I.F. Stone famously joked that he treasured reading The Washington Post because he never knew where he’d find a Page One story. Nobody except me reads the news on paper anymore (the Post’s average paid daily circulation has fallen below 100,000), so the new metric is how much play a given story receives on social media. To update Stone: I treasure all legacy media (not just the Post) because I never know where I’ll find a story that should have gone viral. The latest is “I’ll have Eric call.”
The culture of corruption surrounding President Donald Trump and his family is so all-encompassing that it’s starting to resemble what water looks like to a fish. Presidential politics is by far the most lucrative business venture of Trump’s career. A mere 19 months ago, Trump’s net worth was $2.6 billion and the hundreds of millions he owed in civil penalties prompted me to speculate that the 45th (now 47th) president was headed for bankruptcy. Today, Trump is worth $7.1 billion and most of the civil penalties have been tossed out. Nobody gets that rich that fast in real estate.
World Liberty Financial is increasing Trump’s net worth by billions of dollars while Trump moves aggressively to ease restrictions on cryptocurrency. WLF is the biggest Trump corruption story both in dollars and in sleaze. When the company debuted last year Trump held the position “chief crypto advocate”; his sons Don, Jr., and Eric were “web3 ambassador”; and his youngest son Barron, then a freshman at New York University, was “DeFi (decentralized finance) visionary.”
The biggest scandal to emanate from World Liberty Financial was the United Arab Emirates’s $2 billion purchase of a World Liberty Financial stablecoin. Eric Trump was present when this deal was announced at a Dubai conference; it was the largest investment ever made in any crypto company. Two weeks later, Trump removed limits by the Biden administration on UAE’s purchase of U.S.-produced AI computer chips, which had been imposed out of concern that UAE was performing military exercises with China. The UAE paid Trump $2 billion to turn a blind eye to legitimate national-security worries.
If we lived in normal times, this scandal would already have a nickname and the Justice Department would be investigating. But these are anything but normal times, and even to suggest an investigation would get an attorney working in the Justice Department’s public integrity division fired—that is, if the Justice Department still had a public integrity division; the 36-person division has been shrunk down to two. Americans are consequently either unaware of or resigned to the most outrageous instance of government bribery since Teapot Dome.
The Financial Times reported Thursday that the Trump family has reduced its equity stake in WLF from an initial 75 percent to 38 percent. How much did its sale of 37 percent of World Liberty Financial generate for Trump and his family? All of this would be profit because it doesn’t appear Trump invested a dime to acquire his shares. What was the sale price? We don’t know. Trump reported $57.3 million in income from WLF last year, but it will be months before we learn his (much greater) income from WLF in 2025. Also: Who bought that 37 percent from the Trump family, and did the buyer pay market price? Isn’t that the sort of thing we should know? And yet we don’t.
This past week, Trump has basked in unaccustomed praise for helping to end a war he could have ended nine months ago (and President Joe Biden before that) if they’d withheld offensive weapons shipments to Israel, as required by Section 6201 of the Foreign Assistance Act. The peace conference in Sharm El-Sheikh was a family affair; in addition to Trump, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, was present. Kushner famously negotiated the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first administration. After that, Kushner lined up Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE to invest $2.54 billion in his private equity fund. All three countries were represented at Sharm El-Sheikh. Qatar previously helped bail out Kushner and his father Charles on 666 Fifth Avenue, an office building for which the family overpaid back in 2007.
Last year Kushner expressed interest in developing Gaza’s waterfront property, and said creating an independent Palestinian state was “a super bad idea.” More recently, Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff (whose son Zach is chief executive of World Liberty Financial) have discussed with developers turning Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” You can’t make this stuff up.
There’s no specific English term to describe your son or daughter’s father-in-law, but in Spanish Charles Kushner is the president’s consuegro. He is also America’s ambassador to France. Two decades ago Kushner père did 14 months hard time for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering; the latter involved setting up his brother-in-law William Schulder, then ratting out the family business to prosecutors, with a prostitute and then sending a tape of their assignation to his sister. Trump pardoned Charles at the end of his first presidential term.
We haven’t seen any financial scandals emanate from the American embassy in Paris (just a dustup over some undiplomatic criticisms), but we have from another Trump consuegro, Massad Boulos, who’s the State Department’s senior Africa adviser. Boulos is father-in-law to Tiffany Trump, who, The New York Times reported last month, cruised the French Riviera last July on the superyacht of one Ruya Bayegan at the same time Boulos was negotiating with Libya to increase oil production—a move that would enrich Bayegan’s energy company.
Granted, that was small stuff. But in August the former prime minister of Guinea told the Times that Boulos told him he was “pursuing work” on the government dime by trying to “put together some investors from the United States and some governments in Africa.” After the Times queried Boulos, the former prime minster got back in touch to abruptly deny even knowing Boulos. Nothing to see here, move along.
Donald Trump, Jr., is co-founder of a new Georgetown club called Executive Branch that sells access to top Trump officials by charging members up to $500,000 to join. Zach Witkoff and his brother Alex are co-owners. It was at Executive Branch’s inaugural banquet that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency: “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face.” That may be the most ethical sentence ever uttered at Executive Branch.
Another co-owner of Executive Branch is Omeed Malik, co-founder of the venture fund 1789 Capital, which hired Don, Jr. as a partner in November. That prompted a stampede of defense contractors and other new clients into the fund, ballooning its assets from about $150 million to more than $1 billion. Malik is also a backer of GrabAGun, a company where Don, Jr. holds the title “consultant” that aspires to become the Amazon of gun sales (a concept that calls to mind Homer Simpson’s complaint, when a gun seller tells him there’s a waiting period, “Five days? But I’m mad now.”) A company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said the quiet part out loud: “Our business may be harmed” if Don, Jr. “ceases to be involved with GrabAGun or to support our business and publicize our product offerings.” In July, the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported that the SEC granted a preliminary approval for GrabAGun’s public offering less than two months after SEC Chairman Paul Atkins attended Executive Branch’s launch party.
But I promised to tell you about “I’ll have Eric call.”
This is something the president was caught on a hot mic saying to Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in Sharm El Sheikh, according to Rory Jones of The Wall Street Journal. It’s a bit of a riddle exactly what the two world leaders were talking about, but it couldn’t have been government business because Eric Trump does not hold any position in government.
Here’s what we know. Subianto said something was “not safe, security-wise,” and then asked Trump: “Can I meet Eric?” Trump replied: “I’ll have Eric call. Should I do that? He’s such a good boy. I’ll have Eric call.”
I know, this sounds like a scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 classic The Conversation. But Jones furnished a few hints as to what this was about. The Trump Organization has two hotel-and-golf course projects underway in Indonesia with a company run by an Indonesian businessman named Hary Tanoesoedibjo. Subianto, in his conversation with Trump, said he “told Hary” about the matter he wanted to discuss with Eric. The conversation ended with Subianto saying, “We’ll look for a better place.”
The White House refused to comment about the exchange, presumably because it contradicted Trump’s claim not to be involved day to day in Trump Organization business. The Trump Organization, meanwhile, told the Journal, “We are incredibly proud of our assets in Indonesia and the many great things to come.”
And Barron? Already balancing his sophomore-year NYU studies against his demanding responsibilities as World Liberty Financial’s DeFi visionary, the youngest Trump is now being touted by Trump’s former social media manager Jake Advent to sit on TikTok’s board. Trump approved TikTok’s transfer to American ownership last month, saying it will be “run by a new board of directors.” Barron’s sole qualification for this assignment is that he’s 19 years old. But within the Trump nepocracy, that’s more than enough.
