1789 Capital: Donald Trump Jr making billions from taxpayers
Donald Trump Jr is making billions from taxpayers through his venture capital firm (1789 Capital) by investing in industries at the center of his father’s second-term agenda, including artificial intelligence, defense technology, drones, computer chips and digital assets.
Besides the obvious ethics question, Donald Trump Jr’s massive financial windfall is raising questions about how political access to Donald Trump is putting profits in the pockets of Trump family and businesses (via The Intellectualist and Lincoln Square):
According to reporting by the Financial Times, the firm, 1789 Capital, counts Mr. Trump Jr. as a partner, pitches itself around “patriotic capitalism” and has grown from $200 million to $3.5 billion in assets under management, meaning investor money the firm manages, over the past year. One partner told the newspaper the firm hoped to reach $10 billion in the next few years.
Its portfolio, or collection of investments, includes companies tied to artificial intelligence, data centers, computer chips, space, defense manufacturing, prediction markets and related technology. The Financial Times identified investments including Databricks, Ramp, Deel, Crusoe, Groq, Reflection AI, Elon Musk’s xAI, SpaceX, defense-tech company Anduril, Hadrian Automation, Vulcan Elements and Polymarket, a prediction-market platform.
Those industries, including AI, defense, drones and digital assets, overlap with areas the Trump administration has promoted. Mr. Trump has moved to boost drones, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, U.S.-based manufacturing and national-security technology, areas where investors can profit from markets shaped by federal decisions. (Emphasis mine)
As I wrote a few weeks ago, Donald Trump is using the power of the presidency for his personal benefit to transfer massive amounts of wealth from the struggling middle and working classes to himself, his family, and a small circle of well-connected Beltway elites. By mingling private companies with government — an arrangement that fascist dictator Benito Mussolini once called “corporatism” — Trump is lining the pockets of the family business while leading America down the road to fascism and the end of liberty.
Recently, Trump made a $1.5 billion request for the Defense Department that provides additional evidence of how Donald Trump, Jr and the rest of the family are making billions. For example, the agreement between the Pentagon and Dell Computers (via CNBC.com):
The Department of Defense announced a five-year, roughly $9.7 billion deal with Dell to provide a suite of software to the U.S. military.
The Pentagon has been under immense pressure from Capitol Hill to deliver a clean audit, especially as it asks Congress for a massive $1.5 trillion budget for fiscal year 2027. President Donald Trump has been particularly complimentary of Dell.
At a Mother’s Day event at the White House earlier this month, Trump said to “go out and buy a Dell,” after lauding the Dell family for its donation to the Trump accounts.
And Dell has returned the favor. He congratulated Trump on his election victory in 2024, saying he “look[s] forward to continued progress and opportunity under his leadership and working together toward a strong and unified future for all.”
Dell also joined Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. (Emphasis mine)
Prior to his “go out and buy a Dell” proclamation, Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million in Dell stock on February 10, according to financial disclosure forms, when the stock was trading for $126 per share. The stock soared to $260 following Trump’s Mother’s Day declaration and has gone as high as $318 since the Pentagon contract announcement.
This means that, so far, Trump has unrealized gains of between $1.55 million to $7.74 million from his Dell stock. But that’s chicken feed compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars Donald Trump, Jr and 1789 Capital made through another Defense Department partnership (via CommonDreams.org):
Three months after Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm took a stake in a small North Carolina rare-earth magnet firm, a Pentagon department tasked with boosting rare-earth manufacturing for national defense purposes expedited a request for a loan worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the company—a transaction that one government ethics expert said at the time gave the appearance of “conflicts of interest.”
New details of how the $620 million loan was secured were reported by ProPublica only added to concerns that the money was given to Vulcan Elements last year to benefit its new investor, President Donald Trump’s eldest son.
According to ProPublica, although Trump Jr., the Pentagon, and Vulcan Elements said Trump Jr. was not involved in the loan deal and the company did not benefit from political favoritism, his close friend—White House trade and manufacturing counselor Peter Navarro—personally made the call to the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital last fall, asking them to quickly approve the loan.
The message to staffers in the office at the time was: “The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” one Pentagon employee told ProPublica.
The $620 million loan dramatically increased Vulcan’s valuation, which was estimated to be about $200 million around the time that 1789 Capital, Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, invested. Three months after [Trump Jr.’s] company took a stake, Vulcan was valued at an estimated $2 billion. (Emphasis mine)
Trump and family raked in billions of dollars through their crypto investments and stablecoins (via National Today):
[In recent attempts to “end the war” in Iran], a crypto firm owned by the Trump family, World Liberty Financial, struck a deal with the Pakistani government to allow its stablecoin to be used for cross-border transactions. This arrangement came at a time when Pakistan was involved in mediating negotiations to end the war in Iran, with the Trump family’s real estate developer Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff involved in the talks.
The Trump family’s involvement in World Liberty Financial and Pakistan’s role in the Iran negotiations highlight the ongoing concerns about the former president’s tendency to mix his personal business interests with U.S. foreign policy. This case raises questions about the potential conflicts of interest and the influence of private financial interests on diplomatic efforts. (Emphasis mine)
Trump has embraced stablecoins in recent years. He signed the first federal stablecoin bill into law last summer (GENIUS Act) that made it possible for World Liberty Financial to issue the USD1 stablecoin. Because it’s tied to the US Dollar, this crypto currency scheme will make it easy for government to track and control every dollar spent by those who are using it. And if that’s not enough reason to oppose it, the GENIUS ACT makes it easier for Trump to continue using the office of the presidency to rake in billions for himself and his family (via Fortune.com):
After years of battling with regulators, the legislation represents a major victory for the crypto industry, which started in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and was long viewed as an outlaw sector. Now, the stamp of approval from Congress—and the broad embrace by the Trump administration—casts new legitimacy on blockchain technology, with once-skeptical institutions like Big Tech companies and banks rushing in, especially as Bitcoin soars to record highs.
However, as Congress moves on to debate a second bill that would create regulations around cryptocurrencies and exchanges, critics warn that the passage of stablecoin legislation raises concerns about the increasing ties between Trump’s business empire and blockchain interests. “That is a huge conflict of interest that society is just really not prepared for,” said Todd Phillips, a banking and administrative law professor at Georgia State University. (Emphasis mine)
When corporatism (government/private company partnerships) becomes the norm, a corrupt leader like Donald Trump can use his position to line the pockets of his family by making profit his official policy. This is how Donald Trump, Jr and 1789 Capital are turning citizens into a revenue stream and extracting value from taxpayers at every stage of their lives.
The cost of this corruption is not merely financial—it is constitutional. Every dollar Donald Trump, Jr and 1789 Capital put in their pockets comes at the expense of our liberty, our property, and our God-given, constitutionally protected rights.
MAGA wants us to believe that there’s nothing unethical going on here, but the billions being pocketed by Donald Trump, Jr and 1789 Capital courtesy of daddy is a blatant money-making scam where the pockets of the family business are lined with billions of taxpayer dollars.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative and the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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