NEPOCRACY
The Trump Family’s Ever-Expanding
Portfolio of Corruption
Presented for your approval: a tour
d’horizon of the First Family’s misdeeds. Even Barron’s getting into
the act!
Jose Perez/Getty
Images
I.F.
Stone famously joked that
he treasured reading The Washington Post because he never knew
where he’d find a Page One story. Nobody except me reads the news on paper
anymore (the Post’s average paid daily circulation has
fallen below 100,000), so the new metric is how much play a given story
receives on social media. To update Stone: I treasure all legacy media (not
just the Post) because I never know where I’ll find a story that
should have gone viral. The latest is “I’ll have Eric call.”
The
culture of corruption surrounding President Donald Trump and his family is so
all-encompassing that it’s starting to resemble what water looks like to a
fish. Presidential politics is by far the most lucrative business venture of
Trump’s career. A mere 19 months ago, Trump’s net worth was $2.6 billion and
the hundreds of millions he owed in civil penalties prompted me to speculate that the
forty-fifth (now forty-seventh) president was headed for bankruptcy. Today,
Trump is worth $7.1 billion and most
of the civil penalties have been tossed out.
Nobody gets that rich that fast in real estate.
World
Liberty Financial is increasing Trump’s net worth by billions of dollars while
Trump moves aggressively to ease restrictions on cryptocurrency. WLF is the biggest Trump corruption story,
both in dollars and in sleaze. When the company debuted last year, Trump held
the position “chief crypto advocate”;
his sons Don Jr. and Eric were “web3 ambassadors”; and his
youngest son, Barron, then a freshman at New York University, was “DeFi (decentralized finance)
visionary.”
The biggest scandal to
emanate from World Liberty Financial was the United Arab Emirates’ $2 billion
purchase of a World Liberty Financial stablecoin. Eric Trump was present when
this deal was announced at a Dubai conference; it was the largest investment
ever made in any crypto company. Two weeks later, Trump removed limits by the
Biden administration on UAE’s purchase of U.S.-produced AI computer chips,
which had been imposed out of concern that UAE was performing military
exercises with China. The UAE paid Trump $2 billion to turn a blind eye to
legitimate national security worries.
If
we lived in normal times, this scandal would already have a nickname and
the Justice Department would be investigating. But these are anything but
normal times, and even to suggest an investigation would get an attorney
working in the Justice Department’s public integrity division fired—that is, if
the Justice Department still had a public integrity division;
the 36-person division has been shrunk down to two. Americans are
consequently either unaware of or resigned to the most outrageous instance of
government bribery since Teapot Dome.
The
Financial Times reported Thursday that
the Trump family has reduced its equity stake in WLF from an initial 75 percent
to 38 percent. How much did its sale of 37 percent of World Liberty Financial
generate for Trump and his family? All of this would be profit because it
doesn’t appear Trump invested a dime to acquire his shares. What was the sale
price? We don’t know. Trump reported $57.3 million in income from WLF last
year, but it will be months before we learn his (much greater) income from WLF
in 2025. Also: Who bought that 37 percent from the Trump family, and did the
buyer pay market price? Isn’t that the sort of thing we should know? And yet we
don’t.
This
past week, Trump has basked in unaccustomed praise for helping to end a war he
could have ended nine months ago (and President Joe Biden before that) if
he’d withheld offensive weapons shipments
to Israel, as required by Section 6201 of the Foreign Assistance Act.
The peace conference in Sharm El Sheikh was a family affair; in addition to
Trump, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was present. Kushner famously
negotiated the Abraham Accords during
Trump’s first administration. After that, Kushner lined up Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
and UAE to invest $2.54 billion in his
private equity fund. All three countries were represented at Sharm El Sheikh.
Qatar previously helped bail out Kushner
and his father, Charles, on 666 Fifth Avenue, an office building for which the
family overpaid back in 2007.
Last
year, Kushner expressed interest in
developing Gaza’s waterfront property and said creating an independent
Palestinian state was “a super bad idea.” More recently, Kushner and Middle
East envoy Steve Witkoff (whose son Zach is chief executive of World Liberty
Financial) have discussed with developers turning Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
There’s
no specific English term to describe your son or daughter’s father-in-law, but
in Spanish, Charles Kushner is the president’s consuegro. He
is also America’s ambassador to France. Two decades ago,
Kushner père did 14 months’ hard time for
illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering; the latter
involved setting up his brother-in-law William Schulder, then ratting out the
family business to prosecutors, with a prostitute and then sending a tape of
their assignation to his sister. Trump pardoned Charles at
the end of his first presidential term.
We
haven’t seen any financial scandals emanate from the U.S. Embassy in Paris
(just a dustup over some
undiplomatic criticisms), but we have from another Trump consuegro,
Massad Boulos, who’s the State Department’s senior Africa adviser. Boulos is
father-in-law to Tiffany Trump, who, The New York Times reported last month,
cruised the French Riviera last July on the superyacht of one Ruya Bayegan at
the same time Boulos was negotiating with Libya to increase oil production—a
move that would enrich Bayegan’s energy company.
Granted,
that was small stuff. But in August, the former prime minister of Guinea told the Times that
Boulos told him he was “pursuing work” on the government dime by trying to “put
together some investors from the United States and some governments in Africa.”
After the Times queried Boulos, the former prime minster got
back in touch to abruptly deny even knowing Boulos. Nothing to see here, move
along.
Donald
Trump Jr. is co-founder of a new Georgetown club called
Executive Branch that sells access to top Trump officials by charging members
up to $500,000 to join. Zach Witkoff and his brother Alex are co-owners. It was
at Executive Branch’s inaugural banquet that Treasury Secretary Scott
Bessent told Bill Pulte, director
of the Federal Housing Finance Agency: “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking
face.” That may be the most ethical sentence ever uttered at Executive Branch.
Another
co-owner of Executive Branch is Omeed Malik, co-founder of the venture fund
1789 Capital, which hired Don Jr. as a partner in
November. That prompted a stampede of defense contractors and other new clients
into the fund, ballooning its assets from about $150 million to more than $1
billion. Malik is also a backer of GrabAGun, a company
where Don Jr. holds the title “consultant,” which aspires to become the Amazon of gun sales (a concept that calls
to mind Homer Simpson’s complaint, when a gun
seller tells him there’s a waiting period, “Five days? But I’m mad now.”) A company filing with the Securities and
Exchange Commission said the quiet part out loud: “Our business may be harmed”
if Don Jr. “ceases to be involved with GrabAGun or to support our business and
publicize our product offerings.” In July, the nonprofit Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported that the
SEC granted a preliminary approval for
GrabAGun’s public offering less than two months after SEC Chairman Paul Atkins
attended Executive Branch’s launch party.
But
I promised to tell you about “I’ll have Eric call.”
This
is something the president was caught on a hot mic saying to Indonesian
President Prabowo Subianto in Sharm El Sheikh, according to Rory
Jones of The Wall Street Journal. It’s a bit of a riddle
exactly what the two world leaders were talking about, but it couldn’t have
been government business because Eric Trump does not hold any position in
government.
Here’s
what we know. Subianto said something was “not safe, security-wise,” and then
asked Trump: “Can I meet Eric?” Trump replied: “I’ll have Eric call. Should I
do that? He’s such a good boy. I’ll have Eric call.”
I
know, this sounds like a scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 classic, The Conversation.
But Jones furnished a few hints as to what this was about. The Trump
Organization has two hotel-and-golf-course projects underway in Indonesia with
a company run by an Indonesian businessman named Hary Tanoesoedibjo. Subianto,
in his conversation with Trump, said he “told Hary” about the matter he wanted
to discuss with Eric. The conversation ended with Subianto saying, “We’ll look
for a better place.”
The
White House refused to comment about the exchange, presumably because it
contradicted Trump’s claim not to be
involved day-to-day in Trump Organization business. The Trump Organization,
meanwhile, told the Journal, “We are incredibly proud of our assets
in Indonesia and the many great things to come.”
And
Barron? Already balancing his sophomore-year NYU studies against his demanding
responsibilities as World Liberty Financial’s DeFi visionary, the youngest
Trump is now being touted by Trump’s
former social media manager Jake Advent to sit on TikTok’s board. Trump approved TikTok’s
transfer to American ownership last month, saying it will be “run by a new
board of directors.” Barron’s sole qualification for this assignment is
that he’s 19 years old. But within the Trump nepocracy, that’s more than
enough.
Timothy Noah is a New
Republic staff writer and author of The Great Divergence:
America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.
