When it comes to supporting its public schools, Florida ranks dead last in the nation. Not only was it dead last of all states, it was at the very bottom in 2024 and 2025.
Florida betrays its state constitution, which contains a clear mandate to create and protect strong public schools.
Article IX, Section 1(a) states:
“The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education…”
Under the misleadership of Republican politicians like Jeb Bush and Ron DeSantis, Florida has diverted billions of dollars to privately governed charter schools and unaccountable vouchers for private and religious schools and home schooling. Bush and DeSantis have ignored and abandoned Florida’s state constitution.
And among all the states, Florida’s school rank dead last.
Based on the NPE report Public Schooling in America 2026, Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for public Education, wrote:
This is the third consecutive year that Florida’s statehouse has earned last place when it comes to supporting public schools. Florida’s lawmakers don’t merely encourage privatization through charters, vouchers, and homeschools; they actively engineer conditions that undermine public schools and worsen the environment for teaching and learning.
The damage from Florida’s universal voucher program is staggering. Close to four billion dollars in state education funding now flows annually to voucher programs — nearly one in four state education dollars diverted away from public schools, including to families whose children never set foot in a public school. And the funding mechanism puts the burden directly on school districts, which must absorb the loss.
Meanwhile, Florida continuously revises its school rating standards to ensure more public schools are labeled as failing, while simultaneously incentivizing and subsidizing charter expansion. Its Schools of Hope program even allows charters to colonize unused space inside public school buildings. Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz teamed up with a Florida billionaire to help draft the enabling legislation, then used it to muscle her chain into the Miami charter market with generous public funding in tow.
Fifty percent of Florida’s charter sector is run by for-profit operators — one of the highest shares in the nation. Only Michigan has more. Florida is home to Academica, the largest for-profit charter chain in the country, and to Charter Schools USA. Both profit from the real estate they build and lease back to their own branded schools.
Charter schools claim to be equally open to all students. That is not the case in Florida, which lost points for the numerous enrollment privileges its laws permit. Florida is one of a small number of states that allow company-based charter schools. The Villages, the largest retirement community in the country, has its own charter school, and it functions less like a school of choice than a company store. The school was created by the community’s developer, and at least one parent must be employed by The Villages or a company that services it. If that parent quits or is fired, the child must leave immediately. For a low-wage service worker who might want to change jobs, the school becomes a trap — a reason to stay put rather than pursue something better.
Florida sinks to the bottom not only because of its weak charter and voucher laws and the financial incentives it offers to expand privatization, but because it actively undermines its public schools through policy and funding decisions at every turn. Florida lost every possible point on school funding — whether measured by cost-of-living-adjusted teacher salaries, equitable funding distribution, or funding based on capacity to pay. It has low teacher satisfaction, high student-to-teacher and student-to-counselor ratios, weak anti-bullying laws, and it still permits corporal punishment.
Of 102 possible points, Florida disgracefully earned only 14. You can read our full NPE 2026 report card here.
Scott Dworkin runs a Democratic activist’s blog, raising money for candidates and exposing Trump scandals and grifts. I subscribe and encourage you to do the same.
A paper trail of federal money keeps showing up right behind the Trump name. Don Jr. joined drone maker Unusual Machines’ advisory board in November 2024—and within a year, one of the company’s largest orders ever was placed by the US Army.
Last August, Don Jr.’s firm, 1789 Capital, bought into a startup called Vulcan Elements; three months later it landed a $620 million loan, the biggest in the Pentagon’s lending office history. ProPublica found the loan was initiated by senior White House official Peter Navarro—a friend of Don Jr.’s—and pushed through in a matter of weeks, sending Vulcan’s value skyrocketing from $200 million toward $2 billion.
The sons swear their names have nothing to do with it, but the record says otherwise: roughly $3.7 billion in federal money went to at least ten companies tied to the brothers since the regime took power. That’s your April taxes, meant to defend the country, rerouted to whoever hired the right last name.
Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is now demanding the Pentagon’s inspector general investigate: “his sons are cashing in on defense contracts funded by hardworking taxpayers.”
They built this in the dark to work in secret, betting nobody would ever turn on the lights. The investigation just started, the receipts are already public, and every dollar gets traced. This fight is only beginning.
DOGE IS DEAD. THE DAMAGE ISN’T.
DOGE’s mandate expired July 4, the end date written into Trump’s own executive order. Elon Musk swore he’d cut $2 trillion. DOGE’s website claims $215 billion—a number they haven’t updated since January and that budget experts don’t buy. Even taking their figure at face value, that’s a dime in cuts for every dollar promised.
Molly Hardy was the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 2024 employee of the year. DOGE laid her off anyway. Then in March, the agency came crawling back, emailing to ask if she’d return. She turned them down—not bitter, just clear-eyed: “It didn’t feel good. It just felt really sad.”
She’s not alone, and that’s the part they didn’t see coming. All over the government, the wreckage is being reversed: HHS fired 10,000 workers and is now scrambling to hire 12,000. Agencies that bragged about the chainsaw are begging people to come back. Asked if shrinking the workforce was even still the goal, OPM chief Scott Kupor admitted: “I’m not hearing that.”
And when Congress asked what DOGE actually accomplished, budget director Russell Vought had nothing to show: “We have no plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report.”
The people who took a chainsaw to our government don’t get to slink off without a full accounting. We’ll see to that.
The FBI has assigned 200 agents to pore through the ballots cast in the Presidential election in Georgia in 2020. You may recall that in 2020, Georgia was controlled by Republicans. In January 2, 2021, Trump called Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger and asked him to find 11,780 votes, which was one more than Joe Biden had. Raffensberger wouldn’t do it. The Georgia votes were counted and recounted three times, once by hand. In all three recounts, Trump lost. But Trump is still searching for proof that he won.
What a sore loser!
The Associated Press reported:
ATLANTA (AP) — The FBI has asked its field offices across the country to dedicate more than 200 staffers to its investigation of the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County.
A memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press calls for the FBI to “surge” 260 investigative analysts and staff operations specialists to the effort, which it described as a “priority investigation.”
It said each of them is to conduct a check of an estimated 708 records by July 17. While the memo does not describe the investigation, people familiar with the matter who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal decision-making confirmed the request was to help with the Georgia 2020 election investigation.
FBI agents in January seized hundreds of boxes containing ballots and other documents related to the 2020 election in Georgia’s most populous county, which is heavily Democratic and includes most of the city of Atlanta. A Fulton County spokesperson declined to comment citing a pending investigation. The contents of the memo were first reported by MS NOW.
President Donald Trump and his allies have made false claims that widespread election fraud cost him the 2020 election. Georgia’s votes in the 2020 presidential race were counted three times, including once by hand, and each count affirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s win.
The Justice Department has previously said it is investigating “irregularities that occurred during the 2020 presidential election in the County.”
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, was the author of the recent report Public Schooling in America: Our 2026 Report Card on the States. The subtitle: THE BEST AND THE WORST STATEHOUSES FOR SUPPORTING PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THEIR STUDENTS.
She wrote recently to explain why Ohio received a low grade:
Ohio lost more points on privatization in the NPE Report Card than any other state — more than Florida, more than Arizona. Its charter and voucher policies are among the most expansive and least accountable in the nation. The only reason Ohio does not rank at the very bottom is that it continues to fund its public schools at a relatively adequate level. That margin is shrinking.
The charter sector tells a particularly troubling story. Half of all charter schools in Ohio are operated by for-profit companies — an unusually high share even by national standards. Yet nearly half of all charter schools that have ever opened with enrollment in the state have since closed, a closure rate of 49 percent. These are not isolated failures. They reflect a system designed with too few guardrails and too little accountability.
A significant portion of these for-profit schools are credit recovery operations and online schools — low-cost, maximum-profit models held to lower academic standards than traditional public schools. Nearly one in three charter students in Ohio — 30 percent — attends a virtual school or an institution where instruction is delivered primarily online.
What explains so much low-quality supply? Ohio’s authorizing structure is a central culprit. The state permits multiple authorizers, including nonprofits that collect millions in authorizing fees and have a financial incentive to approve and retain schools regardless of performance.
Ohio also has more voucher programs than any other state in the country — eight in total — further diverting public dollars away from the students and communities that depend on public schools.
If Ohio continues on its current trajectory, the consequences are predictable: further erosion of public school funding, further decline in the rankings, and fewer educational options as the neighborhood public school choice disappears.
The elected board of the Los Angeles Unified School District recently chose Andres Chait, a veteran educator, as its new superintendent, succeeding Alberto Carvalho, who is under investigation in relation to an AI contract.
Chait has served in the LAUSD for nearly three decades. He started as a kindergarten teacher and rose through the ranks. His own children are students in the district.
From my experience, I think this is a wise decision. Many big-city districts went through a long period of disruptive reform, in which they selected inexperienced outsiders to “shake up” and “reform” the district. Most of these disruptions failed, as the outsider fired experienced educators and spent at least one year learning what educators do. Alan Bersin in San Diego, Joel Klein in New York City, and Michelle Rhee in the District of Columbia come to mind, though there were many more. The Broad Superintendent’s Academy was dedicated to churning out such superintendents, indoctrinated in the belief that schools with low scores should be closed, not helped, that state takeovers were a cure, not a harsh and futile measure, that veteran teachers were slackers.
Choosing a respected insider guarantees stability, not disruption.
Rhode Island welcomed charters under former Governor Gina Raimondo. When she left to become President Biden’s Secretary of Commerce, lieutenant governor Dan McKee took her place. He was widely viewed as a strong supporter of charter schools. He was closely associated with the creation of Rhode Island’s mayoral academies, especially the Blackstone Valley Prep network. But this year, he signed legislation pausing the approval of new charter schools for three years. He said that declining enrollment and funding challenges warranted the pause.
This was awkward for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (sic), which had honored him in 2009 as a Charter School Champion. Taken aback, the Alliance did something unprecedented. It withdrew his award!
Today, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools withdrew its recognition of Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee as a Charter School Champion, marking the first time in the organization’s 21-year history this award has been rescinded.
This happened after McKee signed a bill “that enacts a moratorium on public charter schools for three years, lowers the statewide cap from 35 to 28, and prohibits already approved schools from opening.”
Think about it: 9.9% of Rhode Island’s students are enrolled in charter schools. Some are in private and religious schools. Probably 80-85% attend public schools. Where should the Governor’s priorities lie?
This is a rare and unusual move in the U.S. given how aggressively neoliberals have been imposing school privatization on the nation for the last few decades. It is also noteworthy that both chambers of the State’s legislature overwhelmingly approved the three-year moratorium on these privately-operated schools. Opposition to charter schools has been steadily growing across the country over the years.
Not surprisingly, many business groups, charter school advocates, and even some democrats tried to pressure the Governor and legislature not to approve such a moratorium. The fact that many democrats still support privately-operated charter schools goes against the mainstream narrative that it is mostly or only republicans who support school privatization.
Whether this moratorium decision by Governor McKee and the state legislature is based on principle or cynical maneuvering by certain factions of the rich against other competing factions, the moratorium is still a positive step forward for the public interest and public schools. More charter schools always means more problems.
We have read all about the scandals of Graham Platner. We know about the women he dated, the women he texted, and his tattoo. The media has written about all of them in detail.
What we don’t know is about the financial scandals of his opponent, Senator Susan Collins. Her husband is a lobbyist, and she has lovingly taken care of his business.
The Founding Fathers had a finely honed sense of the corroding power of corruption. They wrote prohibitions on self-enrichment and the pull of bribery directly into the Constitution on three separate occasions, banning foreign and domestic gifts, changes to presidential compensation during one’s period in office, and appointments for members of Congress that could be remunerative. They believed that someone treated well by a foreign potentate or stateside special interest would be naturally inclined to benefit them, if even unconsciously, and that a wall needed to be constructed to guard against this.
That the Supreme Court has directly or indirectly nullified these one by one is a tragedy. But the court of public opinion, at least as mediated by gatekeepers of information, has also separated what counts as corruption from what counts as a political scandal. Donald Trump personally earning $1.4 billion from a family cryptocurrency business that benefits from his administration’s lenient crypto policies (much of those crypto purchases coming directly from a foreign government) is less well known to the public than whatever wild thing he said on his personal social media site the night before.
By the same token, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a household name, and Darializa Avila Chevalier will soon be, because of what they say, or once said. Thomas Daffron is not a household name.
Daffron is Susan Collins’s husband. He was also a registered lobbyist and eventually became chief operating officer of a K Street consulting firm named Jefferson Consulting, prior to and after marrying Collins. This firm received $76 million in government contracts for acquisition and improvement consulting during Daffron’s tenure from 2006 to 2016. Much of it came after he became COO, and especially after Collins wrote a contracting reform bill in 2007, parts of which boosted Jefferson Consulting.
Some of the connections appeared rather clear. To use one example, the Collins bill required a strategic plan for acquisition at the Federal Acquisition Institute, and Jefferson billed the Federal Acquisition Institute for its strategic plan. This pattern repeated; the bill put in rules mandating precisely the services Jefferson Consulting provided.
This is not a new revelation. It was released on the eve of Collins’s last re-election campaign six years ago. Collins’s response was that Daffron, the man she has been married to since 2012 and has known since the 1970s, never officially lobbied her. Collins won re-election and that was that, until her Democratic opponent for Senate this year, Graham Platner, brought it up as part of an anti-corruption agenda he released a week ago. He proposed the “Collins Rule”: Any senator whose spouse or the firm where they work receives government contracts should have to recuse themselves from voting or oversight work on that contract.
Collins was apoplectic. She tweeted that the claim was “outrageous and false,” and that she was defamed as a criminal. (Platner replied that he didn’t say it was criminal, but that it should be.) She sent her campaign manager to stand outside Platner’s press event and rebut the charges. The campaign manager said that money is delivered to contractors through the executive branch and not the Senate, eliding the fact that the bill Collins wrote benefited the firm her good friend and future spouse worked at.
For six years, this has been a nonstory, because we don’t have a political culture that imprints this kind of financial machination and leveraging of political power as a scandal. It’s either too complicated or just politics, and people move on.
Scandals are reserved for old internet comments and personal failings. Of these, Platner has plenty. When I talked to him last week, I mentioned that he’s become like a figure in Homer’s epics who is always preceded with an epithet: the “scandal-plagued” Graham Platner.
He’s talked about these scandals countless times, and I don’t need to rehash them here. But you can believe both that personal character is important in assessing elected officials and make room within that definition of character to cover how their actions in office affect their personal bank accounts.
“We’ve been working within a political system that for so long now, this form of self-dealing and self-enrichment has become intrinsic to the system itself,” Platner told me. “A lot of people who cover this stuff have created this framework in which that kind of thing is not even worthy of discussion … We write off actual scandal, legalized corruption, because we’ve been so immunized to it.”
This may seem solely like a media critique, and yes: It’s partially that. Headlines like “Platner Tests Democrats’ Tolerance for Scandal” are rarely matched by ones like “Collins Tests Republicans’ Tolerance for Self-Dealing.” But that takes everyone but the media off the hook.
Platner and Collins are locked in a virtually tied race, according to recentpolling. Other statewide Maine races show the Democrat comfortably in front. Part of Collins’s still being in the game is due to her experience and durability, but part of it is the way in which this definition of political scandal is massaged and shaped.
In her career, Susan Collins hasn’t faced a drumbeat of questions about her consistent violations of the congressional stock trading disclosure laws that she co-authored. She hasn’t had to answer many queries about a net worth that has more than doubled since 2012, after her marriage to Daffron. She doesn’t respond to reporters about her family stock holdings in Amazon and UnitedHealth and Visa, and the votes she makes affecting those businesses.
She isn’t forced to explain why she switched her vote to allow a tax break for private equity managers to stand, and how now private equity managers are supporting her re-election with millions of dollars. She hasn’t said much about the 100 billionaires who are funding a super PAC on her behalf (run by a lobbyist whom Daffron recently consulted for) that has spent $9 million in attack ads just through the end of last month. There’s been little about how one of the billionaires is a private equity mogul who destroyed paper mills in Maine and put residents out of work.
We all know chapter and verse about Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo, his texts to women other than his wife early in his marriage, and allegations of misconduct from former girlfriends (that one he vociferously denies). These are the kinds of revelations that are grist for gossip. We don’t have a mentality that puts financial scandal and personal scandal on the same plane. Old tweets are easy to cover, but they’re also easy to understand and to render judgments in ways not applied to things that take more consideration.
The people who decide what does and doesn’t matter in politics also don’t speak the language of no-bid contracts, pay-to-play deals, and family benefits from contractswith the same zeal reserved for putting an old tweet on a screen. Maybe that’s because corruption hits both ways and can blow back on one’s own party, and maybe that’s because personal peccadilloes are a shortcut and time-saver.
Either way, this dearth of consideration has saddled us with this myopic definition of scandal that contributes to a disaffection with politics. If graft is seen as normal, the ability for reform and even progress feels remote.
Please open the link to finish reading this examination of the media’s double standards.
William Kristol had a storied career as a conservative and neoconservative. His father Irving Kristol (a friend of mine) was considered “the father of neoconservativism,” that is, disillusioned liberals. Bill Kristol was chief of staff to Vice-President Dan Quayle. He founded The Weekly Standard, a magazine of cutting-edge neoconservative commentary.
But he couldn’t tolerate Trump. When Trump was elected in 2020, Bill changed his party registration from Republican to Independent. In 2026, he registered as a Democrat. He is now an editor and writer at The Bulwark. What a transformation! As you will read in this article, his change of mind is more than skin-deep.
He wrote, in the same post that carried Jim Swift’s piece, the following about the indifference and arrogance of the elites:
America today has lots of hard-working immigrants, and plenty of native-born citizens who accept and respect them. But there are also plenty of Americans these days who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
I hasten to say there’s no fault in being born on third base. Indeed, all of us, whether rich or poor, who were born in today’s America might be said, in the grand historical scheme of things, to have been born on third base. A healthy American patriotism begins with acknowledgment of our good fortune, and with gratitude for what our forebears—most of whom were not born on third base—did to make our privileged lives today possible.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with also taking pride in what we and our contemporaries have accomplished. And if we sometimes overestimate our own achievements and underrate those of our predecessors—and therefore underrate our simple good fortune in being born here—well, that’s human nature, and it’s probably not worth getting all worked up about.
But what is worth getting worked up about is those who have no sympathy for others who didn’t happen to enjoy good fortune. What’s worth getting worked up about is those who have contempt for and who revel in cruelty toward the less fortunate.
There are lots of those people in America today. They include our president. They include many in his administration. They include many in the world of MAGA.
And they include Megyn Kelly, who was so proud of what she said on her show yesterday after the Supreme Court’s TPS decision that she then posted the clip on X:
Megyn sends a message to the Haitians who lost their TPS today:
“Go home! Get out! We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic, culture, and values. You being here only dilutes it for us . . . GO BACK TO FUCKING HAITI!”
Kelly thinks that “we” made America great with “our work ethic, culture, and values.” But most Americans of Kelly’s generation—and, to be clear, of mine—have had to do little in the way of heavy lifting to make America great. And is it clear that today’s culture and values are so exceptionally wonderful?
It was our forebears who made America great. Many of them were immigrants and refugees, whom earlier generations of nativists treated with hostility, bigotry, and cruelty.
The rhetoric of yesterday’s Court ruling is not itself bigoted or cruel. But the policies it permits are bigoted and cruel. They are the policies of people who found themselves, mostly by good fortune, standing on third base. Many of them aren’t particularly good hitters or fast runners. But they’ve decided to protect their status by making sure no one else—especially no one else of a different skin color or background—will have a chance to get up to bat.
An anthropology professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville wrote a comment on her private Facebook page after Charlie Kirk was murdered. She was not sorry. Her post was forwarded to university officials, and she was fired.
She sued and said that the University had punished her for exercising her First Amendment rights. She won in court and was awarded $1.9 million. She did not get her job back. The university board approved the settlement. It must now be approved by the Governor and Attorney General.
The University of Tennessee at Knoxville reached a $1.9 million settlement with a former professor who was fired after she criticized slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Tamar Shirinian, who had been an anthropology professor at the university, sued the university’s chancellor, the state university system president and the faculty senate president, claiming that the school violated her constitutional rights by retaliating against her. Her lawsuit said her speech was protected by the First Amendment.
The settlement, which was approved Monday night in a meeting of the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees Audit and Compliance Committee, does not restore her faculty position. Some other people have prevailed in similar First Amendment cases.
A Reuters investigation found that more than 600 people were “suspended, fired, disciplined or investigated in a sweeping backlash.”
Shirinian wrote a very uncharitable comment on her Facebook page, assuming that it would be read by her circle of friends:
Shirinian wrote in a private Facebook post after the shooting, “The world is better off without him in it. Even those who are claiming to be sad for his wife and kids …. like, his kids are better off living in a world without a disgusting psychopath like him and his wife, well, she’s a sick f*#k for marrying him so I don’t care about her feelings.”
Someone forwarded her post to a state representative who had lashed out at people in higher education who were critical of Kirk’s views. Within days of the shooting, campus Chancellor Donde Plowman began termination proceedings.
Professor Shirinian promptly wrote a letter of apology to the Chancellor, saying that her comments were “ineloquent and heartless.” She said she condemned political violence; her letter was insensitive, she said, but she did not advocate political violence.
Are there no laws against conflict of interest? Nepotism?
And to think that Republicans were outraged by Hunter Biden! Whatever he did (a seat on the Burisma board; name-dropping his father in business meetings?) is chump change compared to the money-grubbing Trump boys.
Where is the outrage?
Mary Trump writes:
Donald has always insisted that his children run their businesses independently. We have been told repeatedly that there is a bright line separating the presidency from the Trump family’s financial interests. We have also been told to ignore the remarkable coincidence that, every time Donald returns to power, his family somehow discovers lucrative new industries that depend almost entirely on decisions made by the federal government.
Those coincidences are becoming increasingly difficult to believe.
Since Donald returned to the White House, his two oldest and arguably most useless sons have dramatically expanded their investments into industries that rely almost entirely on Pentagon spending and federal policy. These are not businesses they spent years building. They are not industries in which either Don Jr. or Eric has any meaningful experience. They simply happen to be some of the fastest growing sectors benefiting from the Trump regime’s priorities.
Coincidentally, of course.
Don Jr.’s venture capital firm acquired a stake in Vulcan Elements shortly before the company received a $620 million Pentagon loan. According to reporting by ProPublica, that loan was accelerated after intervention from the White House.
Eric, meanwhile, serves as Chief Strategy Advisor for a robotics company despite possessing no discernible qualifications for such a role. That same company later received a $24 million Pentagon contract.
Neither Don Jr. nor Eric serves in government.
Neither is required to comply with federal ethics rules.
Neither files public financial disclosures.
Yet both continue to profit from industries whose fortunes increasingly depend on decisions being made by the administration run by their father.
Late in 2025, the Pentagon established the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, appropriately abbreviated DAWG, to rapidly expand the military’s use of drones, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Initially funded at roughly $226 million for fiscal year 2026, the Pentagon is now requesting an astonishing $54.6 billion for fiscal year 2027.
That represents an increase of more than 24,000 percent.
It is also larger than the entire proposed budget for the United States Marine Corps.
Think about that for a moment.
The Pentagon is proposing to spend more money on autonomous warfare than on the Marine Corps itself.
And it just so happens that Donald’s two oldest sons have recently become enthusiastic investors in autonomous defense technologies.
This is what MSNBC reported:
This is a major business move and another in a series of examples of the president’s family’s dealings seeming to intersect with his administration. In this case, the Pentagon, as the war with Iran rages on. Just yesterday, drone maker PowerUS announced it will merge with a golf course holding company backed by Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr., with plans to create a new publicly traded company. That new company calls the Trumps notable investors and says it aims to support American drone industry dominance. The company is expected to compete for lucrative military contracts, trying to fill a void created after the Trump administration banned new foreign made drones on national security grounds. An investment firm joined by Donald Trump Jr. shortly after his father’s reelection has also taken a significant stake in another defense contractor supplying AI powered military technology to the Pentagon. The Trumps maintain their father is not involved in their business dealings, and the White House says President Trump acts only in the best interests of the American people.
The phrase “notable investor” deserves closer examination.
It does not mean Don Jr. or Eric possess unique knowledge about robotics, drones, artificial intelligence, or national defense.
It certainly does not suggest either of them suddenly became experts in autonomous weapons systems. It means they are the sons of the President of the United States. That relationship is their greatest asset. It is the reason companies want them associated with their businesses. It is the reason investors pay attention. And it is almost certainly the reason government contracts suddenly become easier to obtain.
No private citizen should be allowed to leverage proximity to presidential power in this way.
Yet that appears to be exactly what is happening.
Members of Congress are beginning to ask difficult questions.
Following ProPublica’s investigation into Vulcan Elements, Democratic lawmakers demanded explanations after learning that the company’s $620 million Pentagon loan was reportedly handled very differently from virtually every other application under consideration.
According to the report, Don Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, purchased a stake in Vulcan during 2025. Only months later, the Pentagon approved the largest loan ever issued through its Office of Strategic Capital.
Internal documents reportedly revealed that Vulcan’s application moved through the approval process with unusual speed after direct involvement from senior White House adviser Peter Navarro.
One anonymous Pentagon official summarized the situation bluntly.
The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.
The Pentagon insists political considerations played no role in the decision. Don Jr. likewise denies participating in securing the loan. Those denials become increasingly difficult to accept when viewed alongside the broader pattern.
One contract might be coincidence.
One investment might be luck.
One White House intervention might be explainable.
But eventually coincidences stop looking like coincidences.
They begin looking like a business model.
The deeper problem is that none of this violates the disclosure rules that govern executive branch officials because Don Jr. and Eric are not executive branch officials.
That loophole allows enormous sums of money to flow toward businesses connected to the First Family while shielding the public from understanding the true extent of their financial interests.
Transparency disappears. Accountability disappears. And public trust disappears right alongside them.
Unfortunately, this pattern does not stop with rare earth minerals or autonomous weapons.
It extends into robotics as well.
Apparently, Eric Trump has now become an expert on robotics too, a development that would be more amusing if it were not attached to Pentagon spending, military applications, and the rapidly expanding market for autonomous weapons systems.
This is what Eric Trump said in a FOX state TV Interview:
We have to win robotics in the United States of America. You had a great segment two days ago, Maria, about the robot in Beijing that was literally running marathons and beating the fastest marathoners by seven, eight minutes for a full marathon. These are in the very early days. We better be winning this race in the United States of America. We are the greatest economy in the world, and that is exactly what this company is doing. I am telling you, he is doing a phenomenal job. When you go up and interact with these robots and they fist bump you, they high five you, they follow your commands. You bring in the AI economy. It is going to change industry, it is going to change military application, it is going to change hospitality. The uses are unlimited and I think it is a very beautiful thing, but we must win this race.
What race, exactly?
The marathon the robot is running?
In what universe does the world become a better place because we have fast-running robots that can fist bump people? Although, to be fair, I would be more than happy to have robots replace Eric and Donnie.
Eric is listed as Chief Strategy Advisor, which, after listening to him speak, makes perfect sense if the strategy is to say a lot of words without demonstrating any understanding of the subject matter. In April 2026, the Pentagon awarded Foundation Future Industries a $24 million contract to test its Phantom robotic systems for military applications. That contract immediately drew attention from lawmakers concerned about potential conflicts of interest.
This is what Senator Elizabeth Warren said:
Is the Pentagon just a cash machine for Trump’s kids now? This looks like corruption in plain sight.
Yes. It does.
The Pentagon has defended the contracting process and has not alleged wrongdoing by Eric or the company. Of course it has not. This is Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon. Expecting it to objectively assess whether Donald Trump’s son is benefiting from conflicts of interest is like asking Donald to fact-check his own net worth.
We need a slightly more objective entity to decide whether there is wrongdoing here.
In May 2026, Ranking Member Robert Garcia wrote a letter to the Department of Defense laying out the concerns with unusual clarity.
Eric and Donnie’s purchases, consultancies, and advisory roles create unprecedented intertwining of Donald’s personal financial interests with U.S. policy and national security. Each new venture opens new opportunities to direct DOD funds to the first family’s pockets, and the Trump administration appears to be taking advantage of those opportunities. Such actions raise concerns that DOD is rewarding companies with contracts for recruiting a Trump family member into their ownership group or directly onto their payroll. Such companies have amassed over $725 million in loans, grants, and awards since Donald took office.
No kidding.
The coincidences are mind-boggling.
The Pentagon maintains that its decisions are based on merit, which is a difficult claim to take seriously when Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense. His appointment alone is evidence that merit is not exactly the organizing principle of this administration.
Because neither Eric nor Donnie is subject to federal disclosure requirements, the public has very limited visibility into the scale of their financial exposure. That is precisely how this kind of corruption is allowed to happen. The President’s children can invest in, advise, or promote companies that stand to benefit from federal contracts, while the American people are left guessing how much money they are making and how directly their father’s administration may be helping them make it.
This is the Trump family business model in its purest form. Find an industry dependent on government action. Attach the Trump name to a company operating in that space. Let the machinery of government create the opening. Then insist there is nothing to see when the money begins flowing.
The problem is not merely that Eric and Donnie are unqualified. That has always been the least surprising part of the story. The problem is that their lack of qualifications does not matter. In fact, it may be part of the point. Companies do not need them for their expertise. They need them for their access.
This is the same pattern that has defined Donald’s entire life. He has never understood the difference between public power and private profit because nobody ever forced him to learn it. Fred Trump built the empire. Donald inherited it, hollowed it out, sold off pieces of it, and survived only because other people kept rescuing him. Now his sons are applying the same principle to national security.
The stakes, however, are much higher this time.
We are not talking about failed casinos, licensing deals, branded steaks, or golf course scams. We are talking about drones, rare earth minerals, autonomous warfare, artificial intelligence, robotics, and Pentagon contracts. We are talking about the future of American military policy and billions of dollars in public money being routed through a system in which the president’s family appears to have direct financial interests.
There needs to be an investigation.
Someday, when we finally get through this mess, Eric and Donnie need to be held accountable, stripped of their ill-gotten gains, and, if warranted by the evidence, prosecuted. The American people should not be treated as a revenue stream for the Trump family. The Pentagon should not function as another Trump family ATM. National security should not be turned into a business opportunity for two men whose only qualification is their last name.
