“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.
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.