On Sunday, the New York Times published a lengthy story detailing how President Donald Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick personally negotiated to secure an agreement with Kazakhstan to give an American company access to "the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods."

To nobody's surprise, two of Trump's sons and Lutnick's sons became financially involved with the project just in time to benefit big time.

Within weeks of the [] negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project.
Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.
The Kazakh deal was ultimately signed on Nov. 6, six days after the investment involving the Trump sons and their partners, which was not publicly disclosed at the time.

How about that! The Trump and Lutnick boys were able to get financially involved in the deal being negotiated and agreed to by their government official fathers just before the deal was signed and before it became known to the public! What fortunate timing!

Before the deal, the Trump administration granted preliminary approval for as much as $1.6 billion in government financing for the mining company.

According to the New York Times,

The arrangement is hardly an outlier. One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project.
All 14 of these companies have either benefited directly from offers of financial assistance from the Trump administration, or have pending permit applications before the Commerce Department, which Mr. Lutnick oversees, The Times found. The total amount of federal funding that the Trump administration has provided or is considering providing to the companies exceeds $8.9 billion, according to public statements by the companies and federal government.

It sure is heartening to see rich men who are supposed to be working for the people and in their best interests make sure their families make oodles of money from contracts funded with tax dollars and using non-public information.

But why stop with mining deals? According to the New York Times,

This emboldened mixing of federal policymaking and personal business began shortly after Mr. Trump returned to office last year, when the Trump and Lutnick sons played a role in billions of dollars of cryptocurrency deals as the fathers helped set policies that supercharged the crypto industry.

This dovetails nicely with another New York Times piece from Tuesday.

President Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses, a new filing shows.
All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

How inspiring to see top government officials and their families launch and invest in untraceable shadow currency schemes while simultaneously using the authority granted to them by the people to boost those schemes so they and their loved ones can make a few quick (billions of) bucks! A true underdog story.

But at least Trump does not take his $400,000 yearly salary!

I am a bit of a broken record, but the corruption is seemingly endless. Trump, some of his top officials, and their families shamelessly and often openly use government positions and connections to enrich themselves.

The cryptocurrency schemes are even more noxious than they may seem at first blush. Not only do they involve exploitation of public office to unethically enrich themselves and those closest to them, and not only do they often benefit Trump and co. at the expense of his foolish supporters losing money investing in them, they are perfect ways for companies and foreign nations to secretly bribe Trump.

One of the main selling points of cryptocurrencies is that the transactions are largely untraceable. In other words, if a domestic company or foreign nation wants Trump to subvert American interests in favor of their interests, they can "invest" a hefty sum into a Trump-created (or backed) cryptocurrency and let him know with a wink and a nod.

The president and his top officials are supposed act in the best interest of the country and its people. It is hard to believe they are doing that when they and their families make billions of dollars due directly to their decisions as top government officials. This is largely why prior presidents sold off their investments and business interests (or at least put them in blind trusts controlled by other uninterested parties). At best this type of shady self-dealing looks terrible and calls into question their ethics and priorities. More likely, it just signals deep and total corruption or even treason.

Unfortunately, none of this will matter. Trump's supporters will largely stand behind him and excuse or even justify the behavior. He will pardon anyone involved who may have violated federal law. Republicans in Congress will not grow a spine and impeach and remove Trump (unless maybe Republican support for Trump ever seriously drops off). And the Supreme Court essentially ruled that Trump can never be held criminally liable for anything he does in his role as president.

Meanwhile, those of us not inexplicably under Trump's spell have to watch a sleezy, transparent conman degrade the office of the presidency and make decisions based not on what helps the country and its people but on what fattens his and his immoral family's wallets. And we have to wonder what decisions are bought by foreign nations under the table.

No wonder American patriotism is at historic lows as we approach our 250th anniversary.