973. Why that number? Long story dealing with dollar devaluations, collapsing agreements, IMF Special Drawing Rights, trying to modify the old Bretton Woods system that Nixon destroyed… things like that.

The upshot today is that America’s gold—8,133 tonnes, or about 261 million ounces—is worth about $11 billion… per official book-entry price.

Reality: At today’s market price, America’s gold is really worth just shy of $1.2 trillion—a 106x difference.

That unrecognized value sitting on the government’s balance sheet is the real reason “TIME TO AUDIT FORT KNOX” is once again a rallying cry.

See, the audit isn’t the destination. It’s the starting gun for something bigger… something that has multiple end goals (even if they are self-defeating in the end).

• Goal 1: Devalue the dollar.

I’ve long said that the US will find a way to use gold once again to help right America’s foundering ship.

FDR did so back in 1933 when he confiscated gold (the same gold that sits in Fort Knox today) and then revalued it 69% higher, pushing down the purchasing power of a dollar.

Nixon got in on the fun in the early 1970s when he took the dollar off the gold standard to save a foundering US economy, resulting in gold revaluing sharply higher as the dollar fell in value.

Now, the current administration is side-eyeing America’s gold with designs on using it to devalue the dollar. Various members of Trump’s collection of economic and monetary shills have all stated that America needs a weaker dollar in order to regain trade competitiveness.

The math is simple, though it bites Americans in their rump. A weaker dollar makes US goods more affordable for overseas buyers, which has the Trump clan (wrongly) assuming that a weaker dollar will see a renaissance in American manufacturing.

Hmmm… even if some manufacturing reshores at the margin, the timeline is years to decades, while the inflation from a weaker dollar hits consumers in months.

Moving on…

The weaker dollar, however, definitely hurts you. Americans imported more than $4.3 trillion worth of goods in 2025, a record high.

Let’s assume the dollar weakens by 10%, which basically reflects what happened in 2025 and is actually less than what the Trump administration wants… what does that actually mean?

Well, on $4.3 trillion worth of imports, that would imply the cost goes up by about $430 billion. There are roughly 130 million households in America, so… carry the 1, divide by the square root of… what you get is a cost to Americans of roughly $3,300 per year. That’s back of the envelope math, of course, and many factors might reduce that a bit, (though other factors would increase it).

• Goal 2: Manipulating the Midterms

If we were talking about another modern president or presidential contender this would not be a section of today’s dispatch.

But here we are nonetheless…

Donald Trump is a deeply unpopular president based on recent polling data—last week he hit a record low of -25 according to figures from YouGov, and 59% of Americans feel like the economy is “getting worse”.

The administration knows this; I have to assume Trump knows it too, despite his incessant bravado.

Going into Fort Knox, claiming the gold is all there and “proving” it with a staged photo would potentially allow Trump to announce that he is revaluing America’s gold because $42.22 per ounce is just dumb.

What number does he pick? $10k seems very Trumpian. I’m not guaranteeing that’s the number, and no one in Trump’s orbit has picked a number. I’m just saying that $10k seems on brand for Trump.

At that price, Trump turns $11 billion of gold into $2.6 trillion—more than 230x the current book value.

As part of the revaluation, Prez. T also announces with spectacular fanfare on TV that he is sending out a Trump Golden Dividend check—which, by the way, is commentary/expectation all over conservative social media now.

Depending on how he structures the payout—every taxpayer, every adult, every family member in a household—the cost of sending out Trump Gold Dividend checks would run between $320-ish billion and roughly $670 billion, well within the amount of money a revaluation would potentially unlock.

If this scenario is in the cards, then you can expect movement later this summer, with some kind of announcement in October, coincidentally just before the midterms, where Trump will surely be quick to remind everyone how he was able to unlock wealth no other president was remotely capable enough to unlock, and that he shared America’s wealth with Americans, etc., etc…

Of course, that’s just a temporary sugar high that leads to painful inflation in 2027(same thing happened in 2022 after all that COVID money flowed into the economy in 2020-21). That inflation would destroy the value of the dividend check, particularly if dollar devaluation is pushing import-inflation higher at the same time.

But Trump won’t care about tomorrow when it’s today that he absolutely has to win.

Beyond all of that, however, there’s a big—BIG!—downsides to this whole exercise, which leads me to believe Fort Knox will remain sealed, much like tomb explorers who are too scared to open certain mummy’s chambers because of the curse they fear they’ll release.

But more on that curse tomorrow…