The Last Heist: Latest Disclosure: $8.9 Billion in Taxpayer Money to Trump Sons
Kleptocracy, and the vanishing road back: The Trump family is funding its private businesses with your tax dollars, and they have no intention of stopping.
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Max Beckmann, The Night (1918-1919). Beckmann's shattered room mirrors the fear, coercion, and loss that follow when kleptocracy replaces public service.
The tungsten deal that paid the Trump family is one piece of a wider pattern, public money funneled at a scale rarely reversed.
Critical-mineral and crypto money now flows to the president’s sons. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, through their firm Dominari Securities, took a 20 percent stake in the Kazakh tungsten venture six days before Commerce Secretary Lutnick signed the agreement. Few countries that reach this stage of self-dealing ever return.
The New York Times exposed the arrangement on June 28, 2026. The undisclosed deal routed public funds to two political families. Lutnick and President Trump negotiated the mineral rights for a small American firm. The Export-Import Bank and Development Finance Corporation pledged up to $1.6 billion in financing. Reporters found no evidence that the brothers knew of the pending commitment.
Republicans wrote the influence-peddling standard themselves, impeaching a president’s son to brand the opposition corrupt. Their case against the Biden family reached 1 percent of the Trump family’s yearly gains.
The pattern reached well beyond this one transaction. The Times counted at least fourteen companies tied to the Trump and Lutnick families in federal mineral projects. Together they drew more than $8.9 billion in taxpayer money.
Donald Trump Jr. built his position with startling speed. Between 2020 and the 2024 election, he sat on one corporate board. Within days of his father’s victory, he became a partner at 1789 Capital. The firm swelled from $200 million to roughly $3.5 billion in a year. Those portfolio companies won more than $735 million in federal contracts.
The money moved as federal loans and equity stakes. In November 2025, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital lent Vulcan Elements $620 million on Navarro’s push from the White House. The loan landed three months after 1789 Capital backed the two-year-old, fifty-person startup, and the valuation jumped tenfold.
Commerce then took a 10 percent, $1.6 billion stake in USA Rare Earth, which pays Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm Lutnick’s sons run, to raise capital. The administration waived the competitive bidding, feasibility studies, and technical reviews that guard public funds.
The crypto ventures followed the same template. Eric Trump announced World Liberty Financial in August 2024, before the election. Two outside developers built the platform, since neither brother knew finance or blockchain and their prior firm had lost $2.1 million to a hack.
The family’s holding company, DT Marks DEFI LLC, took 60 percent of the venture and 75 percent of token-sale revenue. That January, Sheikh Tahnoon wired the Trumps $187 million for a 49 percent stake, lifting the position to roughly $5 billion at launch. The brothers also founded American Bitcoin and joined the boards of BlinkRx and Polymarket.
A rare 35% annual discount is almost over.
The law applies to the whole arrangement. Yet the sons profit as private citizens, beyond federal ethics rules. In theory, Section 201 brings fifteen years, a triple-value fine, and lifetime disqualification. Conviction requires proof of a corrupt exchange for one official act, which prosecutors rarely secure. American law lacks any offense called influence peddling, so bribery remains the only charge that fits.
Lutnick faces sharper exposure as a sitting official. Section 208 carries up to five years for a willful violation. The statute bars an officer from acting on any matter touching his own finances. That rule covers a spouse and a minor child, but not an adult son. The Supreme Court tightened the official-act definition in McDonnell v. United States in 2016. Prosecutors almost never prove a bargained exchange now, which is why no charge has followed.
Since the 1970s, every president until Trump used a blind trust under an independent trustee. Carter folded even his peanut farm into one. The closest parallel, Teapot Dome in the 1920s, sent an interior secretary to prison. His crime was leasing federal oil reserves without open bidding. Yet Brennan Center scholars call the present scale unprecedented in modern history.
The taxpayer carries the risk, since these loans and stakes commit public money to unproven mines. Failed projects or falling prices land on the public, while the families keep the gains. Those awards now follow proximity to the president rather than merit. A program built to break China’s mineral dominance rewards the best-connected firms, and every taxpayer pays.
Political scientists call this a kleptocracy, rule by theft. Such regimes rarely fall to revolution and more often endure, a longevity one Acemoglu model names the central puzzle of corrupt rule. Mobutu held Zaire thirty-two years on patronage and repression, and the Duvaliers ran Haiti nearly as long. A reckoning seldom comes, and the institutions built to end the theft weaken instead.
Republicans once ran a three-committee impeachment inquiry on this exact theory, charging the Biden family with international influence peddling and proving no official act. Chairman Comer promised to examine Trump’s children, and his party drafted matching legislation that stalled and died. They impeached a president’s son for a fraction of what they now fund.
State attorneys general supply the clearest check. On June 24 and 25, 2026, two federal judges struck down both of Trump's election orders, ruling that the Constitution gives elections to the states and Congress alone. Democratic attorneys general from more than twenty states won those suits, and the Justice Department has now lost all thirty-plus voter-roll cases the courts have decided.
Trump lost in 2020 and rejected the outcome, and that refusal led to the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. His allies now signal the same intent. They issue open calls to cancel the midterms and to reject any defeat.
Every kleptocracy follows the same trajectory: first looting, then pressure on courts and the press, and finally a stage where lawful remedies can no longer recover what thieves took. The United States has not reached that final stage, but the country now approaches the edge.
Three political outcomes follow. Voters can remove the regime at the ballot, but only a wide margin forecloses the denial that followed 2020. A narrow win invites the same refusal. Otherwise the regime endures, outlasts its challengers, and deepens repression, the common result. Rupture remains the rarest, arriving only after a divided public unites and the leader’s own allies abandon him. Voters cast that ballot on November 3rd.
Your move:
One vote is a start, not a finish. Confirm three others are registered with a plan to vote. Margins decide whether a result can be denied.
The work continues.
Wendy
Every investigation published here exists because a small number of extraordinary readers refused to assume someone else would step up. If you can become a paid reader, you have my gratitude. Please use this link for the vanishing 35% off the annual membership, about 16¢ a day.
Sources
The New York Times, Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton, the Kazakhstan tungsten deal, Dominari Securities’ 20 percent stake, the November 6 signing, the fourteen family-tied companies, the $8.9 billion total, and the White House statement — https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/28/world/europe/trump-lutnick-sons-kazakhstan.html
CBS News, Donald Trump Jr. joining 1789 Capital days after the election, American Bitcoin, and the board-membership surge — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-jr-washington-power-broker/
Capitol Trades, 1789 Capital’s growth to roughly $3.5 billion and more than $735 million in federal contracts — https://www.capitoltrades.com/articles/3-5b-in-assets-735m-in-contracts-don-jr-s-past-tax-audit-barred-2026-05-21
ProPublica, the $620 million Vulcan Elements loan, the White House intervention, and the startup’s scale — https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-vulcan-deal-white-house
CNBC, the Commerce Department’s 10 percent, $1.6 billion stake in USA Rare Earth and the Lutnick sons running Cantor Fitzgerald — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/26/warren-lutnick-usa-rare-earth-usar-critical-minerals.html
Center for American Progress, World Liberty Financial, the UAE $500 million investment, and the $187 million wire — https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-trumps-500-million-uae-crypto-deal-trades-u-s-national-security-for-family-profit/
NPR, the family’s roughly $5 billion paper gain when World Liberty’s token began trading — https://www.npr.org/2025/09/03/nx-s1-5527047/trump-crypto-family-world-liberty-financial
Decrypt and Arkham Intelligence, World Liberty Financial’s August 2024 launch, the outside developers, the DT Marks DEFI LLC stake, and the prior firm’s breach — https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-world-liberty-financial-the-trump-family-defi-project-explained and https://info.arkm.com/research/world-liberty-financial-wlfi-trump-tokenomics-stablecoin-products
Brennan Center for Justice, the blind-trust norm since the 1970s, the Teapot Dome parallel, and the scale comparison — https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-weak-federal-ethics-laws-enable-presidential-profiteering and https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/money-politics-roundup-february-2026
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, “Kleptocracy and Divide-and-Rule,” on the longevity of kleptocratic regimes — https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Kleptocracy%20and%20Divide%20and%20Rule,%20A%20Model%20of%20Person.pdf
Federal bribery and conflict-of-interest statutes and penalties: 18 U.S.C. § 201 and §§ 208, 216 (Cornell Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/201 and https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/208), with the quid pro quo requirement from the U.S. Department of Justice, Justice Manual — https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-2044-particular-elements
Time, that Republicans produced no evidence linking Biden to an official act, with Comer’s deflection on Trump’s children — https://time.com/6278705/james-comer-hunter-biden-investigation/
PBS NewsHour, Judge Denise Casper’s June 24, 2026 ruling permanently blocking the first election executive order — https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/federal-judge-bars-trump-from-implementing-proof-of-citizenship-requirement-to-vote
PBS NewsHour, Judge Indira Talwani’s June 25, 2026 ruling halting the second election order on the federal voter list and mail ballots — https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/federal-judge-halts-trumps-election-executive-order-seeking-to-create-a-federal-voter-list
Democracy Docket, the Justice Department’s record on voter-roll suits and the Sixth Circuit’s June 24, 2026 Michigan affirmance — https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/judge-tosses-justice-department-maryland-voter-roll-lawsuit-0-9/
Brookings, the 2026 midterm forecast, Trump’s approval near 40 percent, and projected Democratic House gains — https://www.brookings.edu/articles/gop-midterm-prospects-darken-as-trump-approval-falls/
NPR and The Atlantic’s David Graham, the documented efforts to contest the 2026 midterms and the question of whether results will be honored — https://www.npr.org/2025/11/06/nx-s1-5600669/a-reporter-outlines-trumps-options-to-subvert-the-2026-midterm-elections
I think the Acemoglu citation is the most important thing in this piece and the one most likely to be skipped - my opinion here.
The central puzzle of corrupt rule is not how kleptocracies fall. It is how they persist. Mobutu, the Duvaliers, Marcos did not endure because they were competent or popular. They endured because the institutions built to end the theft were captured before the theft reached its full scale. The sequence matters. You do not build the kleptocracy and then capture the institutions. You capture the institutions first, then the kleptocracy runs itself.
This sequence is fluently articulated here in this piece. The waived competitive bidding, the eliminated feasibility studies, the gutted inspector general offices, the Supreme Court that just told the president he can fire any regulator he wants — all of that happened before the $8.9 billion. The architecture of impunity was constructed first. The transactions followed because they could.
The six-day gap between the sons' stake and Lutnick's signature is not the most damning thing in this piece. The most damning thing is that it required no concealment; none. The timeline is public. The filings are available. The conflict is visible to anyone who looks. The confidence that visibility carries no consequence is itself the evidence that the capture is already complete.
The road back indeed narrows with each transaction. This is the record of the narrowing.
Corporate democrats will never hold this regime accountable, any more than republicans will. They will waffle, play to the middle and bothsides the corruption until Trump dies of old age and his kids amass more money than god. Under such a system, the billionaires and Musk continue to remain above the law. We must vote for democrats, but we also need to replace every grifting dem with people who will fight for We the People.
If we are to recover from this episode of shameful indecency everyone who robbed our coffers and participated in ANY crimes committed in our name needs to be held accountable! At the same time, a massive restructuring/rebuilding/fortifying/restructuring of our government needs to take place. Otherwise, we just kick the can down the road.