The Familiar Playbook: The Pentagon Exhibit

This piece extends "The Familiar Playbook," , which examined the structural parallels between African kleptocratic regimes and the mechanics of family enrichment in the current administration. What has emerged since that piece was published warrants a direct update. The Pentagon is now the most explicit exhibit in the case.

When we first mapped the mechanics of Mobutu's Congo, Abacha's Nigeria, and Mugabe's Zimbabwe onto the architecture of power being constructed in Washington, the family enrichment was real but still required some inference. The defense contracting record now requires none.

In December 2025, the Trump administration banned foreign-made drones and drone components from the United States. The policy was framed as a national security measure. It was also a market creation event. The ban generated immediate Pentagon demand for domestically produced drones at precisely the moment when Don Jr. and Eric Trump were positioning themselves in the drone manufacturing sector. Powerus, a Florida-based drone company, was taken public through a reverse merger backed by the Trump brothers' investment firm, American Venture. In late April, the U.S. Air Force awarded Powerus a contract to supply interceptor drones. The war with Iran had just passed its 60-day mark.

One week later, Eric Trump appeared on Fox Business to boast about a separate $24 million Pentagon contract awarded to a robotics firm where he serves as chief strategy adviser. He described it as "a very beautiful thing." The question of whether it was appropriate for the president's son to celebrate defense contracts awarded by his father's administration during a war his father started apparently did not occur to anyone in the room.

The numbers extend further. Don Jr. joined 1789 Capital as a partner shortly after the 2024 election. Companies backed by that firm received hundreds of millions in Pentagon contracts and loans. A ProPublica investigation then revealed that a top White House aide had directly intervened to secure a $620 million Pentagon loan for a startup linked to Don Jr. — superseding the normal contracting process entirely.

Senator Warren framed the structural problem precisely in her letter to Defense Secretary Hegseth. The mechanism of corruption, she wrote, is not about contracting employees' personal investments. It is about the President's family having inside information or influence over Pentagon policies and plans, and about political favoritism by officials who want to remain in the good graces of the President's family. The Pentagon declined to answer the vast majority of her questions.

This is the point at which the African parallel ceases to be a parallel and becomes something closer to a template. Mobutu did not personally sign every extraction contract. The system he built required only the installation of people whose interests were sufficiently aligned with his own that the extraction proceeded naturally. What Warren called "political favoritism by officials who want to remain in the good graces of the President's family" is precisely that mechanism operating in real time. You do not need a direct order. You need an atmosphere.

The congressional Republicans who have declined to investigate the Powerus contracts, the $620 million loan intervention, and the 1789 Capital portfolio do not think of themselves as enabling the looting of the public treasury. They think they are making practical decisions in a complicated situation. The Western banks that processed Mobutu's stolen wealth told themselves the same thing.

History has a way of being less forgiving about that distinction than the people living through it tend to be. The defense budget is funded by the same taxpayers whose social programs are being cut to pay for it. The family that lobbied for those cuts is now collecting from the contracts the budget funds. The playbook, it turns out, was always going to end here.

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Sources: ProPublica on Pentagon contracting and Trump family ties, May 2026; CNBC on Warren-Hegseth correspondence, March 2026; Common Dreams on Eric Trump Pentagon boast, April 2026; The New Republic on Powerus and 1789 Capital contracts, May 2026; Defense One on $620 million Pentagon loan intervention, June 2026; House Oversight Committee Democrats on Trump family DOD contracts, May 2026; Warren/Crow letter to DOD Inspector General, June 2026; ProPublica on Steve Feinberg financial disclosures, March 2026.

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