Trump’s Son Opens a Private Club for Businesses to Pay for Access to his Dad

May 06, 2025

The Trump family’s businesses are an obvious conduit for financial influence on the president. The New York Times describes a whirlwind tour of Eastern Europe and the Gulf States in which Trump’s sons set up real-estate deals. But nothing is as blatant as Donald Trump Jr.’s Executive Branch club.

Here is the Times’ description:

At $500,000 a person, the private membership club is slated to open by this summer in Georgetown. …
The club soon likely will be jammed with Trump family friends, business executives and members of the Trump administration, but will be off limits to members of the public and most members of the news media. …
The founding members of the club, which has already sold many of its membership slots according to organizers, include Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the cryptocurrency executives whose company, Gemini Trust, had been targeted by the S.E.C. until Mr. Trump named new agency leaders, who in April put a hold on the federal lawsuit.
Jeff Miller, a lobbyist and top Trump fund-raiser, is another founding member. In the first quarter of this year, he has registered to represent 39 new corporate clients, including the crypto firm Tether, an overseas operation that was a longtime target of U.S. regulators until recently, when it began to establish itself as a major force in Washington and explore opening a U.S. office.
The other owners at the new club, besides Donald Trump Jr., include Zach and Alex Witkoff—the sons of Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy—and Omeed Malik, who leads 1789 Capital, a Florida-based venture capital firm that recently hired Donald Trump Jr. as a senior executive. The investments for 1789 Capital have included companies such as Plaid, a digital finance firm that had lobbied the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau related to a new set of banking rules—until Mr. Trump’s team effectively shut down the agency and stalled enforcement of the regulation.

The families of presidents have often exploited their supposed access to the president for financial. But the answer to that problem is not to do it even more brazenly. Donald Trump Jr.’s club is, in effect, openly setting up a marketplace for buying favors from the Trump administration.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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