Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core.
The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old.
It had fewer than 50 employees.
And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it.
Here is the part the administration tried to bury.
Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast.
One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.
Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion.
A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son.
This is public money. Your money.
Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for.
And there is more coming.
A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review.
This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer.
https://t.co/4kB1cZNmlE
Within one 24 hour period, Trump:
- got out of a $100 million IRS fine
- secured "immunity" from all future tax investigations for his family and friends
- created a $1.8 billion slush fund for lawbreaking supporters
- was reported for likely insider trading worth nearly $1 billion
All of the obvious things to say about this are true. It's bad. Nobody even tries to defend it. The closest thing to a defense you get is something about how "but Democrats suck" and "woke was also bad," which is not a defense, but rather a kind of moral blank check made out to the administration to give them the right to do anything.
But what I'm most curious about is whether this sort of lurid corruption creates a countermovement that successfully returns government to rule of law or whether it's establishing a norm of executive imperialism that every future administration will use to achieve its ends, which can always be justified by the moral blank check of "the other side is worse, so let us do whatever we want."
@TheShortBear Extreme grift on display and it’s right there in everyone’s face. Others at least tried to hide the grift and fraud; Trump on the other hand, does it openly.
This is indefensible: Spraying glyphosate over wild lands is ecocide, and toxic to humans, of course. But there is one upside: It allows us to see the full corruption of our system, which pretends to be preoccupied with our health, even as it poisons the world behind our backs.
@JaredKubin Yep. Outlook is so awful. Search function the worst. And really anything Microsoft software outside of excel is a dumpster fire. Almost impressive incompetency and apathy at work.
@orrdavid You’re not wrong. When they got rid of the catastrophic plan with the ACA, it was game over. So much fraud. And so much lost for Americans to simply high premiums. The premiums for earners over $100k~ are insane. Absolutely ridiculous.
@ChrisDMacro Was going to say, there’s literally nothing out there except for other defense company buildings, locked down govt sites, solar arrays, and lots of barren land.