Transcription
This weekend I was reading a New York Times article and I had to stop and say, wait a second. Are we talking million or a billion? Here, let me explain what's going on. If this reporting is accurate, we might be looking at one of the most staggeringly corrupt conflict of interest stories of the entire Trump presidency, and Qatar gave them a $400 million plane. Okay.
To, to to to get to the point where I say this might be the worst conflict of interest story is really something. Other New York Times has an absolutely remarkable investigation about a mining deal in Kazakhstan. And the basic story is the Trump administration has made securing critical minerals a huge priority. Now, that's a legitimate national security issue. The United States wants to reduce our dependence on China for minerals used in a lot of different areas, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, weapons. To some degree, I think that that's a totally legitimate thing to want.
During the Covid phase. We learned this is now tangential, is a different supply issue, not the one we're talking about here. But during Covid we learned, hey, a lot of our medications, antibiotics, etc. are manufactured in China. They may be acceptable quality, but there may be national security reasons to say, actually, we should be bringing a lot of this manufacturing domestically, onshoring it. Totally legitimate policy debate. But then comes the part that is very Trumpian.
According to the reporting, while the Trump administration was negotiating mining deals and considering these large amounts of federal financing to get these deals going. Companies tied to Donald Trump's sons and companies tied to Trump's commerce secretary, Howard Nuttall's sons, were all at the same time positioned to profit from those projects. And then I saw the numbers, $9 billion for companies with ties either to Trump's family or to Nuttall's family, actively working on government-backed mineral projects.
Those companies have either already received federal assistance or are looking for federal assistance, to the tune of more than $8.9 billion in federal funding. Some of it has already been approved by the very Trump administration, and some of it is under consideration. Billions of your and my taxpayer dollars flowing through projects connected to the families of the officials making the decisions. This is the sort of stuff we criticize when we see it in other countries.
And before the MAGA crowd starts screaming, oh, David, it's fake news. We'll be very careful about the claim. The article does not say that these dollars have been illegally awarded. It doesn't say the underlying projects are illegitimate. Critical minerals are of strategic importance. It's a real issue. It's a much simpler issue. Why is Trump's family and why is the Commerce secretary's family financially entangled in these projects at all? That's the problem I have with it. It's not how government is supposed to work.
If your family can financially benefit from decisions that you're making while you run the federal government, it's a conflict of interest. It's not it's not an ad hominem. It's it's just a conflict. Even if every decision ultimately turns out to have been defensible on the merits, the appearance alone is hugely problematic. And think about how Republicans would react if this story involved a Democratic president, for example, Obama, for example, Barack Obama. Or imagine if it were Hunter Biden who had a financial stake in a company seeking billions in federal funding while Joe Biden was negotiating deals to benefit those companies.
Oh, by the way, that's what they claimed was going on with the Bidens. Of course, there was no evidence of it, but if it were, Fox News would suspend normal programming, it would be a 24/7 Fox News alert with a countdown timer. There would be hearings every single week, and demands for special counsel upon special counsel. And instead, with Trump, we're kind of expected to shrug and go, hey, listen, critical minerals, we need these. There's nothing to see here.
When you start throwing around numbers like $9 billion, these are not like, oh, you know, I'm a federal employee. I can't accept any gifts over $25. But someone gave me a $50 Panera gift card or something like that. This is like a big story about the machinery of the federal government being used in ways that create extraordinarily lucky opportunities for the families of the people running it. I mean, it's such great luck that exactly what the federal government has decided we need happens to align with the financial interests of Donald Trump's family and his commerce secretary's family.
Now, this is why we have ethics rules. The transaction itself. It doesn't have to be the case that every transaction is necessarily corrupt. But we as the public who are funding all of this stuff with our tax money, shouldn't have to wonder, is this being done because it's in the national interest, or is this being done because someone's investment portfolio who's connected to Trump would benefit from it? That's the point of the ethics rules. They're not just to stop outright corruption. They're there to prevent situations where it could look like public policy is being steered towards their family's financial interests.
Maybe every single one of these projects is worthwhile. Maybe it's not. It's kind of besides the point. Americans shouldn't wonder whether these decisions are being made because they're good for the country, or they're good for the investors connected to Trump, including his family. Now imagine being a competitor in these spaces. How do you fairly compete for a government project when one of the parties is connected to the president's family? That appearance can distort markets and again, scale. It's not a $25 gift card to Dunkin Donuts. It's not thousands of dollars. It's not millions of dollars. It's $9 billion in federal funding to companies tied to Trump and Nuttall. This is a massive scandal and it's just another day in Trump world.
Meanwhile, we're in a war. Prices are up. The reflecting pool. The states fair. No one's going to. The Iran cease-fire has collapsed again. And it's $9 billion, a story that should be a scandal. And it's getting barely any legacy in corporate media coverage.
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