Donald Trump Jr. and his right-wing allies are making a play for your shopping cart, one MAGA-branded item at a time.
The eldest Trump son is planning to forgo a job in his father’s second administration, but it seems he has found a way to enrich himself even more than he could with a cushy government gig. The Wall Street Journal reported last week on Trump Jr.’s latest grift: working with a venture capital firm that invests in “the parallel economy.”
For those unaware, the parallel economy is essentially the sector of MAGA-branded products that conservatives have sold to their loyal followers in recent years as a way to stick it to liberals. Whereas some people bemoan that politics seem to have pervaded nearly every aspect of their lives, the parallel economy is for people who seemingly want to make everything a political statement, from the water they drink to the wireless network they use.
The Economist summed it up well in an article last summer:
Before paying your monthly AT&T bill, you might want to switch to Patriot Mobile, the nation’s one-and-only Christian conservative wireless network. Rather than fruitlessly scouring Hinge for fellow right-wingers you can now make a profile on the Right Stuff, a dating app that helps users get to know each other by eliciting responses to prompts like “January 6th was” or “favourite liberal lie”. To get java roasted by veterans, consider sipping on Black Rifle Coffee’s “Silencer Smooth” (light roast), “AK-47” (medium roast), or “Murdered Out” (extra dark roast). And to protest against Hershey honouring a transgender activist on international women’s day, you can instead buy Jeremy’s Chocolate, where the HeHim bar contains nuts and the SheHer one is unequivocally nutless.
The president-elect’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is already an investor in the parallel economy, selling conservative-branded coffee in his spare time. And The Wall Street Journal says Junior, who has tried hawking a variety of MAGA-branded products, wants a bigger cut of this industry. So he joined a businessman, Omeed Malik, at a firm called 1789 Capital to make it happen.
According to the Journal:
At 1789, Trump Jr. will work alongside some of Trump’s biggest allies, mixing politics with business even as he has said he plans to stay out of the administration. His current role is honorary co-chair of his father’s transition team, where he sees his job as keeping people seeking to capitalize on roles in the administration out of it.
In addition to Malik, a one-time Democrat who is now a fixture at Mar-a-Lago, often on the tennis court, 1789’s other founders include Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of a hedge-fund chief who was one of Trump’s earliest megadonors, and Chris Buskirk, a conservative publisher who co-founded a Trump-aligned donor network with Vice President-elect JD Vance.
The WSJ reported that people close to Trump’s oldest son say he “plans to recuse himself from investments involving any company with government business,” but the newspaper correctly notes that he “will face potential conflicts of interests that come from investing in companies his father’s administration could influence.”
I’d caution against just taking Team Trump at their word that Don Jr. will be avoiding conflicts of interest. In the coming years, as he and his followers hawk the latest in their line of MAGA-branded endeavors, it’ll be incumbent on all of us to ensure that everything is on the up-and-up.