The Trump Family is Openly Profiting off of Misery and Death

On March 11th, twelve days after the first American missiles hit Iran, Trump was asked in the Oval Office to explain why he had launched the largest US military operation since Iraq. He responded: "The situation was very quickly approaching the point of no return... based on what Steve and Jared and Pete and others were telling me, Marco is so involved, I thought they were going to attack us." He was referring to Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Senate Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Mark Warner had already rebutted the underlying claim a week earlier: "I saw no evidence that Iran was on the verge of launching any kind of preemptive strike against the United States of America." White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt conceded on March 13th that "no such threat from Iran to our homeland exists, and it never did." The Defense Intelligence Agency's own 2025 assessment placed the earliest date Iran could credibly threaten the continental United States at 2035.

Kushner, on the day he helped sell Trump on the Iranian threat narrative, was pocketing $25 million a year in management fees from the Saudi government that was publicly lobbying Trump to escalate the war. He still is. Saudi money going to Kushner's firm is one of at least five separate profit streams the Trump family has pulled from this war since the first missiles flew on February 27th, 2026. The other four run through the same UAE, Saudi, Qatari, and Chinese state-linked funds that are financing Trump's crypto company, his real estate licenses, his sons' drone ventures, and a Pentagon contract just awarded to the son-in-law's brother's investment firm.

Kushner

Jared Kushner's investment firm, Affinity Partners, is a Miami Beach private equity outfit with approximately $6.16 billion in assets under management as of the April 17th House Judiciary investigation opened by Ranking Member Jamie Raskin. $1.2 billion of that was raised in the past year alone. 99 percent of Affinity's funding comes from foreign nationals, including sovereign wealth funds operated by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

The original $2 billion came from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund in 2021, six months after Kushner left his father-in-law's first administration. A Saudi screening committee raised strong internal objections to the investment, citing Kushner's total lack of investment experience. Mohammed bin Salman overruled the committee. Under the agreement, Kushner receives a 1.25 percent annual management fee, which works out to $25 million a year, and Senate Finance Committee Democrats estimate he will have collected $137 million in management fees alone by August 2026 without earning a dollar of actual investment returns for the Saudis.

The UAE added approximately $200 million more directly, plus additional funding routed through the Abu Dhabi investment firm Lunate. In September 2025, Affinity and Saudi PIF jointly acquired Electronic Arts for $55 billion, one of the largest private equity buyouts in history, executed while Kushner was already negotiating Middle East policy on behalf of the White House without holding any formal title and without filing any financial disclosure.

Kushner's position in the Trump administration is "Special Envoy for Peace," a phrase with no statutory definition that allows him to conduct diplomacy without the ethics requirements that apply to every other senior policy official. The White House is not requiring him to file financial disclosures. He was in the room at the first round of direct US-Iran peace talks in Islamabad on April 11th, the second round scheduled for April 22nd, and every back-channel contact in between. He is also the person Trump named first when asked why the war started.

Raskin's April 17th letter to Kushner put the situation in about as direct language as a congressional inquiry allows: "From the standpoint of the American people, your decision to act in these two roles, one public for the government and one private for personal profit, creates a glaring and incurable conflict of interest... You cannot both be a diplomat and a financial pawn of the Saudi monarchy at the same time... You cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own."

Kushner's own characterization of his situation, from October 2025 on 60 Minutes, was that what critics call conflicts of interest are actually "experience and trusted relationships." In a February 2024 Axios interview, he put it more simply: "I'm an investor now."

Senator Elizabeth Warren characterized it as clearly as anyone on April 16th: Kushner "is in the Middle East during a war with Iran, seeking to raise $5 billion for his private firm," calling it "one of the most egregious grifts to date." Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a combat veteran and former astronaut, was blunter on the Senate floor: "You can't send two real estate developers to negotiate peace."

Witkoff

Witkoff is Trump's other Middle East envoy, a longtime Trump golfing buddy who ran the Witkoff Group real estate firm before taking a role with no statutory authority and no Senate confirmation. His ethics certification has been delayed without explanation for months. He has attended every round of US-Iran negotiations alongside Kushner, was briefed on the strike plans in the White House Situation Room on February 18th, and was the American face of the nuclear talks that preceded the war. Two of his sons, Zach and Alexander, are co-founders and executives at World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto company that has received hundreds of millions of dollars from the same Gulf governments Steve Witkoff is officially supposed to be negotiating with.

In January 2025, four days before Trump's inauguration, an investment vehicle controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's national security adviser and head of its largest sovereign wealth fund, purchased a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial for $500 million. Eric Trump co-founded the company. Zach Witkoff is a co-founder and the current CEO. Of the $500 million, $187 million flowed to Trump family entities and at least $31 million went to entities affiliated with the Witkoff family. Two senior officers from Tahnoon-backed companies took seats on the World Liberty board.

In May 2025, a Tahnoon-controlled company called MGX purchased another $2 billion in USD1 stablecoin from World Liberty. Two weeks after that, the Trump administration cleared UAE access to hundreds of thousands of advanced Nvidia AI chips, with roughly one-fifth of them going directly to G42, Tahnoon's artificial intelligence company. The UAE royal bought into the Trump family crypto business, placed his people on the board, wired two billion dollars to the company's stablecoin, and two weeks later his AI company received American chips that national security officials had spent three years trying to keep out of Chinese hands. Senator Chris Murphy called the arrangement "a non-stop corruption machine."

Iranian officials told Drop Site News in March that they had been ignoring Witkoff's private requests to talk, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reportedly had to explain to Witkoff the basic stages of nuclear fuel production and the difference between enrichment facilities and reactors on multiple occasions during the Muscat and Geneva rounds, because Witkoff brought no technical experts to the negotiations. Aaron David Miller, a veteran State Department Middle East negotiator, told Yahoo News on April 15th: "Iran and the U.S. under Kushner and Witkoff? Failure. They get an F in diplomacy."

Zach Witkoff remains CEO of World Liberty Financial, which is still accepting investments from foreign governments while his father conducts American diplomacy with those same governments, and the White House has not explained why that is an acceptable arrangement.

Anduril

Joshua Kushner is Jared's younger brother. He runs Thrive Capital, a venture firm he founded in 2009. On March 13th, 2026, fifteen days into the war, Thrive co-led a $4 billion funding round into Anduril Industries, the defense technology company that makes Lattice OS, interceptor drones, sentry towers, and loitering munitions, all of which the US military now needs in quantity for the Iran theater.

Weeks later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth awarded Anduril a contract worth up to $20 billion, routed through a "sole source" framework that bypassed competitive bidding entirely. The public notice inviting vendor responses had been posted in December with a three-week response window that straddled the Christmas and New Year holidays, a window short enough that essentially no other defense contractor without advance warning could have assembled a serious bid. Jared Kushner reportedly sold his personal stake in Thrive after the 2016 election. Joshua kept his. Proceeds from the Anduril deal flowing back to Jared through any family structure would appear on financial disclosures if he had filed any, and he hasn't.

William Hartung of the Quincy Institute put the pattern plainly in a recent analysis: "If they recruit the president's son to boost a firm, they have influence to serve financial interests rather than public interest." His colleague Shana Marshall was more direct: "No one gets rich when the U.S. doesn't sell weapons... extreme graft is only possible because subtle profiteering went unpunished."

PowerUS

In February 2026, two weeks before the first American strike on Iran, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. took "sizable equity stakes" in a West Palm Beach drone company called PowerUS, founded roughly a year earlier by US Army Special Operations veterans. The company raised $60 million and announced in March that it would go public on the Nasdaq through a reverse merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings, a Florida outfit whose entire portfolio consists of two Orlando golf courses called Kissimmee Bay Country Club and Remington Golf Club. Shares of Aureus Greenway jumped on the news. The combined entity will trade as PUSA. Dominari Securities, an investment bank headquartered inside Trump Tower in New York where both Trump brothers are paid senior advisors, is arranging the transaction.

PowerUS describes itself as targeting Pentagon contracts under the $1.1 billion Drone Dominance initiative and has stated publicly that it intends to produce 10,000 drones per month. Co-founder Brett Velicovich told Fortune on April 4th: "Our team is doing many demos across the Middle East right now for our interceptors... We have very incredible tech that can save lives." He added: "We are at war, my friend, we are in an arms race and America will lose if we don't build fast." Eric Trump said: "I am incredibly proud to invest in companies I believe in. Drones are clearly the wave of the future."

On April 2nd, the Washington Post and Military.com broke the story that PowerUS was making sales pitches and drone demonstrations across the Gulf states currently being hit by Iranian drones and missiles. The next day, the UAE engaged 23 ballistic missiles and 56 drones, Kuwait intercepted 8 missiles and 19 drones, and Trump requested the largest defense budget in United States history at $1.5 trillion, of which $74 billion was earmarked for drones and counter-drone technology, a tripling of the previous year's drone spending. The president's sons joined PowerUS two weeks before the first American missile hit Iranian soil and PowerUS is now pitching the same Gulf states and the same Pentagon for a piece of that $74 billion.

Velicovich declined to name which specific Gulf states PowerUS is courting. Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, was quoted in the same Fortune piece calling the pitches war profiteering by the president's family.

PowerUS is not the only drone play. Don Jr. sits on the board of a drone parts company called Unusual Machines with a personal stake of approximately $4 million. Unusual Machines' stock nearly doubled the day his board seat was announced. The company received a $620 million Pentagon loan in December 2024 and an Army order in October 2025 for 3,500 drone motors, with the Army planning to order 20,000 more drone components in 2026. Eric Trump has a separate investment in Xtend, an Israeli drone manufacturer that has received a contract worth up to $25 million for Iran-theater deployment.

Don Jr. is also a partner at a venture fund called 1789 Capital, which he joined in November 2024. The fund grew from $150 million in assets under management to more than $2 billion in the span of a year. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported that companies in 1789's portfolio received $735 million in federal contracts from the Trump administration in its first year. 1789 Capital has investments in both PowerUS and Anduril.

The Saudi real estate empire

Six weeks before the war began, on January 12th, 2026, Eric Trump appeared at a launch event in Jeddah and announced a portfolio of Trump-branded projects in Saudi Arabia with an aggregate announced value of more than $10 billion. The deals were announced in partnership with Dar Global, a London-listed Saudi developer. The portfolio includes Trump Tower Jeddah, Trump Plaza Jeddah at approximately $1 billion, and a golf and residential community in Diriyah consisting of 500 mansions priced between $6.7 million and $24 million each. Judd Legum's analysis for Popular Information found that roughly 80 percent of the Diriyah revenue flows directly to the Trump Organization.

Diriyah is notable because the project is being built in partnership with the same Saudi Public Investment Fund that is paying Kushner's annual management fees. The Trump Organization is also licensing projects in Oman, Qatar, and the UAE, including a Trump International Golf Club in Simaisma, a resort town thirty kilometers north of Doha where the Qatari government owns the land the villas are built on. Dar Global announced at the January 12th launch that it would accept cryptocurrency as payment for units in the new Saudi developments, a payment method that avoids the traditional banking disclosures that international real estate purchases normally generate.

Trump's 2025 personal financial disclosure, released by the Office of Government Ethics in June, reported more than $630 million in personal income for 2024, including $57 million from cryptocurrency sales and $16 million in licensing fees from the Trump International Hotel Dubai alone. The Trump Organization's first-half 2025 filings show $802 million in cryptocurrency revenue against only $62 million from traditional real estate and licensing in the same period. The family's crypto holdings were valued at as much as $11.6 billion over that window.

The Saudis pay Kushner $25 million a year in management fees while Mohammed bin Salman lobbies Trump to escalate the war, the UAE wired $187 million to Trump family entities and $31 million to the Witkoffs through a single crypto transaction four days before the inauguration, the Qatari government leases the land Trump International Golf Club Simaisma sits on, the Pentagon's new $1.5 trillion budget sets aside $74 billion specifically for the category of drones PowerUS is pitching, and both of the American negotiators at the Islamabad talks have sons or brothers holding equity in the companies collecting that drone money.

The Mar-a-Lago dinner

On April 19th, 2026, on the 51st day of the war and two days before the scheduled second round of peace talks in Islamabad, Trump hosted a private gala at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach for the 297 largest holders of the $TRUMP meme coin. The token is issued by a Trump family-controlled entity called CIC Digital. Holders had to purchase enough of the coin during a specified qualifying window to secure a seat at the dinner. The earlier event of this kind in May 2025 drew attendees who had collectively spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the coin, many of whom traveled from overseas and remained anonymous until they physically arrived at the event.

Published reporting on the coin's major buyers, including analysis by Cryptopolitan and coverage by ABC News, has identified the largest pools of purchasing money as coming from funds linked to China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, four governments that between them hold the UAE stake in World Liberty Financial, the Saudi stake in Affinity Partners, the Qatari land beneath Trump Simaisma, and the bulk of the reported Chinese positions in the Trump meme coin itself. Chinese billionaire Justin Sun, who was under active SEC investigation when Trump took office and whose case was subsequently dropped by Trump's SEC, attended the May 2025 dinner.

On April 19th, while the ceasefire clock ran down and while Ghalibaf's Iranian delegation prepared to fly to Islamabad, Trump ate with 297 anonymous investors at Mar-a-Lago whose money flows directly to his family. Iran's Health Ministry had the casualty count at that point at 1,937 Iranians killed and 25,000 injured. UNHCR had 3.2 million Iranians temporarily displaced. The IFRC emergency appeal was 4.3 percent funded. Lebanon's cumulative death toll had crossed 2,000. Southern Gaza was still being bombed. Two days later, Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner were scheduled to fly back to Islamabad to negotiate the terms of a war the dinner guests had helped pay for.

Raskin's April 17th letter to Kushner, sent two days before the gala, was the most direct thing anyone in government has said about this arrangement: "You cannot faithfully represent the United States with billions of dollars in Saudi and Emirati cash burning a hole in every pocket of every suit you own."

— dingo__dog