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Before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump that precipitated Elon Musk’s MAGA conversion in the summer of 2024, there was at least one prominent member of Trumpworld who had been courting Musk in public for years. In May 2020, Musk posted, “Take the red pill,” with a rose emoji, to his 34 million followers on what was then known as Twitter. In a quote tweet, Donald Trump Jr. responded, “Welcome.”
Six days after the January 6 insurrection, Don Jr. posted a video to his Facebook page to ask, “Why doesn’t Elon Musk create a social-media platform?” Twitter had just permanently suspended his father for using the service to incite violence, and Junior was mad. “Elon, why don’t you do that?” he demanded. “Get out there and come up with a concept … I think you are literally the guy to save free speech in America.” A year later, after Musk’s successful takeover of Twitter, Don Jr. posted a screenshot of a Musk post that read, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” Junior captioned it: “This times 1000.”
He was the first major political figure to suggest that Musk take on government inefficiency, the crusade that has since turned Washington upside down. The day after Musk hosted a forum with Trump on Twitter, now rebranded as X, Junior posted, “Who else loves the idea of Elon Musk heading up a government efficiency committee to eliminate the likely trillions of dollars of waste we have in our bloated bureaucracy? I can’t imagine a better person for the task. Trump will make this happen!” The post got 3 million views.
This is not to suggest that Don Jr., who did not respond to requests for comment, was the puppet master pulling the strings that made Musk the the power behind the throne in Washington. But there’s no denying that the principal way in which the second Trump administration differs from the first is in the rise of Musk’s strain of tech-bro fascism — a school of political thought cultivated in online cesspools and gamerworld and disseminated via shouty podcasts that the elder Trump, whose technological know-how is limited to scrolling through his Spotify playlist at Mar-a-Lago, has little interest in. No, it is the extremely online Junior who is steeped in this world and has brought its luminaries into his father’s orbit.
In 2016, Junior lured Peter Thiel to speak at the Republican National Convention, whose MAGA attendees were visibly unnerved by Thiel’s admission that he was gay. But Thiel’s early endorsement and $1.25 million donation was a radical step among Silicon Valley supremos who were largely still Obama Democrats. Eight years later, they are nearly all paying tribute to Trump, with Musk, Thiel’s fellow PayPal mafia, doling out $288 million from his own pocket in 2024.
Junior has made alliances with all sorts of people who have been outside not only Republican circles, but MAGA ones, too, such as Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. (About the latter, he smirked in 2024, “I love the idea of giving him some sort of role in some sort of major three-letter entity or whatever it may be and let him blow it up.”) Most importantly, he brought J.D. Vance onboard. Vance, a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist who loves the “debate me” style of trolling of the online right, had called Trump “loathsome” and an “idiot” and “cultural heroin” and compared him to Hitler. But in 2022, Junior’s onetime aide Andy Surabian, who was working on Vance’s super-PAC during his run for the Senate in Ohio, put Vance on the phone with Junior, and by the end of the conversation, he was a Vance convert, soon encouraging his father to endorse Vance in the Republican primary and tweeting an alternative history of Vance to his millions of followers: “Enough with the lies being told about this guy.” When Trump had to choose his vice-president in 2024, Don Jr. used all his clout to plump for J.D.
What’s crazy about this is that Junior has any clout at all. How did Donald Trump Jr. — spurned nepo boy, the designated Fredo of his father’s first term, the failson to end all failsons — emerge as the conduit between his father and powerful Silicon Valley edgelords? How did he become, in the span of the four short years his father was in political exile, the family’s crypto point man, a prince among old-money Republicans and the MAGA faithful alike, and one of the most powerful figures in the country? The story of Junior’s rise is equal parts scandalous and unlikely, granting his father near the end of his life the son he has always wanted — and perhaps even a political successor worthy of his name.
Born on New Year’s Eve 1977, the first of Ivana and Donald’s three children, Junior was always the surly, underperforming son. He liked to joke that Dad had demanded his birth be induced for end-of-year tax reasons. Trump was a distant father even before he left Junior’s mother for Marla Maples. After witnessing a ski-lodge confrontation between his mother and “the showgirl,” Junior didn’t speak to his namesake for at least a year. “He hated his father,” one adult friend of his told me. Another observer who spent months around the siblings during the 2020 campaign thought all three of them were “terrified” of their father.
The relationship always had a Kendall/Logan vibe. There was famously that time when Junior, a hard-partying frat boy at Wharton nicknamed “Diaper Don” for his penchant for passing out and wetting himself, was humiliated by his father in front of all his friends when he came to pick him up for a Yankees game. “Don Jr. opened the door, wearing a Yankee jersey. Without saying a word, his father slapped him across the face, knocking him to the floor,” his former classmate Scott Melker wrote on Facebook in 2016. “He simply said ‘put on a suit and meet me outside,’ and closed the door.” (A spokesman for Don Jr. has previously denied these stories.)
After college, Junior spent a year in Aspen bartending and drinking in relative obscurity (the name “Trump” wasn’t top-shelf in the celebrity-thick ski town). Eventually, he returned to Manhattan to take a job in the Trump Organization and married the pretty model Dad introduced him to (then pulled a classic classy Trump move by agreeing to stand in front of the New Jersey jewelry store and “give” his betrothed, Vanessa, the free engagement ring the shop had provided in exchange for some advertising). Together, they spawned five kids.
Junior also tested his Wharton degree on endeavors beyond the family business. But he wasn’t so great at making money. Trump Senior had to take over a $3.65 million loan to rescue a South Carolina real-estate investment Junior had made. Many of his ventures involved his friend Gentry Beach. Beach and Junior are godfather to each other’s kids, hunting buddies. They had a charming rapport. In 2006, Junior sent an email to a group of men with the subject line “Gucci Camping or (jhunt),” in which he wrote, “The first annual Madison ave camping trip has officially been scheduled for sunday sept 3rd. All goyem bring your guns.” Beach responded, “Jews, the other white meat. Look like chicken taste like fish.” A Junior-Beach business, Eden Green Technology, was hit with a lawsuit that indicated the company was in financial trouble due to “gross project mismanagement.” The suit accused Beach and other executives of paying themselves exorbitant salaries and spending more than $19.4 million in the first nine months of 2018 — while only generating $9,000 in revenue. (The parties reached a settlement soon after the lawsuit was filed.)
By the time the 2016 campaign rolled around, Junior was kind of a joke, weak-chinned and beaver-eager, packed into a business suit but not ready for the ratfucking style of politics his father had learned at the knee of Roy Cohn. He notoriously set up the Trump Tower meeting with Russians after being promised dirt on Hillary Clinton that “would be very useful to your father.” Junior took the bait — Dad might have done so, too — but, JFC, he left a record. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Junior wrote in an email eventually made public. (Trump, who eschews email for exactly this reason, would later dictate the exact words Junior should use to get himself out of that jam: Pretend the meeting was about Russian adoptions.)
The Russia meeting became a key point in the “Putin owns Trump” narrative. Reporters also ferreted out Junior’s 2008 brag that Russian money was key to the Trump Organization’s budget: “In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” It was all sort of embarrassing, piker corruption. In 2018, he flew to India to leverage Dad’s presidency to sell Trump condos to rich pals of Narendra Modi.
There was something feral about Junior. He didn’t have the slick panache of Ivanka and Jared, who tried — and failed — to grasp for the Trumps a Kennedy-esque respectability and beauty and glamour. In the White House, some administration members joked that, of all the Trumps, Junior was the most likely to someday walk in with an automatic weapon and “go Columbine.” Junior’s love of firearms and hunting, rooted in boyhood summers in Europe in the woods with his Czech grandfather Milos, also had a vicious aura, with pictures of the Trump boys grinning next to the corpses of leopards and elephants. Junior once bragged that he shot 4,000 birds in Argentina — in a day. (In February, Italian authorities accused his hunting party of shooting a protected breed of duck in wetlands near Venice. He didn’t personally deny it, but his spokesman said, “Don takes following all rules, regulations, and conservation on his hunts very seriously and plans on fully cooperating with any investigation.”)
Halfway through the first Trump administration, Junior’s marriage fell apart. Vanessa filed for divorce in 2018. (She is now dating Tiger Woods.) In 2020, he proposed to MAGA diva Kimberly Guilfoyle. The California-born lawyer, nearly ten years older than him, had a long and colorful history in politics already, as the former wife of California governor Gavin Newsom. And as a Fox News personality, she distinguished herself as possibly the only female the company has sacked for sexually harassing her staff. Guilfoyle knew how to make money. Junior complained about his ex-wife hitting him up for incidentals in addition to the monthly alimony. One of their friends told me Guilfoyle handled these calls from Vanessa.
During the 2020 campaign, all three Trump siblings campaigned for their father, each with a role appropriate to their public personas. Junior was dispatched to fluff the MAGA rabble, pique the QAnons with conspiracy-theory wink-winks, and roll his eyes about pronouns. All that pandemic summer and fall, he would often stroll onto rally risers unmasked, business shirt tucked into jeans, no jacket, and in a nasal rapid-fire declare his bona fides: “I’ve had more blue-collar jobs than Joe Biden!” His favored sign-off was, “We will make liberals cry again!” Meanwhile, as Trump’s 2020 campaign finance chair, Guilfoyle offered to give a lap dance or share a hot tub with the highest donors.
Trump lost the election, bringing him to his lowest point as a politician. Ironically, this is when Junior’s prospects, for the first time, began looking up.
If Don Jr.’s staff had had their way, he might not have been on the Ellipse on January 6. Junior’s adviser Arthur Schwartz had texted other aides that Junior “didn’t approve jack shit” about showing up at the Stop the Steal rally — until he learned his father would be there. “Once my father’s speaking, then, you know, I feel obligated to obviously do it,” he later told the House committee investigating the insurrection. “I’m going to help my father, you know, when I can.” For her part, Guilfoyle had been furious and angry, according to texts, about not being on the rally speaker list because the couple were due to get $60,000 from Turning Point USA for the appearance. She fought her way on to the stage and told the crowd, “We will not allow the liberals and the Democrats to steal our dream or steal our elections,” before Don Jr. told the crowd to “fight, stand up, and hold your representatives accountable.” In a video he took of the family just before Trump sent his “patriots” to assault the Capitol, a giddy Junior selfies himself and Guilfoyle boogies to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.”
Don Jr.’s ticket to influence was the Big Lie, which for a time isolated his father from the Republican Party and led Jared and Ivanka to scurry for the hills. The ignominious end of the first Trump administration coincided with Junior’s continued promotion of his 2019 book, Triggered. In the Biden interregnum, as Dad went about raising money for his legal defense and fended off one prosecution after another, his namesake did what he could for the cause, spewing Biden global corruption conspiracies and shrieking about the weaponized deep state. Junior’s growing popularity as a MAGA red-meat tosser got him a seven-figure podcast deal from Rumble.
Personally, he had been evolving. His weak chin had disappeared under a beard, which gives a strong teenage-werewolf vibe. Casual consumers of X posts and right-wing media today know Junior as a bright-eyed pocket mouse of a man whose lib-baiting jackhammer monologues have spawned suggestions that he is a drug user. “Cocaine News with Don Jr.” is a regular feature on The Daily Show. But he has insisted cocaine is “not my thing.” And people who know him say that it’s “highly unlikely” he has a drug problem. He once barfed all over a hotel after a few hits of powerful weed. Another friend told me Junior, in contrast to his college days, is now noticeably “judicious” around alcohol. “I watched him say no,” one friend said. “I never thought we were in the presence of someone with a problem.” It is possible the hopped-up Triggered podcaster is a party persona. “One-on-one, he is phenomenal,” another friend told me. “We had intelligent conversations. When the posse are around, he is the leader of the pack. If a fanboy showed up, maybe there was a little peacocking.”
He launched a few business endeavors, including a right-wing publishing company with pal Sergio Gor (now the White House director of personnel). He also helped found a hunting lifestyle magazine, Field Ethos, which bills itself as a digest “for the unapologetic man.” The magazine got good reviews, but it felt like Junior was more interested in continuing to make liberals cry.
As his father began to reassert his control over the GOP ahead of the 2024 election, Junior was amplifying voices in the neofascist tech-reactionary world, radicalizing the MAGAverse even more. Racist pseudoscience and quasi fascism were always in the water around Trumps, of course. Two years ago, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, Junior’s bodyman in the 2016 cycle, posted, “Whiteness is great. Be proud of who you are.” But the Richard Spencer version of the so-called alt-right was giving way to new strains of technocratic authoritarianism and manosphere revanchism, all of which swirled around Junior and Vance and others who capitalized on the period of Trump’s exile from power. They were part of Thiel’s universe, where people like Curtis Yarvin were pontificating on the need for monarchy to rule the dumb masses. Junior and Vance were also keyed into a misogynistic white-supremacist subculture that includes Bronze Age Pervert, a Romanian American defender of masculine virtue, and Raw Egg Nationalist, a British fascist and manly wellness influencer.
Vance is among the 76,000 X followers of Captive Dreamer, an anon who has identified himself as a translator of fascist classics in French and German and who was one of the first to claim that Haitians were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. Junior hosted white nationalist Darren Beattie, who has said various Black people need to “learn their place in society” and take “a knee to MAGA” and has called for sterilizing “low IQ trash” at least seven times on his podcast in the last two years. Beattie is now a top official at Marco Rubio’s State Department.
As his father prepared to storm back to the White House, Junior was also upping his girlfriend game. Bettina Anderson is an actual to the manor born WASP, from the enclaves of Palm Beach that used to look down on the Trumps. She is nine years younger than Junior, and she doesn’t appear to have submitted to the Mar-a-Lago face restructuring popular among many ladies in Palm Beach MAGAland. Palm Beach society is a little surprised at Anderson, since Junior “is the most despised member of the family; he’s an asshole, a spoiled heir,” according to one insider.
But everyone understands why a smart girl might hook up with a president’s son. With German efficiency, Dad announced Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece on the same day in December that the Daily Mail broke the news of Junior’s new beau, showing them holding hands on the way to her birthday party. “Bettina wanted her out of the area,” a People source said cattily. The course was clear, in more ways than one, for Don Jr. to jump to a new echelon.
It goes without saying that Trump 2.0 is raking it in. A modest accounting in mid-February of the money the family has made since the election — and that’s a tally only of the known knowns — is $80 million. Junior’s role in this windfall has been both pivotal and personally enriching.
Junior, along with Vance, is the conduit to crypto. Dad had been calling crypto “a scam” for years, but in September, he rolled out, with Junior and Eric, a murky endeavor called World Liberty Financial. The purpose of the WLF enterprise is unclear — an exchange? a crypto bank? — but ethics experts and Democrats have suggested the venture could eventually involve potential conflicts of interest surrounding Trump’s financial ties. Chinese crypto investor Justin Sun, under SEC investigation for alleged crypto-fraud activity and fresh off spending $6 million for Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana (he videotaped himself eating it in Hong Kong), was the first big investor, dumping $30 million into WLF just before the election.
Junior met WLF co-founders Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman through the son of Trump’s fellow New York real-estate mogul Steve Witkoff (now Trump’s Russia-Ukraine and Middle East negotiator). Even in a business rife with shady dealers, Herro and Folkman have colorful résumés. Herro has a few misdemeanor convictions under his belt and hundreds of thousands in unpaid back taxes. Folkman’s business ventures include Date Hotter Girls, a dating-advice service that he advertised with the line “You’re going to be ripping their clothes off and throwing them up against the wall.” Junior had praised Herro and Folkman, saying, “You could put them in a boardroom at Goldman Sachs, and they’re going to smoke the people in the room.” But they seem as astounded as the rest of the financial world. “If you would have thought six months ago that Donald Trump is dropping a decentralized finance project, would anyone have believed it?” Folkman asked on the livestream announcing the project, according to the New York Times. The event’s moderator called the men “two crypto punks.”
At the end of January, Trump Media — the litigation-plagued holding company for Trump’s Truth Social — announced it was pivoting to financial services tied to crypto. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump Organization, led by Eric, was in talks to purchase a stake in crypto exchange Binance, at the same time that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao is in a position to receive a pardon from Trump for a conviction related to money laundering. Meanwhile, Trump made David Sacks his “crypto czar,” and in March announced the creation of a “strategic bitcoin reserve” to shore up crypto markets and keep them humming.
Since the election, Junior has been invited onto so many boards and has been cut in on so many deals that his head must be spinning.
A week after the November election, Junior joined 1789 Capital, a Palm Beach–based $150 million venture-capital firm that aims to invest in companies with “deglobalization” and “anti ESG” policies and whose founder, Omeed Malik, was fired by Bank of America for allegedly making unwanted advances toward multiple women in its prime brokerage unit. (Malik sued for defamation, and the bank settled.) Malik hosted a fundraiser for Vance in 2022, with Junior an invited guest.
A week after that announcement, drone-maker Unusual Machines announced Junior had joined its advisory board. Its stock hit a new record on the heels of the announcement, but the company dismissed the idea that the move was designed to take advantage of Junior’s connections in Washington.
In December, months after Trump Media went public through a SPAC, Trump moved all of his shares, worth $4 billion at the time, into a trust controlled by Junior, and PublicSquare announced that Trump Jr. had been appointed to the company’s board of directors. Headquartered in West Palm Beach, the company aims to be an anti-woke Amazon, with offerings like consumer financing for the shooting industry and pro-life diapers.
In January, Junior was named an “adviser” to GrabAGun, an online firearms retailer founded in 2010 that plans to go public this year in a merger with Omeed Malik’s SPAC Colombier Corp II. The same month, he joined the prediction market Kalshi as a strategic adviser, stating that he and his family had used Kalshi on Election Night “to know we won hours ahead of the fake news media.”
In early February, digital pharmacy company BlinkRx announced that Junior would be joining its board of directors. A week later, Dominari Holdings announced he and Eric joined their advisory board.
“No one picks him for his acumen, competency, or charisma,” said Gil Duran, a San Francisco journalist. “His sole value is that he’s Trump’s son. He is clearly a middleman in the new alliance between the tech authoritarians and his father.”
But Junior isn’t just cashing out. The day after the fourth anniversary of the January 6 coup attempt, a Boeing 757 painted “Trump Force One” with a little Donald Trump action figure mounted on the cockpit descended on the capital of Greenland. Rumors that Junior was coming had been around Nuuk, a town of 20,000, for a day or two, but the government did not send a representative to meet him. “Nobody knew what to do,” a Greenlander told me. “Go meet him? Call the police, send special forces?”
The American expeditionary team that strolled into the airport in bomber jackets (personalized with their names and the words “Trump Force One”) included Junior, Charlie Kirk, and Sergio Gor. Junior started speaking, his yelling rat-a-tat delivery a little much for people used to hunting fish and bear in silent expanses of snow and ice. “To our ears, it sounds like a cannon shooting,” a witness recalled. “People had to put their fingers in their ears. They could not believe it.” Junior explained that he came as “a tourist” who loves wild animals. His team then passed out MAGA hats and little American flags. The crowd drifted off.
The Americans made their way to the Hotel Hans Egede, where a right-wing local blogger had reserved two tables for them. But the restaurant was kind of empty. Bad optics! Social-media fluffers were dispatched to a small park that attracted panhandlers and drug addicts. For the price of donning the red hats, the outcasts were happy to chow down on whale heart with the Americans. “All the drunks and beggars say yes. And now all these people are sitting there eating free food,” the witness said.
Junior dialed up his dad, who crooned over the speaker that the United States needed to take over Greenland because there are “ships sailing around, and they’re not the right ships.” A few handshakes later, the Trump Force One team dashed back to the airport, where the pilot gunned the jet back toward America.
The trip mystified everyone except those in on the joke. Besides giving Trump an opportunity to do some American chest-beating, the stunt was an extended dog whistle to a subculture of Silicon Valley geeks and woke-enraged white male academics who have been dreaming of an American imperium and the breeding of a race of alabaster-skinned supermen in Greenland.
Greenland has mythic significance for the race pseudoscientists surrounding Musk, Vance, and Junior, who are enamored of what 20th-century Italian fascist Julius Evola called “fabulous Hyperborea” — Arctic regions that are supposedly the primordial homeland of a divine race of white-philosopher priests. It is highly unlikely Junior is unaware of the connection. Bronze Age Pervert, for example, has been open about his hope to “rebreed the original Aryan race” in the Arctic, and the white nationalists in his circle have been known to post maps of an American empire that, like Hitler’s lebensraum, show the incorporation of all the “white” nations — Russia, Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, and even South Africa — into a single unit. The fantasy of a white nationalist beachhead in Greenland is something an Xbox sword-wielding hero homunculus would dream up — the essence of tech-bro fascism, if you think about it. Greenland has become so central to the MAGA imaginarium that Vance is sending his wife Usha there later this week.
After Junior left Nuuk, a small team of social-media creators stayed an extra day for content, bribing truant teens to stand before cameras and recite support for an American takeover. “They were walking around and giving everyone $100 and a MAGA hat to make videos where participants were told to say, ‘Yeah, we want to join the United States,’” a Greenlander told me. “These kids are schoolchildren, maybe skipping school. Of course, the parents, after they saw these videos, were like, ‘What? You gave my child a hundred dollars and a stupid hat?’”
Afterward, Dad got the president of Denmark — a woman — on the phone. He was so rude, so vehement about taking Greenland for America, that witnesses described the exchange as “horrendous” and “like a cold shower.” Sending No. 1 Son on such a mission suggests trust, of course, and Junior was later dispatched to Serbia to support both its beleaguered president and his family’s real-estate deals there. A January poll of Republicans found that Junior trailed only Vance among possible candidates for president in 2028. Whether that sits well with a father thinking about a third term is another question. Asked about the possibility of running for president, Junior freaked out: “Oh, God,” he said. “No, no, no, don’t get me into trouble.”
