President Obama made $20 million since he went to Washington

President Barack Obama
(Image credit: Getty Images)

When President Obama arrived in Washington as a freshman senator from Illinois in 2005, he left an annual income of less than $100,000 from his work in the state Senate and as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Over the course of his 12 years in the District — four in the Senate and eight in the White House — Obama earned about $20 million, mostly from book deals and his government salary. Here's the breakdown from Forbes:

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.