Drain the Swamp, Don’t Recycle the Water for Our Side

The problem with the swamp was never that it broke a law. It was that it broke our trust.

Jul 16, 2026

Editorial Note: After yesterday’s piece on data centers, I received an email from Georgia Power about the eminent domain case in Georgia. Georgia Power’s representative informed me that eminent domain was not used, rather the family entered into a purchase agreement and sold the property. Georgia Power noted that, last year, it used its eminent domain power only five times and not against a single residential homeowner. I have updated that piece with the note.

I have been stewing on this for some time because I actually think it is a big deal. In tribal partisan politics, we are not supposed to speak up on this topic. But the time has come that someone needs to say something. It might as well be me. To those of you who unsubscribe because of what I’m about to write, I hope one day you’ll come back. But some of you will not like where this goes, even as it needs to be said. The truth does not care about your feelings.

I’m going to do something somewhat different in that, below the piece, I will list all the sources. I want you to be able to read them for yourselves instead of just taking my word for it. I also want you to see how documented everything is. It has all become a troubling pattern that Democrats will undoubtedly exploit.

In short, President Trump and those around him have made it very easy for Democrats and, frankly, our side should be held accountable. For those who would accuse me of helping the Democrats or playing to their hand, my response is that if we do not hold our own side accountable for its sins, the voters will hold us accountable. And I’m afraid hell is coming for our side if we do not act.

For the better part of a decade, Republicans built a movement on two promises. The first was to “drain the swamp” — Donald Trump’s 2016 vow, hashtagged 79 times in the campaign’s final three weeks, to end the culture of self-dealing in Washington. The second was to expose the “Biden Crime Family,” the label House Republicans attached to their multi-year investigation of Hunter and James Biden’s foreign business. That probe established that Biden relatives received more than $10 million from foreign sources — but never produced evidence tying the payments to an official act by Joe Biden.

Set that standard next to the conduct now documented in the administration’s own financial disclosures and in the pages of major global media outlets, and a troubling pattern emerges. The people who promised to drain the swamp are cashing in.

Consider the crypto ventures. Trump’s 2026 financial disclosure — 927 pages — showed his income topped $2 billion last year, more than $1.4 billion of it from crypto. World Liberty Financial, the firm co-founded by Trump and his sons, funnels the family 75% of token proceeds; the president reported more than $500 million from those sales alone. The memecoin $TRUMP briefly hit a $15 billion valuation, then collapsed more than 90%, wiping out most of its buyers even as the family kept the gains. Its top 220 holders were rewarded with a black-tie dinner; the biggest 25 got a private audience with the president. Even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board — hardly a resistance organ — called it “cashing in on the Presidency in big and sketchy ways.”

In gambling, they say never bet against the house. In crypto, President Trump has positioned himself as the house. He has earned more from cryptocurrency than every single publicly traded US cryptocurrency company.

Coinbase, the largest and most profitable publicly traded US crypto company, earned $1.26 billion in net income the same year. Trump beat Coinbase by roughly $140 million.
The next-closest listed name, CleanSpark, posted $365 million, while IREN, Bitdeer, HIVE, Bit Digital, Bitfarms, Galaxy, Hut 8 and Core Scientific rounded out the top 10 — six of them lost money on the year. Every US-listed crypto miner combined finished the year down more than half a billion dollars, while the sitting president personally cleared more than any company in the sector by any measure.

The foreign money is where “swamp” becomes “sale.” An Abu Dhabi state-backed fund chaired by the UAE’s national security adviser used $2 billion of World Liberty’s stablecoin to finance a deal — weeks before the White House cleared the UAE to buy advanced American AI chips. Steve Witkoff, the president’s Middle East envoy, co-founded World Liberty and, by his own August disclosure, still held an interest in it while negotiating with the same governments investing in it. Jared Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, manages more than $6 billion — 99% of it foreign, including $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund — while Kushner serves as a peace envoy dealing with those very governments. Lawmakers on the relevant committees have opened investigations into both.

The sheer scale is what sets this apart. Not every deal carries a whiff of scandal — but the tangle itself is the danger. The New York Times reported in July that the lead investor in a South Korean aluminum company challenging Commerce Department penalties paid $2 million to Trump’s holding company, disclosed as a golf-course “development fee.” The Times found no evidence that Trump or his family intervened on the company’s behalf, and the Trump Organization says the payment was unrelated to the trade dispute. Yet as the paper put it, the financial ties between the president and the South Korean company “illustrate the minefield Mr. Trump has created by maintaining personal financial ties with nearly 30 different business ventures with foreign counterparts worldwide — unlike any other president in modern American history.”

The hypocrisy sharpens when you look at what these same officials call serious. At Trump’s direction, the Justice Department and House Republicans are investigating ActBlue, the Democratic donation platform, over claims that foreign money slipped through it — the GOP inquiry flagged a few hundred small overseas card transactions. Policing foreign money in our elections is a legitimate thing to do; it has no place there. But it is impossible to treat the ActBlue probe as a principled stand against foreign influence while the president’s own family collects billions from Gulf governments whose decisions he controls. If a few hundred prepaid-card donations threaten the republic, a $2 billion sovereign-wealth investment arriving weeks before a favorable ruling threatens it far more. You cannot credibly chase the trickle while opening the floodgates for your own side.

The self-dealing isn’t limited to family. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s old firm, Cantor Fitzgerald — now run by his sons — manages reserves for the stablecoin giant Tether. One day after Lutnick divested his Cantor stake to a trust for his children, Tether extended that trust a loan, prompting Senators Warren and Wyden to ask why a foreign stablecoin issuer was financing the Commerce Secretary’s family. Donald Trump Jr. was handed roughly $300,000 in free Kalshi equity that ballooned as the prediction-market firm’s valuation soared into the tens of billions — while he simultaneously advised its chief rival, Polymarket. Federal enforcement actions against both companies were then dropped. And the president pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering law, and whose exchange had helped build World Liberty’s stablecoin.

The Trump family, Witkoffs, and Lutnicks seem particularly intertwined.

Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, invested in Vulcan Elements three months before the company received a $620 million government loan. Investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, which is headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons, has been a financial adviser or underwriter for many startups that have received government support.
The Trump Administration has also offered up to $1.6 billion in financing for a project to develop a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan. There’s no question the U.S. needs to diversify its tungsten supply, which is critical to weapons systems. But a firm partly owned by Mr. Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. invested in a company backing the project shortly before the Administration announced a minerals deal with Kazakhstan last November that paved the way for the project. Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev posted a photo of himself at a White House deal-signing ceremony.

Source.

Remember, conservatives raised objections to the intermingling of John Kerry’s stepson with Hunter Biden.

The prediction markets have a second problem: the bets themselves. The Justice Department has charged an Army soldier with using classified intelligence about the timing of a U.S. operation to capture Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro to win more than $400,000 on Polymarket. A New York Times investigation identified more than 80 accounts placing suspiciously well-timed wagers — including trades made hours before U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. Even the Republican-led House Oversight Committee has opened an insider-trading probe into both platforms. When the people closest to power can bet on decisions that power controls, the line between governing and trading on the government disappears.

The additionally galling thing about all this is that the Army soldier will be punished, but those in close orbit to the President engaging in the same behavior will get pardoned. We all know it, and we all know Republicans will say, “Well, Joe Biden did it.”

Here is the point that gets lost in the partisan scorekeeping. It does not matter whether each arrangement is technically legal. The swamp was never a legal problem; it was a trust problem. When the party that promised to end influence-peddling instead perfects it — when access to the president can be bought with a memecoin and a black-tie ticket — the lesson every ambitious operator learns is that the spoils go to whoever holds power, and restraint is for suckers.

That is the real cost. Americans already distrust nearly everything. Only about 17% say they trust the federal government to do right most of the time; two-thirds now call that government outright corrupt. We have lost faith in the press, in experts, in the institutions a republic needs to function. Every one of these deals — foreign cash arriving just before a favorable decision, a regulator’s case vanishing after a family investment, a wager placed just before the news breaks — confirms the cynic’s worldview and drives honest people out. If the game is rigged, why play it clean? Why serve at all?

A spoils system doesn’t just enrich the connected. It engages the worst people and repels everyone else. The answer to a rival’s corruption was never to match it and call the ledger even. Two crime families do not make an honest town.

It is also why the issue will not stay buried in disclosure filings. Corruption on this scale hands the opposition a galvanizing cause. Heading into the midterms, Democrats can make a plain appeal to the independent voters who decide elections: a government this entangled with foreign money needs far more oversight and investigation of the president, not less. People who tune out the partisan noise still tend to notice when the referee is on the take.

If Republicans meant what they said in 2016, the test is simple, and it applies to their own side: no foreign money flowing to the president’s family while the government it deals with awaits a decision; no regulators dropping cases against companies the first family owns; no one betting on state secrets; real divestment, not divestment to one’s children. Drain the swamp. Don’t just recycle the water for our side.

If you’re reading this, you’re not a paid subscriber and today would be a great day to subscribe as I can assure you we’re going to have some openings from those who unsubscribe because of this piece.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?

Drain the Swamp, Don’t Recycle the Water for Our Side

The problem with the swamp was never that it broke a law. It was that it broke our trust.

Sources

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?