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A Kazakh mining company merged with an American developer called Skyline Builders Group in April. Among Skyline Builders’ largest investors are President Donald Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric.
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That Kazakh mining company was itself created in a 2025 deal facilitated by Trump and Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. The Trump administration greased the skids of this 2025 deal with a $900 million taxpayer-backed line of credit from the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that subsidizes U.S. companies’ overseas dealings.
That is, a company the Trump sons are invested in merged with a company the administration helped create. Don Jr. and Eric say they had no knowledge or influence over the Ex-Im subsidy, but it’s one of many deals where Trump administration policy seems to profit Trump’s family business.
Every few weeks brings news of another crypto deal, Gulf State partnership, or Chinese venture involving both a Trump-connected company and a Trump administration policy.
And the president thinks this is all fine.
American ventures
Skyline Builders, which invested in the Trump-subsidized Kazakh mining project, is a project of a larger investment fund, American Ventures, which is in turn owned by a financial group called Dominari Holdings. Eric and Don Jr. reportedly own about 12% of Dominari.
The family ties run deeper. The parent company of American Ventures, Dominari Holdings, is headquartered in Trump Tower in Manhattan, and American Ventures itself is headquartered in Palm Beach near the Trump sons’ business headquarters.
Eric and Don Jr. sit on Dominari Ventures’ advisory board.
American Ventures’ whole play is betting on an “America First” turn in the economy. The fund is targeting “new technologies that create American jobs and reduce US dependence on foreign resources.”
Specifically, “drone manufacturing, crypto and AI” are among the fund’s target sectors according to the Financial Times.
Trump has worked to put the U.S. government behind all of these sectors, where his sons are investing millions.
For example, Trump issued an executive order titled “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” in 2025. “It is the policy of the United States to ensure continued American leadership in the development, commercialization, and export,” the executive order reads. The order instructed the Federal Aviation Administration to accelerate federal funding on commercializable drone technology, and to prop up the “American Drone Industrial Base.”
Likewise, Trump is propping up cryptocurrency. He signed the “GENIUS Act,” which creates a regulatory framework for some cryptocurrencies. Experts describe the law as something of a giveaway to the issuers of these stablecoins.
Crypto schemes and Gulf states
Cryptocurrency is famously a playground of fraudsters and money launderers because crypto has no underlying value. For that reason, the Trumps’ dalliance in crypto deserves scrutiny and skepticism.
After his election but before his inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency — the Trump coin, which goes by the ticker symbol $TRUMP. $TRUMP is not really a currency. It’s called a “meme coin” because it’s mostly a souvenir or pure speculation.
The coin is not backed by anything. You cannot pay your taxes in it. You cannot redeem your $TRUMP in exchange for anything with the Trumps. And whenever someone buys $TRUMP, the company CIC Digital charges a transaction fee of sorts. CIC Digital is owned by Trump.
So every buyer of $TRUMP was enriching Trump.
The one thing of real value $TRUMP provided its top buyers? Access to the president. Trump hosted a dinner for the top 220 holders of the coin in May 2025, and a VIP reception for the top 25. Given that $TRUMP had no underlying value, these people were paying Trump simply for access to him.
This is different from the ordinary Washington corruption, where contributing to a politician’s reelection buys access. These donors weren’t funding a campaign: they were directly enriching Trump.
But this wasn’t the Trumps’ only cryptocurrency.
In late 2024, Eric Trump announced the creation of World Liberty Financial, a “DeFi platform.” The company is something like an online bank, but without all the regulations.
The Trump family, through a corporate entity called DT Marks DEFI LLC (DT for “Donald Trump”) back then owned most of World Liberty Financial. WLF issued its own cryptocurrency, which goes by the ticker symbol $WLFI.
$WLFI is not a memecoin. It’s also not exactly a cryptocurrency. It’s a crypto-token that gives its holder a vote in the governance of World Liberty Financial. It’s something like a voting share in a bank, but not exactly.
World Liberty Financial also issues a proper cryptocurrency called $USD1, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. The most important purchase using this Trump-connected currency was when MGX, an investment fund backed by the government of Abu Dhabi, invested in Binance, a crypto giant whose founder was pardoned in 2025 by Donald Trump.
The Wall Street Journal’s Sam Kessler reported earlier this year something that had been a secret for the first year of the second Trump term: Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of Abu Dhabi’s president, bought 50% of the Trumps’ World Liberty Financial stake just days before Trump’s inauguration.
As with the investors in the $TRUMP coin, Tahnoon’s major investment seems to have bought him access to Trump and his inner circle, including a White House meeting in March 2025.
Abu Dhabi at the time was lobbying to gain access to U.S.-made advanced microchips. The Biden administration had barred such sales, worried that China could subsequently gain access to this sensitive technology.
The Journal reported: “Two months after the March meeting, the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters.”
Again, Trump thinks this is all fine.
‘Nobody cared, and I’m allowed to’
In his first term, Trump announced that he would bar his sons from doing business with foreign governments so as to avoid conflicts of interest. He now believes this slight nod to ethics was a mistake.
“I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it,” Trump told the New York Times. “I didn’t have to do that. And it’s really unfair to them.”
In a sense, Trump is right that he “didn’t have to do that.” Ethics rules and conflict-of-interest law generally do not apply to the president. Most presidents avoid such dealings out of an inner moral sense or at least political concerns. Trump apparently decided that there was no upside, because people didn’t sing his praises for this first-term sacrifice.
“I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to,” he said.
A YEAR OF CRONYISM AND SELF-ENRICHMENT FOR TRUMP
Democrats are likely to take over the House of Representatives in the next election. They will undoubtedly launch a series of investigations into the Trump family and the Trump administration.
If Democrats follow their pattern from Trump’s first term, they will waste their time on liberal-media fever dreams. If, instead, they want to expose real impropriety and corruption, they will look into the intersection of Trump family business dealings and the Trump administration’s official actions.
