Isaac Paul of Tangle has done us all a favor by creating a highly detailed compendium of the Trump family’s corruption during this second term. If you read it all in one place its truly, overwhelmingly shocking. It’s a great contribution to our understanding of what’s going on and well worth reading and bookmarking. I’m sure he’ll have to add to it on a nearly daily basis.
He runs down the unbelievable crypto schemes and looks closely at how the family is selling out foreign policy in return for billions. But they aren’t leave even a penny on the sidewalk. Here’s just a small excerpt of some of the other grifts they’ve got going:
A lot of what I’ve written so far has involved the Trump administration simultaneously dictating foreign policy while also taking funds, in some form, from foreign governments, leaders, or wealthy foreign actors. Yet plenty of this is happening domestically, too.
For instance: The Trump Organization launched Trump Mobile, a branded phone that costs $499 and an additional $47.45/month for the “47” plan. The Trump organization does not manufacture the phone or provide cell service (the phone itself has yet to be released, and the network will be operated by Liberty Mobile Wireless). Instead, Trump licenses his name to the deal and then promotes it using the presidential brand while he is in office — all at a cool profit.
Wherever you look, there’s another potential profit. Last spring, the Trump family opened an exclusive club in Washington called “Executive Branch” that charges $500,000 per membership. The parent company of Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, even launched as a publicly traded organization with his initials, DJT, as its ticker; Trump himself holds a huge stake in the company and the stock’s value has fluctuated based solely on Trump’s political fortunes. Shoot, the president’s son, Eric Trump, went on Fox News and graciously received congratulations about his own company receiving a $24 million Pentagon contract.
Just yesterday, while I was finishing up this story, The Financial Times reported that the Trump sons had taken a stake in the Kazakh mining company that just won a $1.6 billion contract from the Trump administration. Then, hours later, a Bloomberg story landed in my inbox about the U.S. Air Force agreeing to buy an undisclosed number of interceptor drones from a company backed by President Trump’s sons. During a talk I did with college students at St. Olaf College in Minnesota this morning, one of the students asked me about the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. investing in and advising the gambling and prediction market companies Kalshi and Polymarket. I didn’t even know about it. I’d just spent the past week writing and researching claims of corruption against the Trump family, and I’m still discovering glaring new examples every day.
There’s a lot more. As Trump himself would say, “nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”