'Unbridled looting': How the Trump family is raking in billions — while no one is watching

11 June

National Memo editor Joe Conason says President Donald Trump glommed “approximately $1.6 billion” in revenue and income during his first four years. Six months into his second, he and his family are grabbing “billions already—and by the time he’s done, he may make off with tens of billions.”

In his New Republic piece, Conason ticks down a long list of Trump’s despot-style self-enrichment schemes, proving again “an old truism that applies to authoritarian regimes throughout history.” Sure, they curtail civil liberties, target alleged “enemies of the state” and repress disfavored groups. But, “most of all, they enrich themselves and their families.”

In his second term, the notorious creator of “Trump University” has announced several business partnerships with overseas corporations, some with ties to Middle East governments the U.S. is currently in talks with, Conason said. There’s a new Trump Organization golf course and luxury tower in Qatar, announced just prior to Trump’s official visit. But this, Conason says, is “merely one of … 19 such deals in the works in coming months.”

The Trump Organization is also building a Trump resort on the coast of Oman, working directly with the Oman government and a contractor with ties to the Saudi government. Similarly, Trump also partnered with the Saudi Public Investment Fund in the LIV Golf Tour and tournament, which brings considerable revenue to his Doral resort in South Florida.

“And a new Trump Tower is under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with yet another just announced for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates,” Conason says.

Meanwhile, Don Jr. and Zach and Alex Witkoff—the sons of Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff—opened a private club in Washington, D.C., “where high-rolling political donors, lobbyists, and business executives can expect to socialize with Trump Cabinet members and other administration officials,” according to Conason.

Membership at the exclusive “Executive Branch” costs $500,000, but Conason said this is small potatoes compared to the Trump family’s expansion into cryptocurrency.

“[It] seems … designed to foster bribery, money laundering, and criminality,” writes Conason. “World Liberty Financial, the company set up by Eric and Don Jr. in partnership with Witkoff’s sons and others, has … already received a suspicious-looking investment from a Chinese crypto entrepreneur named Justin Sun, who advises the firm. He plowed $75 million into the project, a move that was followed in due course by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s suspension of an investigation into his business practices.”

World Liberty announced it would issue its own “stablecoin,” which was promptly pounced by an Emirati firm controlled by the United Arab Emirate’s royal family, which bought billions of “coins” for a crypto exchange regularly used by “terror groups, drug cartels, and sanctions busters,” Conason reports.

He added that Trump has rewarded the crypto industry by “dismantling much of the federal oversight, regulation, and prosecution that its advocates find burdensome and by promoting legislation to advance its interests.” This includes trying to “pump Treasury revenue into supporting crypto currencies” to inflate its price.

Like the regime of former Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the Trump family works to enrich itself at all costs, but the comparison doesn’t stop there, says Conason.

“Just as Trump is doing now by firing inspectors general and abolishing federal watchdog agencies, Marcos dismantled and crippled all the institutions that represented democratic authority and might have stopped or punished his depredations,” Conason writes. “The Philippine dictator threatened and brutally repressed his critics, as Trump seems equally keen to do.”

Conason adds that Marcos wife, Imelda, maintains a mutually admiring friendship with Trump. And the Washington lobbyists who aided the Marcos’ family “and protected them from scrutiny were none other than Trump political guru Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s 2016 campaign manager for three months and later received a presidential pardon for keeping his mouth shut about the Kremlin’s campaign interventions.”

But what eventually brought down Marcos “was a determined electorate and a peaceful movement known as ‘People Power,’ motivated by popular fury at his abuses and specifically by anger over his larcenous misrule,” said Conason. “… Americans still have the power to ensure that a similar wave of activism finally drops Trump and his enablers into history’s dustbin.”

He says this will likely be “the only way to curtail their unbridled looting.”

Read the full TNR report at this link.

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