Ethics questions loom over Trump Jr. benefiting financially from Pentagon drone deal
A small Florida company, Unusual Machines, has won a contract from the Pentagon to build 3,500 drone motors and other drone parts. Donald Trump Jr. is a large shareholder in that company, leading some to question the ethics of the contract.
Unusual Machines and Don Jr.
Shares of Unusual Machines jumped after the contract was announced.
Along with those 3,500 drone motors, the company said the army indicated a plan to order an additional 20,000 pieces of equipment next year. They did not disclose the monetary value of the deal.
Unusual Machines brought in Trump Jr. as an adviser late last year and gave him 200,000 shares of the company. That’s valued somewhere between $2.6 million and $4 million.
The contract is part of the president’s plan to bolster the country’s drone industry for commercial and military use. Trump signed an executive order in June called “Unleashing American Drone Dominance.”
The president’s son got involved with the company through Unusual Machines’ close relationship with investment bank Dominari Securities. That bank, headquartered in Trump Tower in New York City, recently hired both Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as paid advisers.
Ethics questions
As a major shareholder, Trump Jr. will benefit financially from the Pentagon deal.
“This is very problematic from an ethics perspective,” Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush, told Straight Arrow News.
After serving under the Republican president, Painter later became a Democrat and is now part of Andrew Yang’s Forward political party.
Trump Jr. helped screen candidates for top jobs at the Pentagon following his father’s election victory. He’s also been a vocal ally and supporter of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, appearing with him at several events.
“To have the grown children of the president of the United States entering into contracts with the Department of Defense without rigorous review of those contracts by independent experts to determine whether the contract is in the interest of the United States’ international security and at a fair price,” Painter said. “This is very inappropriate unless those precautions have been taken.”
Spokespeople for Trump Jr. denied that they had reached out to government officials on behalf of Unusual Machines.
“Don has never communicated with anyone in the administration on behalf of Unusual Machines or about the contract in question,” a spokesperson for Trump Jr. told the Financial Times. “His advisory role with them has nothing to do with interfacing with the government.”
Presidential families
Trump Jr. is not the first family member of a U.S. president to be questioned over the ethics of a deal.
The fourth president of the U.S., James Madison, sent his stepson, Payne Todd, on a State Department mission to Russia and Europe. While on that mission, Todd spent most of the time drinking and gambling.
That incident got the attention of Madison’s predecessors, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
“I pitty our good Brother Madison,” Adams wrote in a letter to Jefferson.
“Over the course of American history, part of the belief and trust in the government was that presidents and their families always felt they had to do the right thing,” Megan Gorman, author of “All the Presidents’ Money: How the Men Who Governed America Governed Their Money,” told SAN.
Gorman also pointed to more recent examples of presidential families being questioned over ethics.
That includes former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son James, who had an insurance firm in Boston. He allegedly funneled business to that firm while also being a White House aide.
“James Roosevelt did release his tax returns and did deny all the allegations, and he ended up resigning as an aide to his father,” Gorman said.
There are also recent examples, like the sons of former President George H. W. Bush.
“George W., at one point, was on the board of an oil company, and the country of Bahrain had reached out to them to do business,” Gorman said. “It was not clear why Bahrain would do this. George W. Bush did not benefit from it. But again, it created this, sort of, pushing the envelope a bit more.”
During former President Joe Biden’s time as vice president, ethics experts shared their concerns over his son, Hunter, serving on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.
“It was on a much smaller scale, but Hunter Biden’s involvement in Ukraine at the time that his father was vice president of the United States, handling Ukraine policy for President Obama, that was very, very problematic,” Painter said.
That brings us back to the Trump administration, where this is not the first ethics issue that’s come up.
“This appears to be part of a pattern of President Trump’s grown children, Don Jr. and Eric, and we also see Jared and Ivanka now that they’re not in the Trump administration, and others in the Trump family benefiting from official decisions by the president himself or members of his administration,” Painter said.
In July, Painter testified in front of the Senate Banking Committee over ethics concerns about Trump and his son’s role in a cryptocurrency company that has made hundreds of millions of dollars while the president is in office.
“The Trump family has accumulated billions of dollars of interest in cryptocurrency that they didn’t have just a few years ago,” Painter said.
Legal issues?
While these issues have been ongoing almost since the country’s founding, Painter says the Trump family has taken them to another level.
“This really is unprecedented,” Painter said.
Gorman agreed.
“This is clearly pushing the line even more aggressively,” Gorman said. “But again, how this has played out, while it may not make Americans comfortable, there are no laws really preventing this.”
He said that a big part of this issue is that there are really no governing laws on presidential families.
“This is something that I think could be an issue that all Americans could agree upon going forward,” Gorman said. “Especially after the last two presidents’ children being in the press so much for these issues.”
Painter said this latest incident with the Trump family should be investigated by Congress.
“This is very, very concerning for our national security, as well as from the vantage point of the taxpayer,” Painter said. “Congress has a responsibility to act, and should do so by passing new legislation that would restrict this kind of thing.”
Since these deals almost always involve taxpayer money, Painter said it should be a much greater concern to the public. While Madison’s stepson may have caused him embarrassment, it did not benefit his father or anyone else financially.
“We really do need to double down here with respect to ethics in government, and emphasizing how critically important it is that the president’s family and persons close to the president not be able to profit from the presidency,” Painter said. “We’re not taking that seriously at all now, and this is very, very concerning.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
