The Trump boys are Making Corruption Great Again
Hunter Biden could never.
PN is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
American politics has always had dynasties: The Adamses. The Kennedys. The Bushes. The Clintons. Each family used their association with the White House as a stepping stone to further office, with power begetting more power.
And lots of politicians have spun their clout into gold after leaving office. The Obamas are fascinating people, but they wouldn’t have a Netflix deal if he’d stayed a senator for Illinois.
But we’ve never had a president who used the White House as a real-time venture capital accelerator for his family. In Trump’s first term, his children at least pretended that they weren’t trying to profit off the presidency. This time around, they’re selling Trump-branded crypto tokens.
The Trump kids don’t want to ride their family name into political office. They want billions of dollars in cash — and they want it now.
Retail corruption
During the first Trump administration, the Trumps were in the hospitality business. The family slapped their names on golf courses and hotels, but said they weren’t entering into any new foreign deals for the sake of propriety. They still cashed in, of course, reaping a massive windfall from foreign governments, American politicians, and corporations looking to curry favor with the president.
In 2019, when Sprint needed FCC approval for its merger with rival T-Mobile, its managers parked themselves in Trump’s DC hotel and made sure to post photos of themselves in the lobby sporting branded pink T-shirts.
“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’ Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’” a foreign diplomat told the Washington Post.
But that corruption was essentially retail. Even “ghost bookings” at Trump properties could only put a few hundred thousand dollars at a time in the family’s pockets.
This time around the Trump kids have discovered crypto.
Printing money
In 2021, Trump told Fox Business’s Stuart Varney that “bitcoin seems like a scam.” Despite regular forays into the lucrative grift of NFTs, he grasped that digital monopoly money is inherently unstable and threatens the US dollar’s standing as the world’s reserve currency.
“I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar,” he said.
But three years later, he vowed to make America the crypto capital of the world, and one of his first actions back in the White House was to sign an executive order creating a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile.”
That was convenient for his sons, who had rebranded themselves as crypto bros.
Six weeks before the presidential election, Eric and Don Jr. announced their family’s new cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial. Their partners include Alex and Zach Witkoff, the sons of Trump’s Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff, one of WLF’s original backers.
As with the family’s media company TMTG, the Trump family is the big draw and the biggest beneficiary. The Trump family owns 60 percent of WLF and is entitled to 75 percent of the net proceeds from the sale of a crypto token called WLFI and a stablecoin (which is pegged to the dollar) called USD1.
One of the earliest backers was crypto billionaire Justin Sun, who purchased $30 million of WLFI in late 2024 and raised his stake to $75 million in early 2025, after which the SEC dropped a lawsuit filed in 2023 accusing him of selling unregistered securities. WLF later froze Sun’s access, amid generalized concerns about market manipulation, leaving him powerless to sell his tokens, even as their value dropped by almost 50 percent.
But Sun’s investment was peanuts compared to the massive windfall of cash the Trump family netted thanks to the combined efforts of Emirati Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, chair of his nation’s sovereign wealth fund, and Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, founder of Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange.
Chips and pardons
As detailed by the Wall Street Journal, CZ and Tahnoon each wanted something from the US government.
Tahnoon, who heads an artificial intelligence company called G42, hopes to make the UAE an AI hub. For this, he’ll need ultra-fast microchips, most of which are processed by the American company NVIDIA. But US intelligence and national security agencies worried about G42’s ties to China, fearing that the company might serve as a conduit for critical technology to leak to our biggest rival.
In 2023, CZ and Binance pled guilty to money laundering, after allowing every sanctioned entity from Hamas to North Korea to trade on the platform, along with a whole barnyard of “pig butchering” scammers and arms dealers. CZ served four months at a low security prison in California and stepped down from his leadership role at Binance. Upon his release, he relocated to the UAE.
After Trump got reelected, both CZ and Tahnoon started cozying up to the Trump family. Just four days before Trump was sworn in, Tahnoon secretly bought a 49 percent stake in WLF for $500 million via his company Aryam investments. The Journal reports that half of the money was paid upfront, resulting in an immediate payout of $157 million to the Trump family and $31 million to the Witkoff family. The second $250 million payment was due in July 2025.
Meanwhile, CZ hired a team of lobbyists and lawyers close to the Trumps to secure him the pardon that would allow him to go back to running his company publicly. At the same time, Binance was providing back end support to WLF to launch its crypto coins and increase their popularity.
In May 2025, CZ and Tahnoon appeared to have hit on a winning formula. The Emirati royal family bought a $2 billion stake in Binance, via a company called MGX, and they paid for it in USD1. Essentially, WLF sold a pile of poker chips for $1 each along with a promise to redeem them at some future date for a buck. WLF got $2 billion in cash, which it will hold and collect interest on — roughly $80 million annually — until such time as Binance decides to cash in its USD1 chips.
The deal increased USD1’s market cap by more than 1,500 percent. And in a miraculous coincidence, the Trump administration granted the UAE access to 500,000 of the coveted AI chips that month. In October, CZ got his pardon, too.
“New digital Bretton Woods system”
The Trump family’s crypto bonanza has made them much richer than their hotel business ever did. Forbes estimates that Don Jr.’s net worth increased sixfold in 2025. His brother Eric has done even better and is now 10 times richer than he was when their dad was sworn in last year. Even Barron Trump, a college sophomore, has seen his net worth rocket to $150 million thanks to his own ten percent stake in WLF.
Last week, WLF hosted a crypto summit at Mar-a-Lago, AKA the “Winter White House.” The confab was attended by members of Congress, Trump administration officials, and the heads of major finance and crypto companies.
CZ attended a private VIP dinner with the Trump boys on Tuesday.
Zach Witkoff compared it to “a new digital Bretton Woods system” — which is hilarious for its economic illiteracy. And also not.
Eric Trump said “it’s like Davos — with better hospitality, better food, better weather, better group of people, less wokeness.” He also characterized it as karmic “retribution” for the family’s fall from grace when the patriarch tried to overthrow democracy.
Leave no dollar behind
With all this money raining down on them, one might expect that the Trump kids not to bother with the more prosaic forms of corruption. Why grub around for a million here and there when you can sit by the pool and let the cash come to you?
But the Trump boys make the time!
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) catalogued the many boards who recently realized that they’d benefit from Eric and Don Jr.’s expertise. They include drone maker Unusual Machines, which paid Don Jr. $2.8 million and got its biggest US government contract ever. Or the rare-earth magnets company Vulcan Elements, which solicited an investment from Don Jr.’s 1789 Fund and then got a $620 million loan from the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital. Or Dominari Holdings, which appears to have created an advisory board simply to hire Trump Organization officials. Forbes reports that Don Jr and Eric were each awarded $4.67 million in stock for “serving” an 11-week stint, with Trump Org executive VPs Ronald Lieberman and Lawrence Glick and chief legal officer Alan Garten rounding out the roster (although with lower compensation).
Of course this invites the comparison to Hunter Biden, whose seat on the board of Ukrainian company Burisma fueled years of outrage. Critics argued that he was paid for perceived access to his father, who was vice president at the time — which of course he was.
But the “scandal” relied on a baroque and easily disproven theory to establish a quid pro quo. In 2016, Vice President Biden made a public speech demanding that Ukraine fire a notoriously corrupt prosecutor, whom the entire US national security community along with their European counterparts wanted out. This was spun up into a plot to protect Burisma, which wasn’t even under investigation at the time.
Here, the Trump family is taking in billions of dollars from foreign governments, corporations, and individuals who have a wish list of asks of the Trump administration. And the Trump kids will take payment in any currency! Heck, if you can’t be bothered to fake a board seat and you’re not interested in Trump-branded monopoly money, you can just pay $500,000 to join Don Jr.’s private membership club. It’s called Executive Branch.
That’s not the quiet nepotism of a board appointment at a regional energy company. That’s converting the presidency into an asset class. And it’s a whole lot more lucrative than signing up to run for office based on your family name.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
Thank you Liz. Uday (Don Jr) and Qusay (Eric) have no (none, zero, zilch) recognizable skills. They go through cash like it’s water. He needs to leave them a grift they can work. Crypto rug pulls are their bag…😡
Thank you, Liz, for pulling this together.
I cannot see any future of crypto than an inevitable crash. It appears to be a vehicle for organized crime, be it families such as the trumps or foreign governments. Naïve investors will be left with nothing.