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Trump And His Family Are Enriching Themselves
I do not know if the numbers on the Forbes chart below are correct but it is quite obvious that Trump and his family are using their positions to enrich themselves.
biggerSom relevant current headlines:
Trump sons to take stake in Kazakh miner that won $1.6bn US backing (archived) – FT
The Trump family last year netted more than $1bn in pre-tax profits from their various cryptocurrency projects and have continued to pile into AI, drones and critical minerals companies that have won lucrative US government contracts
Trump family-backed drone firm signs weapons deal with US – Bloomberg via MSN
The US Air Force agreed to buy an undisclosed number of interceptor drones from a company backed by President Donald Trump’s sons, according to the firm, deepening the military’s ties to defense contractors linked to the first family as the US war with Iran enters its third month.
…
Democrats in Congress have asked the Pentagon for more information about other defense contractors and technology firms with ties to the president’s family. In addition to Powerus, Eric Trump backed a reverse-merger deal between Israeli drone maker Xtend and JFB Construction Holdings, a publicly listed construction company.
Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and the Profitable Business of Peace (archived) – NY Times
For the time being, the board’s logo stands for little more than the idea that the politics of peace can be married to capital interests and the belief that this alignment stands to benefit everyone involved. Kushner and Witkoff’s fellow executive board members include Martin Edelman, a corporate lawyer with extensive ties to the upper echelons of the United Arab Emirates, and Marc Rowan, the chief executive of Apollo Global Management. In May 2025, Apollo invested $100 million in the Witkoff Group; Edelman is the general counsel of G42, an A.I. company controlled by the U.A.E.’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. A New York Times investigation found that Tahnoon was involved in a deal that netted $2 billion in 2025 for World Liberty Financial, the crypto company owned by Trump’s and Witkoff’s sons.
In his January executive order establishing it as a public international organization, Trump wrote that the Board of Peace is covered by the International Organizations Immunities Act, which prohibits employees or agents of an international organization (and their immediate family members) from being sued for “official work.” But that same law defines an international organization as an entity that results either from a treaty or from an act of Congress — neither of which is true of the board.
Previous presidents have also benefited financially from their time in office. Joe Biden’s ‘care’ for his family was legendary. But none has been so unashamed about it like Trump.
If only there would be an opposition party in Congress using its power to do something about this.
Thank you, “spin analysis”, for giving me the opportunity to work on purging myself of my moderate positions regarding America and Americans.
AUH has certainly become a lightning rod here. All the “Marg bar” stuff. In a recent post, as is his wont, he blamed the US entirely for all chattel slavery. Ignoring the fact that the US only accounted for about 4% of African black slavery. Totally ignores Brazil, Arabia, Caribbean island colonies, all of those things. Ignored the fact that that a dominant African tribe and king willingly sold other Africans to the white people; they are always blameless. Only Americans are to blame for slavery.
Posted by: spin analysis | May 2 2026 2:02 utc | 95
Lol. Loving Gruff and dissing that unnamed one.
Posted by: spin analysis | May 2 2026 4:02 utc | 128
Filling up the bar by constantly shouting half-truths and other distractions is certainly reminiscent of Trump and his Truth Social posts, so it’s unsurprising that you are part of the same crowd as William Gruff and Ahenobarbus who doggedly defend the fascist project that is America.
No one is denying that the continued existence of other settler colonies are problematic, but next to the behemoth that is America, they’re relatively inconsequential.
Communists understand the principle of identifying principal and secondary contradictions—it’s basic dialectical materialism straight from Mao’s On Contradiction:
Hence, if in any process there are a number of contradictions, one of them must be the principal contradiction playing the leading and decisive role, while the rest occupy a secondary and subordinate position. Therefore, in studying any complex process in which there are two or more contradictions, we must devote every effort to finding its principal contradiction. Once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved. This is the method Marx taught us in his study of capitalist society. Likewise Lenin and Stalin taught us this method when they studied imperialism and the general crisis of capitalism and when they studied the Soviet economy. There are thousands of scholars and men of action who do not understand it, and the result is that, lost in a fog, they are unable to get to the heart of a problem and naturally cannot find a way to resolve its contradictions.
To grossly oversimplify things, imagine being forced to choose between stopping a serial arsonist (America) and putting out fires that the arsonist started (American proxy wars/regimes). In an ideal world, communists would want to do both, but in practice, relatively limited resources compared to the forces arrayed against communism means that communists must pick and choose their battles carefully. Often, but not always, stopping the arsonist takes precedence over the fires.
In fact, the continued existence of other settler colonies are enabled by America. Without constant American intervention, more progressive societies—ones that addressed the historical injustices and prevented futures ones—would have emerged in places like Brazil long ago. The Jakarta Method book has an entire chapter dedicated to Brazil, and if you find that too imposing, here’s an excerpt from an interview of the author:
The mass slaughter of leftists in Indonesia was more than just another Washington-backed atrocity. It was the prototype for smashing the hopes and dreams of the Left in the developing world — for good.
Benjamin Fogel: The other major event in your book is the 1964 military coup in Brazil that led to twenty-one years of military rule. What was the significance of the coup, and how does it relate to the events of 1965 in Indonesia?
Vincent Bevins: The Brazilian coup happened first, of course. And to me, the propaganda story peddled by Suharto in 1965 looks eerily familiar to the anti-communist legend that motivated the Brazilian military one year before. But more broadly, what you have here is two countries that go through the same process at the same time and produce the same kind of societies. Both countries have US-backed military coups that create anti-communist, authoritarian capitalist social structures that mostly remain in place to this day.
The armed forces in both countries were trained at the same base in the United States and had a lot of opportunity to learn from each other, and they were certainly studying under the same American teachers. One major character in the book, an amazing man I was very lucky to meet, told me all about the way those men lived in Kansas in the 1950s.
The coups were enormous victories for the global right — these are huge countries, after all — and the resulting regimes embarked on a kind of anti-communist mini imperialism in their respective regions.
Then, in the early ’70s, as Brazil is in the most brutal phase of its dictatorship and helping the Chilean military to prepare the ground for their own coup, we see right-wing actors in both countries looking to Indonesia for inspiration, and that is the birth of the “Jakarta” terror meme that I trace across the world in the book.
America hasn’t stopped meddling in Brazil. Bolsonaro, the previous president of Brazil and an American puppet much like Argentina’s Milei, ran away to Florida when Lula won. Florida also happens to be the current home of Juan Guaidó, the American puppet who declared himself the president of Venezuela.
Mao regarded Israel and Taiwan (secondary contradictions) as the bases of American imperialism (principal contradiction), the front and back doors for America to enter and violate Asia. Hezbollah, Ansarallah and Iran all consider America to be the principal contradiction/Great Satan and Israel to be secondary contradiction/Little Satan of their region.
Look at all that evidence. Anyone who doesn’t identify America as the principal contradiction is being deliberately obtuse.
You also muddy the waters by lumping together different forms of slavery. All forms of slavery are bad—no one is arguing against that. But they’re not exactly comparable. The Portuguese practiced “ancillary slavery” and the classical Romans practiced “chattel slavery”, but only the Americans are depraved enough to bring “racial chattel slavery” into existence.
Liberalism and Racial Slavery: A Unique Twin Birth (page 35-36):
To render it explicable, the paradox must first be expounded in all its radicalism. Slavery is not something that persisted despite the success of the three liberal revolutions. On the contrary, it experienced its maximum development following that success: ‘The total slave population in the Americas reached around 330,000 in 1700, nearly three million by 1800, and finally peaked at over six million in the 1850s’.1 Contributing decisively to the rise of an institution synonymous with the absolute power of man over man was the liberal world. In the mid eighteenth century, it was Great Britain that possessed the largest number of slaves (878,000). The fact is unexpected. Although its empire was far more extensive, Spain came well behind. Second position was held by Portugal, which possessed 700,000 slaves and was in fact a kind of semi colony of Great Britain: much of the gold extracted by Brazilian slaves ended up in London.2 Hence there is no doubt that absolutely pre eminent in this field was the country at the head of the liberal movement, which had wrested primacy in the trading and ownership of black slaves precisely from the Glorious Revolution onwards. It was Pitt the Younger himself who, intervening in April 1792 in the House of Commons on the subject of slavery and the slave trade, acknowledged that ‘[n]o nation in Europe … has … plunged so deeply into this guilt as Great Britain.’3
That is not all. To a greater or lesser extent, there survived in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies ‘ancillary slavery’, which is to be distinguished from ‘systemic slavery, linked to plantations and commodity production’. And it was the latter type of slavery, established above all in the eighteenth century (starting from the liberal revolution of 1688-89) and clearly predominant in the British colonies, which most consummately expressed the de-humanization of those who were now mere instruments of labour and chattels, subject to regular sale on the market.4
This did not even involve a return to the slavery peculiar to classical antiquity. Certainly, chattel slavery had been widespread in Rome. Yet the slave could reasonably hope that, if not he himself, then his children or grandchildren would be able to achieve freedom and even an eminent social position. Now, by contrast, his fate increasingly took the form of a cage from which it was impossible to escape. In the first half of the eighteenth century, numerous English colonies in America enacted laws that made the emancipation of slaves increasingly difficult.
The Quakers lamented the advent of what seemed to them a new and repugnant system. Slavery for a determinate period of time, and the other forms of more or less servile labour hitherto in force, tended to give way to slavery in the strict sense, to a permanent, hereditary condemnation of a whole people, who were denied any prospect of change and improvement, any hope of freedom.6 Again, in a statute of 1696, South Carolina declared that it could not prosper ‘without the labor and service of negroes and other slaves’.7 The barrier separating service and slavery was as yet not well defined, and the institution of slavery had not yet appeared in all its harshness. But the process that increasingly reduced slaves to chattels, and established the racial character of the condition they were subjected to, was already underway. An unbridgeable gulf separated blacks from the free population. Ever stricter laws prohibited interracial sexual and marital relations, making them a crime. We are now dealing with a hereditary caste of slaves, defined and recognizable by the colour of their skin. In this sense, in John Wesley’s view, ‘American slavery’ was ‘the vilest that ever saw the sun’.8
As I was saying yesterday, the British were horribly inhumane, yet the Americans managed to outdo the British in cruelty.
The American Revolution was fought not to end this particularly vile form of slavery but to preserve it by ejecting the British who opposed it.
To be fair to Americans, it’s not just about the freedom to enslave Black people that drove the American lust for a war of independence. American war-lust is also driven by the insatiable urge to possess the freedom to murder all the Native Americans—you can’t get empty farmland to be worked by Black slaves if those lands are still occupied by living, breathing Native Americans.
From page 17 and 19 of Losurdo’s Liberalism:
The English colonists’ revolt in America was accompanied by another major controversy. For a long time, like that of the blacks, the Indians’ fate had not in the slightest unsettled the deep conviction of the English on either side of the Atlantic that they were the chosen people of liberty. In both cases, they appealed to Locke, for whom (as we shall see) the natives of the New World approximated to ‘wild beasts’. But with the eruption of the conflict between colonies and mother country, the exchange of accusations also encompassed the problem of the relationship with the redskins. England, Paine proclaimed in 1776, was ‘that barbarous and hellish power, which hath stirred up the Indians and the Negroes to destroy us’ or ‘to cut the throats of the freemen of America’.77
We have seen Paine accuse the London government of seeking an alliance with Indian cut throats. In reality, warned an English commander in 1783, it was precisely the now victorious colonists who ‘were preparing to cut the throats of the Indians’. The victors’ behaviour (added another officer) was ‘shocking to humanity’.86 This was an enduring controversy. In the later nineteenth century a historian descended from a family of loyalists who had taken refuge in Canada argued as follows: Did the rebels claim to be the descendants of those who had disembarked in America to escape intolerance and stay loyal to the cause of liberty? In fact, reversing the policy of the British Crown, which aimed at conversion, the Puritans had initiated a massacre of the redskins, assimilated to ‘Canaanites and Amalekites’ that is, stocks marked out by the Old Testament for erasure from the face of the earth. This was ‘one of the darkest pages in English colonial history’, which was followed by the even more repugnant one written during the American Revolution, when the rebel colonists engaged in ‘the entire destruction of the Six Indian Nations’ that had remained loyal to England: ‘by an order which, we believe, has no parallel in the annals of any civilized nation, [Congress] commands the complete destruction of those people as a nation … including women and children’.87
Oh, the irony of Americans complaining about Israelis emulating the Americans by calling themselves the chosen people!
Losurdo isn’t the only one who holds such an opinion of America. Samir Amin does too:
The first phase of this devastating enterprise was organized around the conquest of the Americas, in the framework of the mercantilist system of Atlantic Europe at the time. The net result was the destruction of the Indian civilizations and their Hispanicization- Christianization, or simply the total genocide on which the United States was built. The fundamental racism of the Anglo-Saxon colonists explains why this model was reproduced elsewhere, in Australia, in Tasmania (the most complete genocide in history), and in New Zealand. For whereas the Catholic Spaniards acted in the name of the religion that had to be imposed on conquered peoples, the Anglo-Protestants took from their reading of the Bible the right to wipe out the “infidels.” The infamous slavery of the Blacks, made necessary by the extermination of the Indians—or their resistance—briskly took over to ensure that the useful parts of the continent were “turned to account.” No one today has any doubt as to the real motives for all these horrors or is ignorant of their intimate relation to the expansion of mercantile capital. Nevertheless, the contemporary Europeans accepted the ideological discourse that justified them, and the voices of protest—that of Las Casas, for example—did not find many sympathetic listeners.
The disastrous results of this first chapter of world capitalist expansion produced, some time later, the forces of liberation that challenged the logics that produced them. The first revolution of the Western Hemisphere was that of the slaves of Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) at the end of the eighteenth century, followed more than a century later by the Mexican revolution of the decade of 1910, and fifty years after that by the Cuban revolution. And if I do not cite here either the famous “American revolution” or that of the Spanish colonies that soon followed, it is because those only transferred the power of decision from the metropolis to the colonists so that they could go on doing the same thing, pursue the same project with even greater brutality, but without having to share the profits with the “mother country.”
… …
But let these dams give way, and the unilateral ideology of the rights of the individual—whether in the popularized versions of Sade or Nietsche, or in the American version—can only produce horror and, if pushed to its limits, autocracy—hard (fascist) or soft.
Marx underestimated this danger, I think. Perhaps out of concern not to encourage any illusions stemming from an addiction to the past, he may not have seen all the reactionary potential in the bourgeois ideology of the individual. Witness his preference for the American society, on the pretext that it did not suffer from the vestiges of a feudal past that handicapped progress in Europe. I want to suggest, on the contrary, that Europe’s feudal past accounts for some of the relatively positive characteristics that argue in its favor. Should not the degree of violence that dominates daily life in the United States, which is out of all proportion to what exists in Europe, be attributed precisely to the absence of premodern antecedents in the United States?
Even greater brutality. Even greater brutality!
The evidence for the Americans’ love for slavery and genocide (and mendacity) is in the 1776 Declaration of Independence itself.
Once again, from page 17 of Losurdo’s Liberalism:
Similarly, the Declaration of Independence berated George III for having not only ‘excited domestic insurrections amongst us’ by black slaves, but also ‘endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions’.
The ultimate hypocrisy of the Americans fighting for their own liberation from the British while at the same time putting down “domestic insurrections”—revolts from Black slaves fighting for liberation from American slavery.
The ultimate act of lying by inverting facts, with the Americans accusing the Native Americans of attempting a genocide on the Americans when history eventually showed the whole world that it was the Americans who exterminated the Native Americans.
Death to America
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Posted by: All Under Heaven | May 2 2026 8:12 utc | 127
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