Critics reacted with disgust after Eric Trump went on Fox Business on Thursday morning to boast about Foundation Future Industries, a company where he serves as chief strategy adviser, scoring a multimillion-dollar deal from the US Department of Defense.
For the segment, Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo invited on both Eric Trump and Sankaet Pathak, co-founder and CEO of Foundation Future, a robotics firm that earlier this year won a $24 million Pentagon contract that will see its robots deployed in Ukraine, where they will be used to inspect and transport weapons.
Bartiromo asked the second-eldest son of President Donald Trump how he got involved with Foundation Future, and “what attracted” him to the enterprise.
Trump responded that he decided to get involved with robotics to help America “win” the race with China to build battle-ready robots, in the same way he purportedly helped the US “win” by being an early investor in cryptocurrency.
“We better be winning this race in the United States of America,” he declared. “We’re the greatest economy in the world... When you go up and you interact with these robots, and they fist bump you and they high five you, they follow your commands. You bring in AI economy, it’s going to change industry, it’s going to change military application, it’s going to change hospitality. The uses are unlimited.”
Eric Trump and his brother, Donald Trump Jr., for months have been investing in companies with the goal of scoring lucrative Pentagon deals.
The Wall Street Journal reported in March that the Trump brothers invested in a Florida-based drone company called Powerus that “is vying to meet fresh demand from the Pentagon” for drones that started when the Trump administrationbanned foreign-made drones and drone components from the US in December.
And in 2025, at least two companies backed by Trump Jr. received contracts collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the DOD.
Given this history, critics were quick to hurl accusations of corruption at the Trumps for using their father’s presidency to personally enrich themselves.
“The president’s son, who was never involved in this industry before his father became president, should not be getting contracts from the Pentagon,” declared Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch. “This is absurd corruption that Republicans in Congress will say nothing about and do no oversight.”
Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, said the fact that the president’s son is openly boasting about getting multimillion-dollar deals from his father’s DOD shows “the US government is now one of, if not the most, corrupt governments on earth.”
University of Michigan political scientist Donald Moynihan compared the Trump brothers to Uday and Qusay Hussein, the late sons of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and argued that much of Trump’s second administration appears to be running the US government like it’s a family business.
“An underestimated rationale for Trump’s massive ramp-ups in immigration/military spending,” he wrote, “is to create a public slush fund for friends, families, donors.”
National security attorney Bradley Moss, in a nod to possible future congressional investigations of the Trump family’s corruption, advised Eric Trump to “preserve your records.”