The $ons Also Rises
How the corruption of autocrats' offspring is a feature not a bug, and how history shows the inevitable unhappy endings of this much greed
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The $ons Also Rises
Twenty years ago, when I was interviewing the victims of a Trump-fronted pyramid scheme — the slippery grift ACN, which spawned a class-action lawsuit against Trump, his children, and the Trump Organization, just one of 4,000 lawsuits against the Trump family — I could sense the cognitive dissonance in some of the victims. They could not understand how they lost their life savings on something that Trump said was a great business opportunity.
They so wanted to believe in the myth created by NBC producers and Tony Schwartz, who wrote Art of the Deal, and it was very difficult for them to understand that they’d been conned.
In January 2024, a federal judge tossed out their case involving the Trumps and the multilevel marketing scheme with American Communications Network (ACN).
The investors had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars — duped by Trump’s endorsement of the pyramid scheme in promotional videos and on the The Celebrity Apprentice. The judge dismissed the suit against Trump and his children, Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, under the federal racketeering law, kicking it down to individual states, where the attorney for the plaintiffs Robera Kaplan said she would continue to pursue it.
Kaplan, who successfully represented E. Jean Carroll in her rape lawsuit against Trump, and is the reason we can refer to Trump as both felon and “adjudicated rapist.” But yesterday, a federal appeals court has ruled that Trump will not have to pay the $83.3 million defamation award to Carroll until the US supreme court either reviews the case or rejects an appeal.
It’s important to not memory hole the fact that New York shut down the Trump Foundation for “functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Trump” and its “shocking pattern of illegality” and how Trump and his children were banned from sitting on the boards of other charities, and forced to take a remedial class on how charities work.
In 2019, I reported how the most lucrative family business was campaigning.
And let’s not forget that former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg was sentenced to five months in New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex, for perjury he committed in a 2023 civil fraud case.
According to a 2024 CBS report:
Weisselberg pleaded guilty to two felony counts of perjury, admitting he gave false testimony regarding the size of former President Donald Trump’s triplex apartment in New York during a July deposition. Prosecutors originally charged Weisselberg with three more counts of perjury, but Weisselberg’s plea agreement allowed him to avoid pleading guilty to those charges… The trial revolved around allegations by New York State Attorney General Letitia James that Trump, two of his sons, Weisselberg and others falsely inflated valuations of Trump Organization properties. A judge ordered the former president to pay more than $450 million, including interest, an amount attributed to “ill-gotten gains” from the scheme.
Weisselberg was found liable for fraud and ordered to pay $1 million plus interest. During the fraud trial, he acknowledged receiving $2 million in severance after leaving the Trump Organization. Weisselberg committed perjury soon after he was released from jail following a previous guilty plea in a separate 2022 criminal tax fraud case against the company. A jury in that case found two subsidiaries of the Trump Organization guilty of 17 felony counts.
It is important to never forget that Trump is a felon with a history of criminal behavior by his family and those in his orbit.
When I wrote the American Monster series, I noted the patterns between fathers and sons — many of the fathers of the criminals I profiled who are accelerating global fascism are criminals themselves.
So perhaps it’s not surprising to see that Trump’s sons, both by blood and marriage, are following in his corrupt footsteps. Twenty years ago, when I was interviewing Trump scam victims, Jared Kushner was visiting his father in a federal prison camp in Alabama. Charles Kushner is a convicted felon, who pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. He hired a prostitute to honey trap his brother-in-law. Meanwhile, his crime boss son is doing powerpoint “master plans” on turning Gaza into a “coastal tourism zone” with “180 skyscrapers.”
And don’t forget that Citizens for Ethics reported that Kushner and Ivanka Trump made up to $640 million in outside income during Trump’s first presidency
The $ons Also Rises
It should be wildly unsurprising that an autocrat like Trump has sons who are profiteering from his installation into the White House.
Echoes of David Frum’s quip in How To Build An Autocracy from 2017, “If this were happening in Honduras, we would know what to call it.”
Just a few recent items on the Trump sons’ grift:
War profiteering: A robotics startup backed by Eric Trump, Foundation Future Industries, garnered a $24 million defense contract with the Marine Corps
Drone Investments: Donald Jr. and Eric Trump invested in a drone start-up — Powerus — competing for contracts under the Pentagon’s $1.1 billion “Drone Dominance” initiative
Mining Interests: A shell company supported by the brothers sought an additional $400 million (on top of $1.6 billion in existing support) for a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan
Digital Grift: Estimates suggest the Trump family has amassed billions in digital assets, with crypto now potentially making up over 70% of their total net worth.
Gold Phone Grift: Reports indicate the family took in approximately $60 million in deposits for “Gold Trump Phones” that were never delivered to buyers.
The sons also met with officials and leaders from at least eight countries, including Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Israel, and Qatar, to seek new business for the Trump Organization.
Lawmakers have called it corruption in plain sight, and it follows a long pattern of dictator offspring who massively enrich themselves.
Unlike 2016, when Trump came into the presidency broke — he’s a real billionaire now. But he is also a convicted felon.
And spoiler alert: these stories do not generally end well.
Let’s take a look at other dictator sons.
Oleksandr Yanukovych
Putin puppet Viktor Yanukovych, who had the same gray cardinal grooming him for office as Trump — Paul Manafort — was convicted of treason in absentia. But before being run out of Ukraine in 2014 and fleeing to Moscow, he managed to steal billions of dollars. His son Oleksandr Yanukovych, made billions selling coal from Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories to Turkey.
According to Ukraine24:
Viktor Yanukovych ran the Ukrainian government like a criminal organization, enabling grand corruption and profiting from diverse schemes.
Since being ousted by Ukraine in 2014, both father and son found asylum in Russia but are still exploiting Ukraine’s coal-rich regions by utilising the Kremlin’s brutal occupation for their financial gains.
Oleksandr is linked to the largest exporter of illegally mined coal from Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, making millions of dollars by shipping nearly half a million tons abroad using an offshore scheme, a recent investigation by Istories revealed.
So much effort in authoritarian regimes is spent trying to commit as much theft as possible.
As Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in 2024:
The essence of authoritarianism is getting away with crime, and corruption must be at the center of any analysis of how dictatorships operate. A large percentage of actions authoritarians take are about covering up corruption: demonizing and jailing journalists, judges, prosecutors and investigators, inventing narratives about their selflessness and purity, and establishing “inner sanctums” composed of cronies, sycophants, and family members who will keep their secrets, dispose of their enemies, and share in the profits from illicit activities.
As she documents the son-in-laws as “proxy for the dictator,” the fascism scholar notes that Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano “was widely hated by Italians for trying to be a ‘mini-Duce.’ As Mussolini’s biographer Laura Fermi wrote, Ciano’s nickname was ‘the Jaw’ because “when Mussolini thrust out his chin, Ciano thrust his own half an inch farther.’”
And yet, Ciano met death by firing squad.
Sons of dictators may feel like they’re above the law, as they circumvent regulations while siphoning off a country’s wealth. But law may have another opinion.
Teodorin Obiang
Teodorin Obiang of Equatorial Guinea is the son of long-ruling dictator Teodoro Obiang, who is notable for stealing state oil revenue to fund his lavish lifestyle, which included California mansions and private jets, the world’s largest Michael Jackson memorabilia collection, and a worldwide trail of corruption, embezzlement and sanctions, limiting where he can drive his many Lambos.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi
The second son of Muammar Gaddafi, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, used Libya’s oil wealth and state-owned businesses to accumulate an estimated fortune in the tens of billions. His father met an unpleasant ending. And Saif was assassinated in February.
Gamal and Alaa Mubarak
The sons of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak — Gamal and Alaa Mubarak — built massive business empires and through corrupt privatization deals and insider trading. Both spent a decade fighting embezzlement and corruptions charges.
Kim Jong Un
Kim Jong Un — the son of North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung — took control of the country in 1994 following the death of his father, and attributed to his mismanagement, North Korea was thrown into a famine that left millions to die, while he is worth an estimated $5 billion.
Marko Milosevic
The son of Yugoslav president and dictator Slobodan Milosevic — Marko — had a large number of business fronts, obscuring the smuggling fuel and drugs, according to reports. After his father’s arrest, he fled to Moscow, like Yanukovych’s son, to avoid being arrested and tried for treason.
More Bad Apples
Along with corruption, ill-gotten gains, assassinations, and infinite criminal cases, sons of dictators often end up in prison. One of 40 confirmed children of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, Faisal Wangita had a history of fraud and spent five years in jail for his role in a mob-style killing which included hammers, knives, and bats. In 1990, the son of former Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu, known as Nicu and the chosen successor, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for ordering troops to fire on a crowd of protesters, killing 91 of them. His parents were killed by firing squad in 1989.
The eldest son of Iraq’s fifth president Saddam Hussein — Uday Hussein — was such a creep even his murderous dad didn’t like his behavior. According to reports, Uday clubbed Saddam’s food tester and bodyguard to death in a rage in 1988. Uday was jailed for the murder, released 40 days later by his father. Uday‘s reputation as a sadistic rapist, torturer, and murderer was only eclipsed by his lavish lifestyle. He and his brother Qusay were killed by the US military a four-hour gun battle in 2003.
Despite the media headlines showing the toothy grins of the Trump boys, look past the images to the real stories of sons of dictators that came before to see how this story will likely end.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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Thank you, as always, Heidi, for shining a light into these dark and disgusting corners despite the real psychological toll it must take to do so. My dentist really wants me to use a mouth guard at night, but every time I read an article like this I feel like I should be wearing one 24/7.
What's even more disturbing than the absolutely vile and brazen corruption of Trump (and his equally shameless circle) is the near-total absence of meaningful pushback. Not long ago, a tiny fraction of their venality would have taken down a politician or public figure. But the sheer volume of the incessant lawlessness in this confederacy of dunces seems to overwhelm our distracted republic’s ability to even register it, let alone respond.