Trump's Sons Keep Investing in Companies Just Before Their Father's Administration Backs Them — More Than $735 Million in Awards So Far

Details

Over the first year of Donald Trump's second term, a pattern has emerged in which companies tied to the president's two eldest sons—Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump—win federal money soon after the brothers take a financial interest in them. The deals span rare earths, tungsten, drones, robotics and artificial intelligence, the same sectors the administration is actively championing. The sums are large and growing: at least four companies in Trump Jr's venture fund alone drew more than $735mn in federal awards in 2025, a single Pentagon loan ran to $620mn, and the latest deal carries up to $1.6bn in government financing. The fund itself ballooned from $200mn to $3.5bn in assets in about a year. In each case the family denies any influence over the awards, and in most no proof of a quid pro quo has surfaced—but in one instance investigative reporters traced a record Pentagon loan directly back to the White House.

A crucial caveat runs through all the figures: much of what the brothers have "made" is unrealized paper value—stakes that rose when taxpayer money flowed in, not cash banked—and the exact size of their holdings is frequently undisclosed, by design. What is documented is the timing, the federal dollars, and the valuations that followed.

By the Numbers

• At least $3.2bn in direct government business, plus $3.1bn in future contract options, generated by the more than a dozen brother-linked companies since the sons invested, per a July 2026 Washington Post analysis; some firms also won shortlist spots eligible to bid on up to nearly $200bn in future work. SpaceX and Anduril alone are 97% of the direct cash; the other 13 start-ups still drew nearly $1.8bn in long-term commitments and $103mn in direct cash.
• 10 of 15 brother-linked companies in the Post tally had government business before the sons invested, 8 held contracts under Biden, and only 5 got their first contracts after the sons invested under Trump—a caveat that cuts against the strongest reading of the pattern.
• More than $735mn in federal contracts and awards went to at least four companies in 1789 Capital's portfolio in 2025, according to Financial Times analysis cited by congressional investigators.
• $620mn Pentagon loan to Vulcan Elements—the largest ever from the Office of Strategic Capital—plus $50mn in Commerce Department equity, three months after Trump Jr's fund invested.
• Up to $1.6bn in Export-Import Bank and Development Finance Corporation financing committed to the Kazakh tungsten venture the brothers bought into.
• $1.1bn earmarked by the Pentagon's Drone Dominance program—created by the administration—for American-made drone systems by 2027, in a market the brothers have invested in and from which Chinese-made drones were banned in December 2024.
• $18.6bn in federal loans, loan guarantees and other financing behind 60 critical-minerals projects worldwide approved since Trump returned to office—the largest such wave in US history, per BMO Capital Markets.
• ~10x and ~6x: the growth in Eric Trump's and Donald Trump Jr's estimated net worth—from roughly $40–50mn each before the 2024 election to $400mn and $300mn by the end of 2025—per Forbes.
• ~10x: the jump in Vulcan's estimated valuation, from about $200mn to nearly $2bn, after the loan was announced.
• ~17x: the growth in 1789 Capital's assets under management, from $200mn to $3.5bn, in roughly a year; partners have said they aim for $10bn.
• "Hundreds of millions" in paper gains booked by American Ventures—the $1bn Dominari-run vehicle that counts the brothers as investors—across at least 10 thinly traded microcaps, per Bloomberg.
• $9.6mn: the stock the brothers were positioned to sell from Dominari advisory-board grants, for roughly ten weeks of service, per Forbes.

The newest example surfaced on April 30, 2026, when the Financial Times reported that the brothers had taken a stake in a Kazakh tungsten venture backed by up to $1.6bn in US government financing. It is, by the standards of what came before, one of the less damning cases—which is partly the point. The individual deals range from troubling coincidence to documented intervention, and it is the accumulation, not any single transaction, that has drawn the attention of ethics watchdogs and congressional investigators.

The Clearest Case: Vulcan Elements

The strongest documented evidence involves Vulcan Elements, a North Carolina rare-earth magnet startup founded in 2023 by a Harvard Business School student. As recently as March 2025, when its first plant opened, its total funding was under $10mn and it had fewer than 50 employees. In August 2025, 1789 Capital—the venture fund where Trump Jr is a named partner—took a stake of undisclosed size in Vulcan as part of a $65mn funding round, when the company was valued at roughly $200mn. Three months later, in November 2025, the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital awarded Vulcan a $620mn conditional loan—the largest in that office's history, worth more than twice the company's entire valuation—plus a $50mn equity stake from the Commerce Department. By January 2026, Bloomberg reported investors were eyeing a valuation near $2bn, roughly a tenfold increase.

The reporting on how the loan was approved is what makes Vulcan the strongest case. On May 28, 2026, ProPublica reported, based on interviews and Defense Department records, that of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was then considering, Vulcan's was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president: Peter Navarro, the White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing and a close personal friend of Trump Jr. After the request came in, Pentagon staff were told to move at an unusually rapid pace, working late nights to close in weeks rather than the customary months. "The call came from the White House: We have to get this done," one defense official told ProPublica.

The relationship between the two men is well established. Trump Jr visited Navarro in prison during his contempt-of-Congress sentence, was among the small group to whom Navarro dedicated his latest book, and—a week before the Vulcan deal was announced—hosted Navarro on his streaming show and urged his nearly 2 million subscribers to buy that book.

The procurement safeguards that normally apply did not. The independent technical review that typically precedes such an award had been waived by Trump's Executive Order 14241 on minerals. There was no competitive bidding. And no public record exists of any conflict-of-interest review, recusal or financial disclosure tied to Trump Jr's stake.

The denials are uniform. Trump Jr—who told the FT he was "very involved in the strategic decisions regarding where to invest our resources" at 1789—said through a spokesperson that he had "no knowledge about how this deal came together" and never discussed Vulcan with Navarro. The Pentagon stated that "no company receives preferential treatment" and that "outside affiliations, investors, or political connections play absolutely no role in the Department's funding decisions." Vulcan's founder said he had never met Trump Jr. ProPublica noted that the Vulcan loan "represents the first time the awarding of a contract from a federal agency has been directly linked to White House intervention."

What changed under the Trump administration was not just the speed but the process. The Office of Strategic Capital, created under Biden, had run an open application process in which firms were vetted methodically—slow and bureaucratic, but designed to ensure sound bets. The Trump Pentagon expanded the office's lending authority from about $1bn to $200bn, installed former Wall Street executives to run it, and shifted to picking companies through personal networks rather than applications. The contrast is visible in who gets turned away. Brodie Sutherland, CEO of the Nevada tungsten miner Patriot Critical Minerals, told ProPublica his firm hired a lobbyist to engineer an introduction to the office, adding that "a lot of what it is, is who you know." He said he hoped a company did not need to "be chums with Trump Jr." to win funding. Defense Department records showed his firm had already been considered for a loan—and rejected.

The Newest Case: $1.6 Billion for Kazakh Tungsten

The Kazakhstan deal is more attenuated, and the family's account is more plausible—but the shape is familiar, and a detailed New York Times investigation published June 28, 2026, by Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton, filled in how the money moved. It also established a second family at the center of the deal: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's sons, whose investment bank collected fees on the same series of transactions (see below).

The prize is one of the world's largest untapped tungsten reserves, near the village of Unrek in rural Kazakhstan—a metal the Pentagon needs for missile warheads, jet engines and armor-piercing rounds, and whose benchmark price outside China has surged sixfold in the past year as Beijing restricted exports. At the center is Pini Althaus, an Australia-born rabbi turned critical-minerals entrepreneur who is executive chairman of Kaz Resources and who also founded USA Rare Earth, a separate company that secured up to $1.6bn in Commerce Department financing in June 2026. Althaus estimates the tungsten project will cost about $650mn initially and $1.1bn over its life, and his firm calculates the deposit could ultimately be worth as much as $80bn.

The turning point came at New York's St. Regis Hotel in September 2025, where Lutnick met Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev during a procession of meetings with corporate executives. "You have great critical minerals that we can invest in together," Lutnick told him, according to a recording Tokayev posted online. Ahead of the meeting Lutnick had sent Tokayev a letter urging Kazakhstan to award the contract to Althaus's firm (then called Cove Kaz), saying the administration "fully supports" it, and the Export-Import Bank and the US International Development Finance Corporation—both boards on which Lutnick sits—had each issued letters of interest, up to $900mn and $700mn respectively, or as much as $1.6bn together. As Lutnick closed in on Tokayev's agreement, Trump joined by phone to seal it. "President Trump did the final negotiation with President Tokayev for this deal," Althaus said.

The brothers gained exposure through a chain of vehicles built for the occasion. Dominari partnered with Paul E. Mann, a British investor whose nuclear-fuel company, ASP Isotopes, used a subsidiary to buy a controlling stake in Skyline Builders Group Holding (Nasdaq: SKBL), a failing road-construction firm whose only real asset was its Nasdaq listing. Dominari and the Trump sons took a stake in Skyline through a special purpose vehicle, first reported by the Financial Times, and the brothers took a second, direct interest through a private placement in the ASP subsidiary in which, Mann confirmed, both Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. made capital contributions. In the Times' account, Dominari Securities—the brokerage housed in Trump Tower and partly owned by both brothers—acquired its 20 percent stake in a corporate entity connected to the Kazakhstan project within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations.

The timing tracks the federal interest closely. In late September 2025 the administration secured Tokayev's verbal agreement on the tungsten rights. In October, Cantor Fitzgerald—the bank run by Lutnick's sons—helped raise $210mn for ASP Isotopes. By October 31, Skyline, now controlled by ASP, took a 20% stake in Althaus's Kazakhstan entity for $20mn. Six days later, on November 6, the final deal with Kazakhstan was signed in Washington by Lutnick, at the C5+1 Leaders' Summit, giving Althaus's firm 70% of the venture and the Kazakh state mining company Tau-Ken Samruk 30%. In December, Mann proposed a "reverse merger" that would replace Skyline on the Nasdaq with a new entity, Kaz Resources (ticker KAZR); the deal, announced in April 2026, will take the mining operation public and let investors trade its stock before any tungsten is mined—and Skyline agreed to make about $50mn available for the project beyond the original $20mn. The merger still requires US regulatory approval to close.

Althaus said his discussions with the US government began under the Biden administration and benefited from no political favors, that he was approached by new investors only after the St. Regis meeting, and that he had never met Trump's sons and did not know they were involved until later. "I can see how the optics might be disturbing to some people," he told the Times. "But that's unfortunate because this company and this project goes way beyond any one president, let alone any family." Mann said there was "no conflict of interest here" and that he had not picked Cantor because Lutnick is commerce secretary. Eric Trump said he "has always been a passive investor with absolutely no management role," and both brothers said they were not involved in the deal's specifics.

The evidence in the Kazakhstan case is thinner than in Vulcan's. Reporters found no evidence the brothers knew of the pending federal commitment when they invested, or that they influenced it; Trump Jr's spokesperson said he "does not interface with the federal government on behalf of any company he invests in or advises." The financing remains non-binding letters of interest that had not been drawn down as of mid-2026, the merger is not expected to close until late 2026 or early 2027, and the size of the brothers' stake has not been disclosed. What is documented, as the Times put it, is the timing, the federal dollars, and the fees: filings show that both Dominari (partly owned by the Trumps) and Cantor Fitzgerald (run by the Lutnicks) were paid for helping raise capital across the transactions. Taken alone, it would be hard to call more than a coincidence. It does not stand alone.

Senator Jon Ossoff charged publicly that "Trump's sons got a stake in the $1.6 billion taxpayer-backed Kazakhstan tungsten deal days before it was awarded the contract." The Trump Organization went beyond denial, demanding that the Times retract the story and calling it "libelous."

The story's aftermath, in the two weeks after publication, followed a now-familiar script. Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia sharpened the timing into a direct public charge, saying that "Trump's sons got a stake in the $1.6 billion taxpayer-backed Kazakhstan tungsten deal days before it was awarded the contract." The Trump Organization, rather than disclosing the size of the brothers' stake, demanded that the Times retract the story, calling it "libelous"—consistent with the family's broader pattern of retraction demands and defamation suits against news organizations—though as of mid-July 2026 the Times had not retracted it and no suit had been reported. Commentary spread beyond the initial investigation: Truthout emphasized that both the commerce secretary who cut the deal and the president who blessed it by phone have sons positioned to profit from taxpayer-backed financing, while opinion pieces in Asia Times called the deal the "latest manifestation of Trump enrichment syndrome".

The Lutnick Parallel

The Kazakh deal enriched a second family as well. Cantor Fitzgerald—the investment bank Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick built and handed to his sons Brandon and Kyle when he entered government—collected fees on the same chain of transactions, and the Times counted at least 14 minerals companies tied to the Lutnick family, the Trump family, or both, drawing more than $8.9bn in federal financing or pending permits. Both the cabinet secretary who negotiated the deal and the president who blessed it, in other words, have sons positioned to profit from taxpayer-backed financing. That parallel track—Cantor's role, the Commerce Department's minerals awards, and the conflict-of-interest complaints they drew—is documented in the separate entry on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's conflicts.

Drones and the Defense Buildout

The brothers' defense investments sit in a market their father's administration actively reshaped. The Pentagon's Drone Dominance initiative, a Trump administration program, is earmarked to spend $1.1bn procuring American-made drone systems by 2027. The administration also moved to choke off the market's dominant supplier: a December Federal Communications Commission directive halted the importing of new Chinese drones—the outcome, Unusual Machines CEO Allan Evans noted, of a law passed at the end of the Biden administration—and a June 2025 executive order directed federal agencies to accelerate the testing and commercialization of U.S.-made drone technology. China currently dominates the global drone market, and the combined effect of the policies was to eliminate the leading foreign supplier and open the field to the domestic firms the brothers have backed.

Both brothers are investors in Powerus, a West Palm Beach drone manufacturer founded by U.S. Army Special Operations veterans that is competing for Pentagon contracts under that program, targeting production of more than 10,000 drones a month; on April 30, 2026 it announced its first Defense Department contract, to supply interceptor drones. American Ventures—Eric Trump's primary defense vehicle—is an investor, and Unusual Machines put $30mn into Powerus in 2026; Dominari is in the process of taking the company public through a reverse merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings, a Florida golf-course company. Donald Trump Jr became a strategic adviser to Unusual Machines in 2024, after Dominari had taken the drone-parts maker public in early 2024; when he announced the role within days of his father's election, the stock doubled. In late 2025 the company won what its CEO called the largest government order in company history—a $12.8mn U.S. Army order for drone components, with the Pentagon indicating plans to order 20,000 more in 2026. The company is separately under review for a Pentagon loan of its own from the Office of Strategic Capital, and when news of it broke the stock jumped more than 50%. Evans told the Post that Trump Jr's involvement boosted the company's visibility and stock price but said he had never asked for favors and had no direct government contracts: "How's it a problem if we're not asking for anything and he's not advocating for anything?" Through 1789 Capital, Trump Jr also invested in Anduril Industries, a maker of unmanned combat systems that holds Pentagon contracts and that the Post tallied at roughly $1bn in direct government cash since the investment.

Eric Trump's stake in XTEND, an Israeli AI-drone manufacturer, drew attention for its timing: according to an SEC filing and reporting by Snopes, he invested in XTEND's $1.5bn Nasdaq merger on February 17, 2026—eleven days before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran. The stake came through a $150mn American Ventures investment, and Dominari is taking the company public in summer 2026; the Pentagon this summer advanced XTEND in its drone-dominance competition, and the firm had announced a multimillion-dollar Defense Department contract for AI-enabled one-way attack drones three months before the brothers invested. Central Command confirmed such drones were used in combat for the first time during the strikes. No reporting establishes that Eric Trump knew of the coming operation. XTEND CEO Aviv Shapira said he never sought help from Eric Trump—whom he called a "passive investor" and skilled drone pilot he met only a few times—and that the idea the brothers could sway so stringent a process, "like a Swiss clock," has "nothing to do with reality."

The defense-analyst critique is specific. William Hartung told Responsible Statecraft that when politically connected investors back defense startups, their influence can distort contracting: "If they can recruit the president's son to join in boosting a particular firm, whether or not its product has been proven effective, they have a whole new level of influence, which can be wielded to serve their financial interests rather than the public interest." Powerus co-founder Brett Velicovich rejected the framing: "There's no conflict there... Our focus at the company has nothing to do with politics." Eric Trump said he is "incredibly proud to invest in companies I believe in. Drones are clearly the wave of the future."

The Fuller Portfolio: The Post's Defense-Tech Tally

A Washington Post analysis published July 13, 2026, drawing on federal contracting databases, company news releases and PitchBook data, widened the picture beyond the individual cases above. It counted more than a dozen defense-tech companies and other federal contractors tied to the brothers, most of the investments made since the 2024 election. Collectively, the Post found, the companies have generated at least $3.2bn in direct government business since the sons invested, plus $3.1bn in future contract options; some have won spots on shortlists of preapproved contractors eligible to bid on up to nearly $200bn in future work. The brothers invest primarily through two firms: 1789 Capital, the "patriotic capitalism" venture fund where Trump Jr is a partner—controlled by Vance strategist Chris Buskirk and Trump donor Omeed Malik, with Rebekah Mercer a co-founder—which backed 11 of the 15 companies in the tally; and American Ventures, a branch of the Trump Tower investment bank Dominari Holdings, Eric Trump's main dealmaker.

Two behemoths dominate the totals. SpaceX ($2.1bn in cash, $1.2bn in options) and Anduril together account for 97 percent of the direct government cash in the tally and 42 percent of the guaranteed future options; 1789 acquired sizable shares of SpaceX and Cerebras in late 2025, less than a year before both companies' public debuts. Excluding SpaceX and Anduril, the Post found 13 other start-ups tied to the brothers still captured nearly $1.8bn in long-term federal commitments and $103mn in direct cash under the Trump administration after the brothers invested.

The tally also folds in companies not covered elsewhere in this entry. Hadrian, which builds AI-enabled "smart factories" for aerospace and defense components, recently drew a $900mn commitment from the Navy ($39.2mn cash, $940.8mn in options). Data-and-AI firm Databricks ($14.5mn cash, $76.1mn ceiling), 3D-printed-rocket-fuel maker Firehawk Aerospace ($8.9mn), Perplexity AI ($1.6mn cash, $6.5mn ceiling, for use of its products across federal agencies), and Aeon Industrial, a missiles and autonomous-targeting-software firm ($250,800), round out the defense-adjacent names. PsiQuantum, a quantum-computing company that won Air Force Research Laboratory contracts under both Biden and Trump, drew a May 2026 Commerce Department letter of intent for $100mn in federal incentives, with the government taking a minority stake. Not all of the bets are weapons: Axiom Space is partnering with the fashion label Prada to design spacesuits.

The Post stressed a caveat that cuts against the sharpest reading: 10 of the 15 companies had government business before the sons invested, eight held contracts under the Biden administration, and only five got their first contracts after the sons invested and while their father was president. Company representatives said they won their business through rigorous Pentagon processes on the merits, without any intervention from the president's family, and several said their executives barely knew the brothers.

What the Post added to the influence question was Trump Jr's own account of his role in Pentagon decisions. At an investment conference, he said he had "helped craft some of [the department's] messaging," and on his podcast he described assisting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with personnel decisions, saying he sought candidates who wanted to spend more money on drones. His spokesman, Andy Surabian, countered that "Don does not interface with the Federal Government as part of his role with any company that he invests in or advises," and a person familiar with the fund said Trump Jr does not sit on 1789's investment committee. A 1789 spokesman, Chandler Costello, said there are "zero conflicts at 1789—where no one has ever served in government." Kathleen Clark, a government-ethics lawyer at Washington University, framed the core problem: "Even if not buying drones from China is in the public interest, it's completely reasonable to doubt that it's in the public interest when the Trump family is benefiting financially from it." She favors not a ban but recusal by the sons, and set the deals against what she called the broader dismantling of executive-branch oversight under Trump 2.0. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly dismissed the scrutiny as "the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed... for a decade," and a Pentagon spokesman said "no company receives preferential treatment."

The Rest of the Pattern

Watchdog groups and lawmakers have catalogued a string of additional cases. The two brothers operate through partly separate channels: Donald Trump Jr is a partner in the venture fund 1789 Capital, while Eric Trump's defense and crypto ventures run mostly through his own advisory roles and investments. They overlap in several shared vehicles, including American Ventures, Dominari Holdings and American Bitcoin.

• Trump Jr's fund and its portfolio. At least four companies in 1789 Capital's portfolio—the venture firm where Trump Jr is a partner—received federal contracts or awards from the administration in 2025, totaling more than $735mn, according to FT analysis cited by congressional Democrats. Senators Warren, Blumenthal and Kim separately flagged awards including $45mn to Cerebras Systems and a $10.8mn Pentagon contract to PsiQuantum, in which Commerce later took a $100mn equity stake. Over roughly the same year, 1789's assets under management grew from about $200mn to $3.5bn—a 17-fold increase, per the FT.

• Foundation Future Industries (Eric). In late April 2026, this robotics startup—where Eric Trump is an investor and chief strategy adviser—won a $24mn Pentagon deal for its "Phantom" battlefield robots. Eric promoted the contract on Fox Business. Representative Robert Garcia asked the Defense Department inspector general to investigate "the heightened risk of corruption and grift" in the timing, and Senator Elizabeth Warren said the deal "looks like corruption in plain sight." (The brothers' drone holdings—Powerus, Unusual Machines, Anduril and XTEND—are covered in the section above.)

• Dominari Holdings. In February 2025 the brothers joined the advisory board of this once-dormant Trump Tower shell company and took part in a private placement; the stock jumped 30% that day. Forbes reported they were awarded enough stock to soon sell a combined $9.6mn—for about ten weeks of advisory work. Dominari is also the parent of the brokerage behind the American Ventures vehicle used for the Kazakh tungsten investment, and is itself the subject of a House Select Committee review of its role helping Chinese firms list on US markets.

• American Ventures. Bloomberg reported that this $1bn Dominari-run vehicle, which counts both brothers as investors, has booked hundreds of millions of dollars in paper profits by taking stakes in at least 10 small, thinly traded public companies—amplified by warrants that deliver leveraged upside when a share price rises after a financing deal.

• American Bitcoin. Separate from the federal-contract cases, this crypto-mining company co-founded by Eric Trump saw its stock more than double on its September 2025 debut, briefly placing the brothers' stake north of $1.5bn—a windfall tied to an industry the administration is simultaneously deregulating.

• GrabAGun (regulatory rather than procurement). Not every case involves a federal contract or loan; in one, the benefit would come from a rule change. Donald Trump Jr is a board member, consultant and roughly 300,000-share holder in GrabAGun, an online firearms retailer nicknamed the "Amazon of guns" that went public in 2025 via a SPAC backed by 1789 Capital. On July 2, 2026, the Washington Post reported that the ATF had proposed a rule letting licensed dealers ship firearms directly to in-state buyers' homes after a background check and waiting period—a change that could funnel up to roughly 3.3 million buyers a year toward online sellers like GrabAGun. The rule was only a proposal, open for comment into August 2026 and not final; Don Jr's shares had fallen about 85% from their peak to roughly $700,000 by July; and ATF's chief counsel told Reuters he was unaware of Don Jr's connection to the company and that Don Jr had no influence on the rule, while a spokesman said Don Jr "does not interface with the Federal Government" for companies he invests in. (Murphy's floor speech linked GrabAGun to a separate January 2026 Justice Department opinion declaring a 1927 ban on mailing handguns unconstitutional; that opinion concerned private citizens mailing their own firearms and no reporting ties it to GrabAGun—the company's potential windfall runs through the later ATF proposal.) The proposal is not an isolated gesture: a July 5, 2026 New York Times survey of gun policy reported that the ATF is scrapping more than three dozen firearms regulations—abandoning the Biden-era crackdown on unlicensed sales, reinstating the "gun show loophole," loosening oversight of private transactions—while the Postal Service has proposed allowing handguns to be shipped in the mail, upending a nearly century-old law. No reporting ties Don Jr to any of those rule changes, but the direction of the deregulation is uniformly favorable to the online firearms retail business in which the president's son holds a board seat, a consulting role and stock.

The mechanics are consistent across the equity deals: the brothers buy into small, thinly traded public companies in sectors the administration favors, take a board or advisory seat, and the share price tends to climb on the attention the Trump name draws. A veteran Wall Street investor who reviewed 1789's deals told Business Insider, on condition of anonymity, that the structure lets the president's son profit from the administration's actions even if no contractor is given preferential treatment: "It's a way for Mar-A-Lago to get paid."

The Strategic Case—and Why It Complicates the Picture

The investments sit on top of real national-security problems. China controls more than 80% of the global tungsten market, both mining and processing. In February 2025 it imposed export controls on tungsten bound for the United States, choking off supply of a metal essential to armor-piercing munitions, missile components and jet engines. Beginning January 1, 2027, DOD sourcing rules will bar Chinese-mined tungsten from defense contracting—effectively guaranteeing demand for a non-Chinese source like the Kazakh deposits, which hold roughly 58% of China's tungsten reserves as calculated by the US Geological Survey. China holds a similar grip on rare earths, the focus of the Vulcan deal: it mines about 70% and refines close to 90% of the global supply, and in 2025 it restricted exports of several rare-earth elements used in defense and electronics. The C5+1 Critical Minerals Dialogue that frames the Kazakhstan partnership was launched in 2024 under the Biden administration, and Cove's Althaus, who founded USA Rare Earth, has advised members of Congress and federal agencies under both administrations.

In other words, several of these companies might plausibly have attracted US backing on the merits regardless of who invested. That is precisely what makes the pattern hard to adjudicate from the outside: when the president's family holds stakes in ventures the administration champions with public money, the strategic merits and the appearance of self-dealing become impossible to disentangle. A defensible policy goal can coexist with—and provide cover for—a windfall to the president's children.

Scrutiny, and Its Limits

Ethics specialists have been consistent. Virginia Canter of Democracy Defenders Action said of the family's ventures, "There's no question there's a conflict of interest here." Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which tracked the brothers joining ten company boards since the 2024 election, said it found no clear quid pro quo but that "even the appearance of preferential treatment undermines public confidence in government decision-making."

Historians place the scale in unusual terms. Barbara A. Perry, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, told The New York Times that while past presidents "have had corrupt, even criminal, family members"—she cited Hunter Biden among others—"none of them succeeded to the extent of the Trump family in the level of graft achieved." The federal contracts and loans documented here are only one strand; the brothers' crypto venture World Liberty Financial, their Gulf-state business and the president's own trading have drawn separate scrutiny. The public has largely formed a view: a YouGov poll in March 2026 found 54% of Americans said the word "corrupt" applied "a lot" to the president, up from 46% a year earlier.

Congressional oversight has largely stalled along party lines. In March 2026, Representatives Maxine Dexter and Jared Huffman forced a vote to subpoena Trump Jr over the Vulcan loan; Republicans blocked it. Dexter, the top Democrat on the House panel that investigates wrongdoing in the mining industry, called the minerals deals a warning sign: "Congress needs to make sure that taxpayer dollars are being used in the public's interest and not to benefit family members or those closely tied with the Trump administration," she told the Times. Huffman pointed to the contrast with the previous Congress's two-year investigation of Hunter Biden, which Republican chairmen had justified on the principle that a president's son profiting from his father's office is, in Oversight Chairman James Comer's words, "abuse of the highest order."

The Hunter Biden Inversion

The principle Comer invoked—that a president's son cashing in on his father's office is corrupt—has a specific, awkward history. In 2019, Donald Trump publicly called on China to investigate Joe Biden over his son Hunter, whose chief offense in Trump's telling was that he had flown to Beijing on Air Force Two with his father in 2013, then sat on the board of a fund that sought to raise Chinese capital. "He's there for one quick meeting and he flies in on Air Force Two, I think that's a horrible thing," Trump said. No evidence of wrongdoing ever emerged, and Hunter Biden was an unpaid board member who took a stake only in 2017, after his father left office—but Trump treated the appearance of trading on proximity to power as self-evidently corrupt.

In May 2026, the shape repeated with the sons reversed. Eric Trump accompanied his father to Beijing on Air Force One for the first U.S. presidential state visit to China in nearly a decade. He holds an "observer" seat on the board of Alt5 Sigma, a fintech firm that days earlier had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Hangzhou chipmaker Nano Labs—a company that Republican lawmakers themselves had urged the SEC to scrutinize as a "high-risk" entity they alleged created a "direct channel" between Chinese military interests and Western capital markets. A spokesperson said Eric attended in a "personal capacity" and would not join business meetings, and the White House said the president acts solely in the public's interest. The detail that sharpened the irony for critics: the Alt5 Sigma share offering Eric had celebrated at the Nasdaq months earlier was worth $1.5bn—the very figure Trump had once cited to condemn Hunter Biden's China fund.

The disparity extends to press coverage. During the Biden administration, Fox News mentioned Hunter Biden more than 13,000 times in a 16-month period, according to the media watchdog group Media Matters. Asked in May 2025 whether the media had a duty to cover the Trump sons' deals as hard as Hunter Biden's, Fox anchor Bret Baier said "100%," adding, "If you're going to play it one way, you've got to play it another way." Media Matters found that in the 81 episodes of Baier's Special Report since the inauguration, the program aired a single segment touching on the family's financial conflicts—a roughly two-minute report—compared with the 32 segments on Hunter Biden it ran in the two and a half weeks after the New York Post's 2020 laptop story.

The administration rejects the premise. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt has called reports of conflicts "irresponsible," saying, "Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest." On Vulcan, the White House said its team was working "to secure America's critical mineral supply chain at Trump Speed."

The Bottom Line

No single deal here has been proven to involve an illegal quid pro quo, the family consistently denies influencing any award, and the policies driving the money have a real strategic logic that predates this administration. On its own, the Kazakh tungsten investment would barely register. But the cases do not arrive on their own. The Vulcan loan—traced by ProPublica to a White House adviser and friend of Trump Jr, approved in weeks, with independent review waived and no conflict process on record—shows the pattern at its most concrete, and it sits within a portfolio that drew more than $735mn in federal awards and grew seventeenfold in a year. Whether or not any one transaction crossed a legal line, the cumulative effect is the steady erosion of the norms—competitive procurement, independent review, recusal, disclosure—that are meant to keep public spending insulated from a sitting president's family finances. Those guardrails are slow to build and quick to lose.