Trump insiders, including members of his family and key cabinet members, are grifting it up and battling one another for power as stresses on the administration build.
In the light of Yves Smith’s post about the mounting stresses facing POTUS Donald Trump, a mini-series on key Trump insiders and their antices seemed timely.
As Yves pointed out, Psychology Today had a warning for Trump insiders:
The malignant narcissist, lacking guilt or a conscience, is only concerned with respect and not being publicly shamed. Any kind of public embarrassment will cause them further anger, further rage, further attacks, further unethical comportment, and unprecedented incivility.
If the narcissist is going to be brought down, they will also seek to bring everyone else around them down to vindictively make them suffer. How the narcissist vilifies, lashes out, or destroys others (spouse, friends, business partners, workmates, the general public) is up to the morbid creativity and depravity of the malignant narcissist, the viable tools they have available, and of course how dire or desperate the situation.
This strikes me as a critical moment for Trump insiders. The fire alarm is going off and footsteps are approaching the filthy kitchen. So the wise cockroach digs in and feasts while the darkness lasts.
Let’s start the series with Donald’s immediate family.
What Donald’s sons Eric and Don, Jr., are up to is best expressed in pictures:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) September 3, 2025
Let’s supplement with 400 words from the Wall Street Journal:
The Trump family notched as much as $5 billion in paper wealth on Monday after its flagship crypto venture opened trading of a new digital currency.
The launch is akin to an initial public offering, in which the cryptocurrency, called WLFI, can now be bought and sold on the open market like a listed company’s shares. Beforehand, people who had privately bought WLFI from the Trump venture, World Liberty Financial, hadn’t been able to exchange their tokens.
The trading debut was most likely the biggest financial success for the president’s family since the inauguration. The Trump family, including President Trump himself, holds just under a quarter of all WLFI tokens in existence. Trump’s three sons are co-founders of World Liberty, while it names the president a “Co-Founder Emeritus.”
World Liberty says founders and team members’ tokens remain “locked,” meaning they still can’t sell them. But the trading launch now puts a real-world valuation on their holdings, which previously were valued based on private sales.
WLFI is likely now the Trumps’ most valuable asset, exceeding their decades-old property portfolio. While the president’s family has continued to pursue property deals around the world since taking office, the fast-moving crypto business has had the biggest early impact.
President Trump helped launch World Liberty a year ago, while campaigning, saying it would help make “America Great Again, this time with crypto.”
World Liberty’s rise this year came as the president drove the growth of the crypto industry from the White House, reining in regulation and touting the potential of private, digital currencies to invigorate the U.S. economy.
In advance of the WLFI trading debut, World Liberty this summer took over a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million in cash from investors to buy the cryptocurrency.
That deal, an unusually circular transaction with the same party as buyer and seller, stands to earn the Trumps around $500 million since they keep up to three-quarters of the revenues from the sale of the tokens, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.Trading in WLFI exploded on crypto exchanges early Monday, with about $1 billion in the tokens changing hands within an hour, according to data site CoinMarketCap
The Donald, Jr. controlled Trump Media Group closed an additional deal with Crypto.com a couple of weeks back but it’s just a cherry on top compared to the sundae that is the WLFI deal.
Paul Waldman covered the industry lobbying strategy that went into laying the groundwork for the Trump brothers (and Donald, Sr’s blind trust, wink wink) to get their beaks wet in crypto:
In the years leading up to the 2024 election, the cryptocurrency industry had a problem. The government in Washington was skeptical of crypto to the point of hostility, seemingly agreeing with the widespread opinion that crypto has few if any legitimate uses and is so volatile that to protect Americans it must be regulated strictly. Gary Gensler, who was chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Joe Biden, said the industry was “rife with fraud, scams and abuse,” and worked hard to rein it in.
The crypto industry’s answer to that problem was not simply to fight against regulation. The smarter play — after getting rid of regulators like Gensler, whom Trump told a 2024 Bitcoin conference that he’d fire to wild applause — is to shape regulation to your liking. That can be an especially fruitful approach at an early stage when members of Congress don’t really understand the industry and are easily manipulated.
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They also undertook a lobbying campaign directed at Trump personally. As the New York Times reported, “Lacking much knowledge of its intricacies, Mr. Trump embraced crypto when he saw it could generate huge profits for himself or his political groups, while outsourcing the details to industry advisers with their own business ambitions.”
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The Financial Times reported last week that Trump is planning to issue an executive order opening up retirement accounts like pensions and 401(k)s to crypto, which would mean a giant new potential market. He already signed an executive order to create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, which would have no practical purpose other than driving up the price of Bitcoin (it’s not like in a war or disaster we’ll desperately need a bunch of Bitcoin in the same way we might need oil, which was the point of creating the Strategic Petroleum Reserve).You’ll never guess who that would be good for! On Monday, the Trump Media and Technology Group (the entity that runs Truth Social, the entire revenue of which is about the same as a single McDonald’s), announced that it had purchased $2 billion in Bitcoin. If its value goes up, so does Trump’s wealth.
Mr. Trump wasn’t an obvious sympathizer. He had once dismissed Bitcoin as a “scam.” But he welcomed the executives into his private club in Florida because the industry had suddenly gotten his attention. Mr. Bailey was mobilizing crypto investors to vote for Mr. Trump and had called on his colleagues to raise $100 million for the election effort.
At Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Bailey brought along representatives of several large Bitcoin mining firms — an energy-guzzling sector that has drawn noise complaints and environmental concerns. They pitched Mr. Trump on the economic benefits of Bitcoin, before pivoting to a bold request: Could Mr. Trump write a supportive post on his social media site?
The proposed language was included at the bottom of a bullet-pointed meeting agenda, according to a copy reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Trump said he would “consider it,” Mr. Bailey, who runs the digital currency firm BTC Inc., recalled in an interview. “We had no idea if that was going to happen.”
That night, Mr. Trump fired off a Truth Social post containing the exact message proposed by the executives: “We want all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!! It will help us be ENERGY DOMINANT!!!”
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All of that resulted from one of the great lobbying free-for-alls in recent history. For months, industry executives, paid lobbyists, campaign operatives, and Trump business partners and family members orchestrated a diffuse but stunningly effective influence operation that turned Mr. Trump from an outspoken Bitcoin skeptic into crypto’s most important supporter.Virtually every step of Mr. Trump’s transformation has been steered by the industry. Lacking much knowledge of its intricacies, Mr. Trump embraced crypto when he saw it could generate huge profits for himself or his political groups, while outsourcing the details to industry advisers with their own business ambitions, according to documents and audio recordings, as well as interviews with more than 50 people involved in Mr. Trump’s crypto plans.
Noah Berlatsky has a couple more key nuggets and names another key player, David Sacks:
During the 2024 election, though, crypto investors spent tens of millions on Republican campaigns. Trump, who never saw a quid pro quo he didn’t love, changed his tune, embracing crypto-friendly policies. After his victory, he followed through by appointing venture capitalist and Elon Musk crony David Sacks as a White House crypto czar.
Another reason Trump flip-flopped on crypto is that his family figured out how to cash in. Following the election, Trump squandered some of the goodwill he had built up with the crypto industry when he and his wife Melania launched memecoins — essentially valueless crypto confidence games — that both surged in value, making the Trumps billions (but undermining the credibility of crypto in the process). That came after his two adult sons, Eric and Don Jr, launched their own crypto company during the campaign called World Liberty Financial. Boosting crypto as president, then, allows Trump and his family to profit directly from his public office.
Yves Smith has warned of the grim and massive implications of Trump’s GENIUS act and the potential for government backed crypto to trigger an even bigger financial crisis.
Older failson Eric Trump is also nursing presidential hopes as The Hill informs its audience of sports betters:
“Would I want my kids to live the same experience over the last decade that I’ve lived? You know, if the answer was yes, I think the political path would be an easy one, meaning, I think I could do it,” Eric Trump told the Financial Times in July. “And by the way, I think other members of our family could do it too.”
The 41-year-old serves as the executive vice president of the Trump Organization and has spent the past year traveling overseas to promote the family’s cryptocurrency, World Liberty Financial. The company opened for trading Monday with strong support from the Trump administration.
Eric also takes a leading role in battling his father’s foes on social media, which is the kind of nonsense The Daily Beast covers.
Eric also took time out for a sumo wrestling demonstration and some crypto business in Tokyo, and South Korea, dude has his fingers in many pies.
Donald, Jr. is also becoming a darling of the high end gossip press who apparently approve of his new galpal as much as they disdain his ex.
But what about disgraced first term power couple Ivanka Trump and hubby Jared Kushner?
The Daily Mail has the latest on their “life in exile”:
Four years after abandoning Washington, DC, for Florida, the First Daughter, a ubiquitous presence in her father’s first administration, has no seat at the table this time round. Which rather begs the question: what does she do all day?
Well, if the 43-year-old’s well-supplied Instagram feed is to be believed, she fills her time with exercise, meditation and reading, spliced with a dash of envy-inducing international travel and glittering galas.
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Jared, 44, who founded private equity firm Affinity Partners after also stepping back from his role in Trump’s first White House, spends a lot of time in the Middle East, where much of his clientele are based, our source claimed.
Just in case you were worried that poor Jared was being cut out of the prime graft reserved for Trump insiders, he’s been busy with fellow 9th-circle-of-Hell-destinee Tony Blair making plans for Gaza, per Axios:
The meeting President Trump convened on Wednesday to discuss a post-war plan for Gaza involved two high-profile invited guests, Jared Kushner and Tony Blair, and an unexpected third one: Israeli official Ron Dermer.
Why it matters: Dermer told the assembled senior officials that Israel doesn’t want to occupy Gaza long-term, but needs an acceptable alternative to Hamas to govern the enclave. Kushner and Blair got Trump’s blessing to keep developing such a plan, but right now they don’t have an answer as to who would take over.
Behind the scenes: Wednesday’s meeting lasted over an hour, with Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special envoy Steve Witkoff and several other senior administration officials in the room.
Towards the end of the meeting, Trump wanted to get the Israeli input and asked his team to call in Dermer, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most powerful adviser.
Dermer was in the White House to present Rubio and Witkoff with Israel’s operational plan for occupying Gaza City and for a humanitarian surge during the operation, two sources with direct knowledge said.
“The president wanted to hear from him what are Israel’s needs and red lines in a day-after scenario,” one source said.
According to the source, Dermer made clear that Israel doesn’t want to occupy Gaza for good and doesn’t want to expel the Palestinian population, despite proposals from some in the government to do both. He stressed that Israel wants to hand over Gaza to someone else who is not Hamas…
A source with knowledge of Kushner’s and Blair’s work said they’re still in the middle of the process and it’s unclear how long they’ll need to finalize a detailed plan.
For one thing, they have not yet settled on a proposal for who would govern Gaza or ensure security there.
But the White House sees the plan as an important tool that needs to be ready when the Israeli operation ends.“The goal is for the U.S. to lead the effort to find an internationally accepted governance structure in Gaza that will allow Israel to pull out without deteriorating back to the old reality again from a security standpoint,” the source said.
Middle East Eye has more on the ghoulish plan of these Trump insiders:
Kushner called for the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza as early as last year.
“Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable,” Kushner said in February 2024.
“It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” he added.
MEE also reported on an obscure professor of economics at George Washington University who said in an August 2024 podcast that Kushner had consulted with him on a paper about how to reconstruct post-war Gaza – and it fit almost word-for-word with what Trump has called for.
“The place to start is to dig up the entire place. Then you have to figure out what to do with the local population. You gotta move them around. Everything’s gotta go…nothing vertical stands,” the professor, Joseph Pelzman, said in a podcast called “America, Baby”, hosted by Israeli professor, Kobby Barda.
Pelzman, who said his paper went to Kushner, also said the US should “lean on Egypt” to accept forcibly displaced Palestinians because it is a “bankrupt…really broke” state.
As for Mrs. Melania Trump and her newly adult son Barron, these Trump insiders are keeping any money plays on the downlow and drawing press for triggering the remnants of the “resistance” media, via a Trump booster at USA Today:
It recently came to light that Vanity Fair’s new global editorial director, Mark Guiducci, wanted to put Melania on the cover of the magazine, first reported by Semafor.
That didn’t go over so well with the staff.
“I will walk out the motherf—— door, and half my staff will follow me,” a Vanity Fair editor told the Daily Mail after the news broke. “We are not going to normalize this despot and his wife; we’re just not going to do it. We’re going to stand for what’s right.”
Meanwhile valiant young Barron steps into the social media fray to deny rumors of his father’s demise.
I must say, despite being the Trump insiders insiders, his closest family members have chosen some high-risk investments.
The Trump brothers’ crypto schemes will rely on nimble and expedient exits to maximize the take, as well as significant post-Donald, Senior political support.
And I’m not sure if Trump insiders Jared Kushner and Tony Blair are in on the grim joke of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. While the innocent casualties mount into the hundreds of thousands, the IDF seems ever less likely to be able to successfully occupy Gaza.
One hopes that Jared is working on a backup grift. I suppose that’s the kind of thing his father can work as as ambassador to France, when he’s not busy slap-fighting with French President Macron on behalf of Israel.
Future installments will look at Trump insiders including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and many more.
Trump insiders beware!
