Trump family's new grift so corrupt its chart 'looks like an inbred family tree': expert

A professor of political science weighed in Monday on the latest controversy surrounding President Donald Trump and his family, one that involves allegations of corruption so blatant, the professor said, that a graphic outlining the alleged corruption bore resemblance to “an inbred family tree.”

According to an explosive report from The New York Times Sunday, the sons of both Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are expected to profit handsomely from a secretive deal signed off on by Trump last November. As revealed by the Times, the Trump administration approved “as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing” for a small American mining company in an arrangement to secure Kazakhstan’s tungsten reserves, a deal that both Trump and Lutnick’s sons are expected to financially benefit from.

Adam Bonica, a professor of political science at Stanford, noted the unprecedented simplicity of the alleged corruption scandal, writing on social media that the graphic created by the Times to illustrate the key players in the arrangement was unlike any similar graphic he’d seen before.

“Usually these political corruption maps have complicated plumbing,” he wrote in a social media post on Bluesky, a comment that was flagged by Zeteo on Monday. “You know it’s bad when it’s just a closed loop that looks like an inbred family tree.”

Trump’s sons – Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump – took a 20% stake in an entity “related to the Kazakhstan project,” the Times reported, and Lutnick’s sons – Brandon and Kyle Lutnick – helped raise funds for the deal through their investment company Cantor Fitzgerald, something that “typically [nets] Cantor millions of dollars in fees.”

Even Pini Althaus, the owner of the aforementioned mining company, Kaz Resources, admitted to the Times that the optics of the arrangement looked "disturbing."

“I can see how the optics might be disturbing to some people,” Althaus told the Times.