Don Jr. had a big wedding. Reporters started following the money

This may have been the week that the Trump family’s sprawling and brazen corruption finally broke out of containment, with the level of American kleptocracy in such sharp focus this week that Republicans’ efforts to not-see it required significant effort. 

All this kicked off on Monday with two stories that landed within hours of each other, one in The New Yorker and another from ProPublica. Together they did something the last decade of scattered scoops about the Trump family’s business dealings had never quite managed: They connected the dots.

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, is running Middle East diplomacy while raising billions more for his private investment fund from the same governments with which he is supposedly negotiating. Donald Trump Jr. had a lavish wedding weekend in the Bahamas secretly financed by a sanctioned Russian oligarch who was with Vladimir Putin in China days before flying to the nuptial celebration.

The week’s Trump-family corruption stories did not emerge from the fever swamps of partisan rumor. They arrived through painstaking reporting by ProPublica and The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins and were confirmed in meaningful respects by the people involved. Perhaps most striking, the response to the ProPublica investigation indicate that the American public is desperate for accountability and transparency.

Within 24 hours of publication the article became the outlet’s most-read piece of the year, generating more than 2.2 million views on its first day alone. ProPublica reported that Umar Kremlev, the head of a scandal-plagued international boxing federation financed by the Russian state energy giant Gazprom, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent a private island, stage a fireworks show and bankroll a weekend of festivities for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding. The payments moved through a Dubai-based entity affiliated with Kremlev’s boxing association. Kremlev had reportedly traveled to China with Putin a few days earlier, and was later awarded Russia’s Order of Friendship by the Russian president himself. He had reportedly met Trump Jr. only recently. 

The relationship between the two men had never before previously reported. When the story broke, Trump Jr. and his wife, the model formerly known as Bettina Anderson, denied nothing. Indeed, they confirmed the story in an Instagram post, calling Kremlev a “dear friend” who had “very generously” hosted the celebration. The elder Donald Trump, the one who resides in the White House, managed to deny and confirm the report in the same breath, insisting he had never heard of Kremlev while also describing the event Kremlev had paid for as “an afterparty” and “not a big deal.”  

Eric Trump, meanwhile, did his best to distance himself, with a spokesperson telling ProPublica that he had “absolutely no clue who this person is.” A House Oversight Committee investigation was announced by Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., who requested records concerning Trump Jr.’s relationship with Kremlev and the foreign payments associated with the wedding festivities. Garcia’s letter described the relationship as raising national security and public-corruption questions.

While mainstream outlets treated the revelations as blockbuster news — ProPublica’s reporters fielded 14 television interviews in one day — much of the right-wing media ecosystem either looked away or offered staggering defenses. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that the reporting was unworthy of attention while pivoting instantly to debunked comparisons with Hunter Biden.

Try to imagine a world in which Hunter Biden had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits from a Russian oligarch close to Putin while his father occupied the Oval Office. Right-wing media would not have tried to parse whether the dinner was technically separate from the wedding. It would have run red banners for months. Every text message would be treated as a state secret. Every family photograph would be analyzed for evidence of treason. Congressional committees would convene emergency hearings. The phrase “national security crisis” would be inescapable.

Then there were the officials whose job is literally to know things, professing not to know anything. FBI Director Kash Patel told Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., that he was entirely unaware of the ProPublica bombshell, adding that he does not “track public reporting,” a claim so transparently disqualifying for the head of the the leading federal law enforcement agency that it should have generated headlines on its own.

Attorney General Todd Blanche, asked whether the Justice Department would investigate the funding of a presidential son’s wedding by a foreign national with ties to a hostile intelligence state, responded by interrogating the premise of the question, asking what exactly he would even be investigating.

Layer on top of that the New Yorker’s profile of Kushner. It describes a man now raising as much as $5 billion in new funds for his investment firm, Affinity Partners, from the same Gulf governments whose interests he is supposedly balancing as Trump’s Middle East peace envoy, while separately holding direct talks with Iranian diplomats aimed at ending his father-in-law’s seemingly endless war.

That isn’t a hypothetical conflict of interest. It is the plainest possible arrangement in which a man paid to represent the American public is instead building his personal fortune off the very foreign governments whose wars and rivalries he claims to be helping resolve. The piece situates him as a genuinely new variety of Washington figure, one for whom holding public office functions primarily as a mechanism for private enrichment. Reporting elsewhere has shown that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is already Affinity’s largest investor after pouring $2 billion into the firm as soon Trump’s first term ended, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who controls that fund, reportedly among the loudest voices pushing Trump toward war with Iran. 

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Both reports landed in the same week that Forbes reported the president’s own net worth has grown by an estimated $2.7 billion dollars since he won re-election, fueled by crypto ventures and overseas deals that would have ended the career of any previous occupant of the Oval Office. We also learned this week that Trump made nearly 29,000 securities trades in 17 months, more than the entire membership of Congress combined, while pushing a stock trading ban for lawmakers that conveniently exempts himself and his family. Put all of it together and you see a complex portrait of a family that has converted the presidency into the most lucrative family office in American history, operating with the near total cooperation of a Republican Congress that has decided the only acceptable response is to change the subject.

To be clear, not every conservative outlet ignored the copious evidence of corruption presented this week. National Review published an article bluntly titled “Don Jr. Will Regret It,” which called the episode “entirely inexplicable” and noted Kremlev’s ties to Putin’s regime and the corruption scandals surrounding the boxing organization he leads. Good; principled conservatism is critically endangered, but perhaps not entirely extinct.

But one dissenting article does not erase the larger asymmetry: The right-wing media machine that can eagerly generate weeks of outrage over unfounded rumors is conspicuously uninterested in a documented foreign-funded extravaganza involving the president’s own family. For conservative media to favor its preferred candidates is part of the process. But to abandon any semblance of ethical responsibility in order to protect a corrupt monarchical ruler is a profound institutional failure.