Donald Trump Jr. would like everyone to stop comparing him to Hunter Biden, despite both men allegedly cashing in on their fathers’ proximity to the White House.
Earlier this week, a Business Insider report described how 1789 Capital, the tiny venture capital firm that Don Jr. joined a week after President Donald Trump’s re-election in November, has suddenly been granted investment access to major defense contractors.
The piece was headlined “Don Jr. Is the New Hunter Biden” and reported that the president’s oldest son is doing the same thing Republicans have long accused Hunter Biden of doing: profiting off his father’s presidency.
“The difference between me and Hunter Biden? I’ve been a businessman and serial investor my entire life. He became a ‘businessman’ after his dad got elected,” Trump Jr. wrote Tuesday evening in a social media post on X.
“I joined a Venture Capital Firm that invests in private American companies—nothing to do with the government,” he continued. “He sat on foreign boards and was peddling influence to the highest bidder to change government policy.”
It’s undeniable that Hunter Biden became a businessman after his father “got elected”—Joe Biden held public office from the time Hunter was about 3 years old—and that his foreign business dealings have left a trail of scandals in their wake.
But the Business Insider article makes a compelling case that Don Jr.’s claim that his own business dealings have “nothing to do with government” couldn’t be further from the truth.
Before Don Jr. joined 1789 Capital, based in Palm Beach, Florida, the “anti-woke” firm had raised less than $200 million in funding and mostly just invested in Tucker Carlson’s new media company, Business Insider reported.
In the three months since Trump Sr. took office, the fund has raised $500 million and is aiming to collect $1 billion by mid-2025, plus another $3 billion-plus next year.
Instead of continuing its focus on “anti-wokeness,” it has invested millions of dollars in defense contractors, which have in turn received billions of dollars in government contracts.
Its deals include a $50 million investment in Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI, even though these investment opportunities are usually reserved for deep-pocketed insiders—not tiny funds with no track record of investing, according to Business Insider.
1789 Capital’s SpaceX investment has coincided with a new $5.9 billion contract from the U.S. Space Force to launch critical national security payloads. The Trump administration has also moved to redirect billions of taxpayer dollars to use SpaceX’s Starlink satellite system—and empowered Musk to redirect vast amounts of federal spending.
In the meantime, Don Jr.’s VC firm has also invested in Anduril, a defense technology firm that in February won a $22 billion contract to provide augmented reality goggles to soldiers, and Firehawk Aerospace, which is focused on supplying the military with 3D-printed rocket fuel, Business Insider reported.
Don Jr.’s social media post denying any similarities to Hunter Biden—whom former business associates have accused of selling “the illusion of access” to the halls of power—didn’t address these potential conflicts of interest.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Don Jr.’s representatives for comment.
A Trump Jr. spokesperson told Breitbart News it was “laughable” to compare Don Jr.’s business activities to Hunter Biden’s practice of “sitting on foreign boards and selling access to his dad’s office.”
And yet Don Jr.’s VC firm is the same group launching an invite-only club in Georgetown called the Executive Branch. For $500,000 a year, the club will will connect business and tech leaders with Trump administration insiders.
“What they’re doing is selling access to the president via the back door,” an anonymous Trump associate told Business Insider. “Imagine for one second if Hunter Biden had opened this club while Joe Biden was president. The Republicans would be screaming not just for his head, but for a complete and total dismemberment of his body. It’s beyond hypocritical.”
As for the investments in defense contractors, “If the son of the president is benefiting from these deals, even if there’s a few degrees of separation, is there a level playing field? We just don’t know,” Scott Amey, the general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, told Business Insider.
Nell Minow, a former government attorney with the Office of Management and Budget and the Justice Department, called the deals “a flashing red light of a conflict.”
In 2024, congressional Republicans investigated Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals as part of an impeachment inquiry into his father.
In 2013, Biden took a founding board seat at BHR, a Chinese private equity firm, and a year later, he joined the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma. He had previously worked in banking and owned a lobbying practice and hedge fund in between public-sector jobs.
One of his former business associates testified before Congress that Hunter Biden has sold “the illusion of access” to the White House, while Hunter maintained that he had never marketed himself that way, NPR reported at the time.
Republican lawmakers also hammered the younger Biden—who has been in recovery for drug and alcohol abuse since June 2019—about his past drug use. Joe Biden’s son has long been open about his struggles with addiction and has admitted to using crack cocaine after his older brother, Beau, died in 2015.
Before he finally got sober, he bought a gun, leading to convictions for three federal firearms-related felony charges, which Don Jr. brought up in his social media post denying any similarities to Hunter Biden.
“Oh, and he’s also a felon and a crackhead and I’m not,” Don Jr. wrote. “Thanks for playing.”
