“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.
Courtesy of Sam Reich
Supporters of James Talarico cheer as they watch midterm election returns during a watch party at the Long Center for the Performing Arts Nov. 3, 2026 in Austin, Texas.
America Slammed the Door on Trump. Now the Hard Work Begins
The American people have spoken, and to paraphrase Dean Wormer of Animal House fame: Lazy, stupid, and corrupt is no way to go through life, let alone run a country. The repudiation of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement was seismic and inevitable.
The gravitational laws of politics held true, and Trump’s star crashed and burned. The thrill for MAGA is gone, at least for the moment. You simply can’t keep telling people that they are winning all the time when they feel like they are losing. Counting on the American people to once again believe you over their own lying eyes is a trick play you can only run so much. Just ask Joe Biden.
The poisonous combination of an unpopular and unnecessary war, horrible candidates, rising costs, a lousy job market, soaring gasoline prices, masked police hunting immigrants, sweeping and naked corruption, and a president more focused on ballrooms and algae blooms than on the American people all spelled electoral doom. The election results were a clear and thoroughly well-deserved ass-kicking.
Historic GOP losses in Kansas, South Carolina, Iowa, and Texas mean the Trump lame-duck era has begun. How soon will the GOP start the painful process of moving on from his stranglehold? His complete capture of the party will make the breakup difficult. And he’s not going to let them go easy. The infighting and battles for leadership will likely be vicious, but hopefully they will be about ideas. In a two-party system, having one party this radical and beholden to one person’s cult of personality has been toxic for our politics.
A perfect example of the sort of poisonous viper from the era, MAGA diehard and presidential confidante Laura Loomer took to X last night to say, “America is over. The communist and jihadists are going to open our borders and replace our votes with votes from illegal aliens. We now have reps who openly speak about their hatred of America…” It was just this sort of culture war BS from Loomer or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (“no weirdos, beardos,” etc.) that voters grew tired of — when gas is over $4 a gallon these weak attempts at insults cease to distract. Owning the libs feels hollow when you are weighing whether to fill up the tank or buy eggs.The donor class might as well have lit a dump truck filled with cash on fire. How will Elon Musk, who spent over a whopping $450 million on the election, swallow this most bitter pill? Will he blame the president for his failures as a leader and withdraw support? Where do you even go once you have gone full MAGA?
On the other side, the Democrats set some historic and impressive firsts: first Black Speaker of the House, first openly gay man to be senator, first Black woman governor, first Native-American woman governor, first Muslim senator. These victories are truly inspiring, with more potentially on the way as votes continue to be counted (the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction seems a real possibility). The Dems have to keep growing the tent; it’s their greatest strength.
That said, now comes the hard part. The Democrats’ principal work must be to restore the country to a state of normalcy. Show voters you are fighting for them every day — stop trying to get on cable TV to grandstand about Trump and protecting democracy. The Democrats need to focus on voters’ real needs, reject the endless culture wars, and remind people that the Democrats were the party of working people for decades. Right now, folks desperately need jobs, lower prices on food and shelter, and healthcare.
Throughout his career, Sherrod Brown, returning to the Senate in Ohio after two years away, has been a messenger for working America in Washington. He represents a Rust Belt state that felt the full brunt of job losses from NAFTA and endured the opioid crisis. Dems should follow his lead to find their footing. Hold Trump accountable but don’t forget the voters back home who need help, and need it fast.
This is a huge reason for last night’s historic rebuke of Trump: He abandoned everyday Americans to focus on triumphal arches designed to honor himself. Democrats need to remember the lesson the American people just sent — being a people’s representative is not about party, it’s about service.
As Trump likes to say: Thank you for your attention to this matter.