In March, a defense manufacturing startup called Hadrian won a 900 million dollar commitment from the U.S. Navy to build submarine parts at a new factory in Cherokee, Alabama. The money came out of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Four months later, in July, Hadrian’s CEO Chris Power gave 443,000 dollars to Republican National Committee accounts, hitting the maximum individual limit on every single one. That same month, two partners at 1789 Capital, one of Hadrian’s investors, gave another 300,000 dollars to the RNC. Their names are Paul Abrahimzadeh and Joe Voboril.
743,000 dollars, from the people on the receiving end of a federal contract, back to the party that wrote the law that paid for it.
1789 Capital is Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm. He is a partner there. In a little over a year, the firm went from roughly 200 million dollars in assets to about 3.5 billion.
Every step of this was legal. The donations were disclosed. The contract went through a process. The Navy structured the deal so that private capital went in first and the government followed.
Nobody sent an email. Nobody made a phone call. Nobody said give us the contract and we will take care of you.
They never do. You get the contract, and you already know what comes next. A memo is what a crime looks like. The favor gets done, the return is understood, and not one word of it is spoken out loud.
Power did not write a token check. He maxed out every account he was legally allowed to touch. That is not a thank you note. That is a subscription payment.
Vulcan Elements, a rare earth magnet startup, received a 620 million dollar loan from the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, the largest that office has ever issued, roughly three months after 1789 Capital took a stake in it. ProPublica reported that the request to make the loan came from Peter Navarro, the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, who is a friend of Donald Trump Jr. Out of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide.
Unusual Machines is a drone maker where Trump Jr. held a multimillion dollar stake personally, not through a fund. Last October it won the biggest Pentagon contract in its history.
Two different ways to hold the shares. Same outcome both times.
The 900 million dollars came out of a tax bill. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act paid for itself by taking things away from people. By CBO estimates, it cuts federal Medicaid spending by about 911 billion dollars over 10 years and leaves 10 million more people without health insurance. It cuts roughly 187 billion dollars out of SNAP, about 20% of the program, the largest cut to food assistance in its history.
One law. Two directions.
The money that built that factory in Cherokee and the money taken out of somebody’s insulin coverage are the same money. It did not vanish into thin air. It changed direction.
Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight told CNN that taxes taken out of your paycheck and mine are going straight into these companies, and by extension into the Trump family.
A president’s family is supposed to step back. That is the entire point of the norm. Instead, being in that family has become the fastest route to a federal contract in America.
And these are military contracts. The man who decides whether the United States goes to war has a family holding positions in the companies that get paid when it does. War is not a risk to that portfolio. War is the upside.
The Pentagon says outside affiliations and political connections play no role in its funding decisions. The White House says this is the same tired narrative Democrats have been pushing for a decade.
Those are not answers. They are a way to end the conversation. Watch what these people do, not what they say, because what they say is built for an audience that agrees to stop looking.
None of this required a crime.
Working people in the US did not lose their health coverage because somebody stole it. They lost it because it was voted away, legally, by people who then received legal money from the legal beneficiaries of that vote. The rules were followed the entire way down.
That is not a broken system. That is a system doing exactly what it was built to do, by the class that built it.
Perpetual grifting, dishonesty and criminal behavior. So many criminals, so very few consequences. We are no longer a nation of laws, just of men….men who manipulate the law to enrich themselves and their families