“FOUNDATION FUTURE INDUSTRIES LANDS $24 MILLION PENTAGON CONTRACT” screamed the Fox Business Network chyron Thursday morning. Host Maria Bartiromo teed up her segment, explaining that the defense tech startup was developing “autonomous humanoid robots” to help troops “breach enemy sites more safely.”
Bartiromo’s guest? Eric Trump, Foundation Future Industries’ chief strategy adviser who also happens to be the son of the man in charge of the government that doled out the eight-figure contract. The host congratulated Trump and Foundation Future’s founder Sankaet Pathat — also a guest — on landing such a lucrative payday. No mention was made of the clear ethics quandary involved in the president’s administration funneling millions in taxpayer funds toward his family through federal contracts. Then again, the amount given to Foundation Future is barely a drop in the swimming pool of wealth the Trump family has accumulated by leveraging their patriarch’s position over the last 18 months. They clearly feel no need to hide.
Trump — also referred to during the broadcast as the executive vice president of the Trump Organization — told Bartiromo that he could see “unlimited uses” for the robots, and mentioned some of his family’s other ventures: hospitality, golf, and crypto, to name a few.
The president has reportedly upped his net worth by billions since returning to the White House, but nearly every member of his immediate family — and even some of his extended family — is also raking in cash. They seem to be completely unbothered if not oblivious to the potential ethical or legal restrictions they’re trampling as they do it. Here’s a brief overview:
Donald Trump Jr.
The eldest child of the president is, in conjunction with his younger brother Eric, overseeing the Trump Organization while his father is in office. Jimmy Carter famously placed his peanut farm in an independent trust, but Trump continues to own the Trump Organization and his sons are running it as their father conducts government business with nations where the business operates, or is looking to operate.
Trump Jr. plays a leading role in his father’s empire, including by serving as director of the Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (TMTG), the parent company of Truth Social. He is also a founding partner of World Liberty Financial (WLF), a financial and crypto company that is majority-owned by the Trump family. His co-founders include his brother Eric, alongside Alex and Zach Witkoff, the sons of real estate developer Steve Witkoff, whom Trump tapped to serve as his special envoy to the Middle East, and his de-facto conflict envoy.
The fund quickly established itself as a vehicle for shady foreign dealings, inking out a deal with Emirati royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who has sought to craft a deal with the U.S. for advanced AI chips and courted Trump’s support in shielding the U.A.E from sanctions by the International Court of Justice. Tahnoon has been wined and dined by the White House, and his deal with the Trump sons included a $500 million dollar investment as well as a $2 billion partnership deal between WLF and the international cryptocurrency exchange Binance, which is banned in the United States after being accused of violating anti money-laundering laws. TRON blockchain protocol creator Justin Sun (who coincidentally had an SEC investigation against him dropped) and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (who coincidentally received a pardon from the president) also became involved in WLF.
WLF isn’t the Trump kids’ only crypto venture. In 2025, Trump Jr. and Eric Trump founded American Bitcoin, which Forbes estimates is increasing Jr.’s net worth by as much as $80 million. The Trump administration has responded extremely favorably to the requests and lobbying of major cryptocurrency firms, with President Trump regularly declaring his intent to make the United States the “crypto capital of the world.” The president has adopted an extremely light regulatory strategy for the controversial financial systems, launched his own meme coin, and killed attempts to conduct oversight by agencies like the United States Securities and Exchange Commission — all while his family builds a crypto empire.
As the director of TMTG, he is overseeing a partnership with Crypto.com to bring an in-platform prediction market to Truth Social. He is meanwhile on the advisory board of Polymarket, the largest global prediction market. Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration has been hesitant to regulate prediction markets, and has undermined efforts by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to crack down on rampant insider trading on the platform.
Trump Jr., also serves as a board member to PSQ Holdings, an anti-woke financial tech company, and is an adviser to the publicly traded investment and acquisition firm New America Acquisition I Corp., which according to its website “seeks to merge with growth-stage U.S. businesses leading in areas such as automation, data infrastructure, and energy modernization.”
Forbes estimates that Donald Trump Jr.’s net worth has jumped from roughly $30 million to $300 million.
Eric Trump
He may be the second son, but he’s outpacing all of his siblings in terms of accumulated wealth, with Forbes estimating that his net worth increased tenfold to $400 million since his father’s reelection.
Eric Trump is partner to his brother on many a business venture, including his position as executive vice president of the Trump Organization, and a founder at both World Liberty Financial, and American Bitcoin.
His independent business ventures are some of the most blatant instances of grift of the second Trump term so far. Earlier this month he announced that Foundation Future Industries — a defense robotics company where he serves as a board member and advisor — had received a $24 million contract from the Department of Defense, raising questions about a direct conflict of interest between the federal government and the president’s family.
Eric Trump is largely responsible for the rapid growth of the Trump family’s hotel business — particularly in the Middle East and countries that have courted the president’s favor. The Trump Organization announced the construction of a luxury tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, less than a month after Trump won the 2024 election, a luxury golf course and residential complex is in development in Muscat, Oman. The “coming soon” webpage for the Trump Organization boasts commercial, residential, hotel and gold projects in India, the United Arab Emirates, Romania, Indonesia, the Maldives, and Georgia.
President Trump has had a close relationship with Saudi Arabia since his first term, dismissing the murder of Washington Post journalist and American resident Jamal Khashoggi on the alleged orders of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The president views the kingdom as one of his most prominent geopolitical supporters, and hosted bin Salman in the Oval Office in November, touting the crown prince and the hundreds of billions of dollars Saudi Arabia is investing in the United States as the Trump family launches business ventures there..
Eric Trump is expected to accompany his father on a diplomatic trip to China next month, and concerns are already being raised that the first son will soon be announcing another lucrative deal made on the back of the presidency.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump
Ivanka Trump may have tried to make herself invisible after her father’s first term, but her husband is everywhere.
Jared Kushner, the son of disgraced New York real estate mogul Charles Kushner, and son-in-law to the president, is doing a lot of peace negotiations in the Middle East — and collecting a lot of checks from the involved parties.
Kushner’s Miami-based investment firm Affinity Partners has been a dumping ground for massive investments from global figures, even as Kushner serves as an unofficial leader for diplomatic negotiations concerning the Iran war. In 2024, his firm received a $2 billion investment from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, and manages over $4.8 billion in foreign funds.
He has reportedly collected over $100 million in management fees from the Saudis, who reportedly supported Trump’s entry into the war. Even as he spearheads Trump’s Gaza “redevelopment plan” and acts as one of the primary negotiators in Pakistani mediated talks attempting to bring an end to the war initiated by his father-in-law, Affinity Partners is courting over $5 billion additional in largely Middle Eastern investments.
The primary party in the deal is Saudi Arabia. In a letter to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles last month, House Oversight and Senate Finance Committee Ranking Members Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) raised concerns that Kushner could be “subject to conflicts of interest which could threaten the security of the American people.”
Ivanka Trump is a partner in her husband’s financial firm, Affinity Partners, but seems intent on staying out of her father’s spotlight.
Tiffany Trump and Michael Boulos
Tiffany Trump has long remained on the margins of her family’s business empire, but that doesn’t mean she and her husband Michael Boulos aren’t cashing in on Trump 2.0. Boulos, the son of Lebanese transportation millionaire and diplomat Massad Boulos, married Tiffany Trump in 2022 — and almost immediately became a lot more successful. Boulous took a cut from the sale of a superyacht to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, while working for his cousin, a yacht broker. Reporting later revealed that the yacht had not been completed amid claims that the brokerage firm had illicitly up-charged Kushner by several million dollars, and attempted to conceal the true value of the craft.
Boulous is currently under investigation by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee over allegations that he charged a Saudi businessman $100,000 for an introduction and photos with Trump at his own wedding to Tiffany.
Boulos’ father currently serves as a senior adviser to Trump on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs, raising concerns that business dealings conducted by the younger Boulos could be leveraged to gain access to diplomatic channels.
Melania Trump
Melania Trump made headlines last year when Amazon announced it was paying a whopping $40 million for the right to produce an authorized documentary about Trump, which many viewed as part of Jeff Bezos’ bid to curry favor with Trump upon his reelection. The Amazon billionaire dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago shortly after his 2024 election victory, donated to his inaugural fund, and announced that his newspaper The Washington Post — long a nemesis in the president’s vendetta against the free press — would transition its editorial style to focus on “free markets and personal liberties.”
Melania Trump promoted her documentary while hosting freed Israeli hostages at the White House in February.
Barron Trump
As of late 2025, Trump’s youngest child — just 20 — is worth an estimated $150 million. Most of that valuation comes from his investment stake in World Liberty Financial, the financial firm run by his two older half-brothers. Barron also holds a large stake in World Liberty Financials “stablecoin,” USD1, which has an overall market cap of $2.6 billion.
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Elon Musk posts incessantly about protecting Western civilization.
How Saving Western Civilization Replaced Making America Great Again
“She’s a traitor to the West.”
Elon Musk posted this on X on July 25 in response to a clip of Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, saying on CNBC that Musk propagates a “caricatured” image of Europe as a deteriorating, unlivable hell hole. Beddoes had recently interviewed Musk, challenging his views on Europe, and confronting him for supporting far-right politicians and parties from Germany to the UK. Beddoes never questioned the hallmarks of liberal democracy: free and fair elections, separation of powers, equal protection under the law, or human rights. But in Musk’s mind, her pushing back on his caricature of Europe as a continent colonized by immigrant invaders proved enough to make her a “traitor to the West.”
The idea of “saving the West” isn’t limited to the feverish online posting of the world’s richest man. If one surveys the conservative media landscape on any given day, the call to “rescue Western civilization” appears ubiquitous. For example, on August 5, 2026, the day after Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan, the civilizationist discourse popped up in every corner of the American right. Podcaster Benny Johnson called for more politicians willing to “fight for Western civilization.” Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, released a podcast interview titled “The Battle Western Civilization.” Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, posted: “The Democratic Party is being taken over by anti-American candidates who hate the values that underpin Western civilization.”
Noah Rothman, senior writer at the National Review, posted in response to a video montage of Abdul El-Sayed: “This race isn’t just about tax rates, or health care, or immigration enforcement. It’s about more than politics now. This is a fight over America and whether the enemies of Western civilization are right.”
None of this even touches the civilizationist outrage many on the American right — including Musk — expressed over the casting of Black actors in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Civilizationalist discourse isn’t a new summer trend. It’s surged since Trump’s second inauguration. In a July 2025 interview, Lara Trump even asked her father-in-law about his supposed nickname, the “bodyguard of Western civilization.”
I’ve spent the last two and a half years investigating the growing alliance among Protestant Reconstructionist Christians like Doug Wilson and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth; radical traditional Catholics like Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation and Vice President JD Vance; and Silicon Valley technocrats like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Curtis Yarvin. What’s become clear: “Saving Western civilization” is now the unifying rallying cry of the American right, surpassing Trump’s infamous “make America great again” slogan and even the Christian nationalist mantra of taking America back for God. There’s a reason for this change. As I argue in my new book American Caesar, the crusade to rescue Western civilization provides an umbrella discourse that unites tech reactionaries with traditional Catholics and extremist Protestants in a loose alliance against immigrants, non-Christians, the LGBTQ community, and anyone who criticizes the United States.
While extremist Christians and Silicon Valley technocrats often disagree on issues related to AI, surveillance, and family, they are aligned on the idea that saving Western civilization from external threats like Muslims and migrants and internal threats like antifa, trans people, and feminists is the paramount issue of our time. Even though Elon Musk is not religious, many Christian nationalists see him as an ally in saving Western civilization from the foreign and domestic vandals they believe threaten it. By couching their shared mission in civilizational, rather than religious terms, they can forge a loose coalition against the groups they perceive as common enemies and existential threats to “our way of life.”
As opposed to Christian nationalism or MAGA, civilizationalism also provides a horizontal plane that transcends the United States, including Europe in the effort to rescue civilization from both attacking barbarians and domestic enemies.
In many ways, the civilizationalist discourse emanating from every corner of the American right is an escalation of the Christian nationalist currents that have been center stage during the Trump era. As the scholars Yilmaz and Morieson argue, “Civilizationism is an idea which posits that the world and its peoples can be divided into several ‘civilizations’, most of them defined by religion.” Western civilizationalists render “Western” people as moral, rational, and outright superior to others based on their religious-cultural values. This escalates MAGA’s hallmark xenophobia and Christian nationalism because civilizationalist discourse posits that “non-Westerners” “belong to a foreign civilization with inferior values derived from an inferior religion.” In other words, they are inexorably less than “us” as a people, and therefore unassimilable. There’s no room here for legal migration, pluralism, or multiculturalism. Rather, we are left with a vision akin to Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations model, wherein different people groups across the world hold competing values that can never be cohered. Moreover, American citizens who promote “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” or “anti-capitalist” views are suspected of being linked to either Islamist, or communist foreign networks. They are a foreign enemy cosplaying as real Americans. The goal of civilizationism is isolationist purity. The strategy to achieve it? Civilizational warfare.
Thus, we arrive at a startling truth: When Christian nationalists and technocrats rally to “save Western civilization,” their efforts are not meant to shore up democratic institutions, reinvigorate civic norms surrounding free and fair elections, protect free speech, or defend free thought. When a Texas A&M professor was told he couldn’t teach Plato — the pre-eminent philosopher of ancient Greece and perhaps all of Western civilization (outside of Jesus) — without permission, there was no uproar. When books are banned, the civilizationalists don’t blink.
Their retrieval of Western virtue is not focused on the merits of Athenian democracy or the Roman Republic, much less the Enlightenment values of free choice, personal autonomy, or freedom from religious imposition and/or censorship. In this case, saving Western civilization doesn’t mean empowering We the People, it means rescuing the country from the “immoral elites” who have sold out our country to inferior foreigners; the domestic infidels who refuse to abide by the binary gender and sex norms that both technocrats like Musk and Christian nationalists like Vance and Hegseth prescribe.
If a pure society, rather than a free one, is what they are trying to save, we are left with an important question: Who is going to do the rescuing?
There has been plenty of extremism among Christian nationalists for decades. However, what we are witnessing now is frightening escalation to something more radical: the desire to replace We the People with an all-powerful leader to purify the United States — a Red Caesar, a Protestant Franco, an Appalachian Pinochet, an Unbound Executive, or a Tech Monarch. In other words, a second American Revolution, but this time to seat someone like a king, rather than to break away from one.
There is an abundance of evidence that Trump and his allies are trying to manifest something resonant with these models. Elon Musk’s implementation of DOGE early in Trump’s second term echoed the tech-dissident Curtis Yarvin’s notoriously monarchist ideals. When he took the helm of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency early in 2025, Musk began implementing a “hard reboot” of the government following Yarvin’s blueprint. Musk’s DOGE lieutenants openly claim Yarvin as their greatest philosophical inspiration for gutting federal agencies, laying off workers, and destroying the social safety net. One DOGE team member told The Washington Post that Yarvin represents “the most crisp articulation” of what DOGE is trying to achieve. Another said that “it’s an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin,” and are using his authoritarian theory “to empower people on the ground to actually do stuff — even if they can’t admit it publicly.”
There is more evidence in the form of Trump’s defiance of the courts, particularly when it comes to his effort to rid the nation of the kind of external threats so often cited by Musk and his fellow guardians of civilization. An Associated Press review from May 2026 found that in 31 lawsuits his administration had “250 instances of noncompliance” in immigration cases, “from failing to return property to keeping immigrants locked up past court-ordered release dates.”
The list goes on: The Trump administration kidnapped and imprisoned Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and took control of the country’s oil. Now, Marco Rubio is ruling the country from afar with no plan for elections any time soon. To date, Trump has not received congressional approval for the war with Iran, which has been ongoing since February. Trump tried to rename the Kennedy Center. He demolished the East Wing of the White House. And his former personal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, was just appointed head of the Department of Justice. Oh, lest I forget: Trump ignored the Constitution completely when he tried to deport U.S.-born Americans.
The move toward an American Caesar, in many respects, is no longer a Christian nationalist movement, at least not in the way we often think of it.
The dream of the right is no longer to restore a time when white Christianity went hand in hand with America; a restoration of the supposed pax Americana of the 1950s. The outlook now is more grim and more extreme.
In the face of demographic change, cultural progress, and global crises, Christian Reconstructionists, reactionary Catholics, and Silicon Valley magnates long to “save” Western civilization by replacing American democracy with a post-constitutional Caesar who will rule without the burden of checks and balances or the sharing of power in any meaningful way. Trump is doing everything he can to oblige them.
Bradley Onishi is author of American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America Into a Monarchy, on sale September 15 via Macmillan Publishers.