$3.5B in Assets, $735M in Contracts; Don Jr.’s Tax Audit Barred

There's an old Washington saying: the best lobbyist is a family member. Donald Trump Jr. seems to have turned that into a business model.

Since his father returned to the White House, Trump Jr.'s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, has grown from $200 million to an estimated $3.5 billion in assets in just over a year. The portfolio reads like a defense-tech wishlist with names like Cerebras, SpaceX, xAI, Anduril, Databricks, Groq, and Polymarket. He calls the strategy "Patriotic Capitalism." Critics have a different name for it.

The firm's biggest win is Cerebras, an AI chipmaker 1789 Capital backed at an $8.1 billion valuation. It went public shortly after at $60 billion, a 7x paper gain. The same company had already received a $45 million Pentagon contract before 1789 even formally invested. Then there's Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth startup 1789 backed in August 2025. Three months later, the Pentagon handed it a $620 million loan, the largest in the Office of Strategic Capital's history, without competitive bids and without the standard technical review. In total, at least four 1789-backed companies have collected over $735 million in government contracts since Trump took office.

Now the story has a new, explosive chapter. On May 19, 2026, Acting AG Todd Blanche quietly posted a one-page document declaring the IRS "forever barred and precluded" from auditing the taxes of President Trump, his family, and their businesses, past, present, and pending. Donald Trump Jr. is explicitly named. The order also wiped out a decade-long IRS audit that could have cost the family as much as $100 million. As a bonus, the settlement created a $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund", drawn entirely from taxpayer money, to compensate Trump allies who believe they were unjustly targeted.

The president sued his own administration. His administration settled with him. Then it permanently shielded him and his sons from any accounting of what they owed.

For context: Hunter Biden was prosecuted, subpoenaed, and convicted over roughly $1.5 million in unpaid taxes. Donald Trump Jr. now has a $3.5 billion portfolio, $735 million in government contracts flowing to his companies, and a signed guarantee that no tax authority will ever examine how he made any of it.