The name of charity, the family, how can the Trumps profit from charity

By Chloe, Challenger

 

Last month, just a few hours before he went to a party with King Charles III, the second son of Trump, Eric Trump, wrote a five-part long story on X to defend himself. The fuse line is the next dispute in his name: he has been claiming to the investor that a publicly traded and encrypted money company, American Bitcoin, which he owns, can dig bitcoin at about half the market price, a claim that has been broken by a Forbes article。

As of June 17, 2026, the shares of American Bitcoin (Nasdak Code ABC) had fallen to about $0.83, about 90 per cent higher than those of the end of last year, about $175, and $14。

And then Eric, in his post, talked about another thing that had been going on for almost 10 years: a study by Forbes of his childhood cancer charity in 2017. He wrote that outside attacks were “crazy” because he was just a young man who “saved his whole heart to save a dying child”。

Admittedly, he did do well, and over the years, the Foundation has contributed more than $25 million to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Tennessee, and has streamlined its operations, focused on raising funds and handing over cumbersome implementation to others. But on the other hand, it is misleading rhetoric, hasty accounts, a board of directors whose interests are at stake, and an undisguised loyalty to Trump, and the same tactics are in the encryption industry。

The Tromps always get out of the scandal

Through the Freedom of Information Act application, Forbes obtained thousands of pages of documentation and found that between 2011 and 2016 his foundation had channelled at least $500,000 of charitable money to his family ' s property through a series of transactions, most of which never appeared in tax declarations。

The documents also explain why the Trump family always retreats. Their approach is to fight back loudly on television or social media, then use lawyers to bury the paper record layer, and then repair it to the point where it's enough to deal with custody, avoid punishment, without any change in the bones; when the wind is over, they come back in the victim's position and ask the public to trust them again, and there are always a lot of people who want to believe。

Eric's foundation, which is putting the script from the beginning to the end: nine years after the scandal, this renamed institution is still in operation, raising funds on an annual basis, spending more than $500,000 a year, and running almost all the sites in the name of Trump。

The conflict of interest is clear, even the White House is involved

The foundation's starting point is indeed good. First of all, Eric and his rich friends wanted to do something good, and when they handed it to the IRS in 2007, they wrote, "Our family owns three golf clubs in New York and New Jersey. The application also promised not to enter into a lease with any company under its leadership. And that's true for the first three years, about $50,000 a year, hundreds of thousands。

Since 2010, however, Trump Group staff have been on board and spending has increased sharply to $142,000 in the following years. The former director of the club, Ian Gillule, pointed himself directly at Trump when he was interviewed: he was dissatisfied with the fact that the Foundation used the premises without charge, that bills disappeared in the early years, that he was not “helping for nothing”, that he had donated so much without leaving any record or name, and that he had ordered him to charge a single fee, whether he was his son or not。

So everyone was charged. After the 2011 event, the Trump National Golf Club issued a $20,000 bill to the Foundation, and a line was added to the copy of Forbes: “In case of doubt, call Dan Scavino.” The conflict of interest is obvious: Dan Scavino is now the Deputy Chief of Staff of the White House, who was both the director-in-chief of the club and the director of the foundation at the time; and Eric's own signature is under the bill, but it is not clear which identity he signed. The following year the bill was issued: the club received $100,000 in 2013 and $99,000 in 2016, and even the Trump Soho Hotel and the Sea Lake Estate shared a piece。

Poisoned candy wraps it in beautiful sugar suits

Dear Friends, Eric wrote in his 2014 fundraiser manual that the Foundation “has one of the lowest cost rates in the world” and insists that Saint Jude receive almost the full amount of money with only the Tremple-owned premises, full-time volunteers, donates and unpaid performers。

But the books don't match that. At the party there were Hooters waitresses and mini Eric rocking dolls, most of them from Celebrity Apprenticeships, “They're all free of charge”, and even if Eric said so, he signed a performance cheque of over $90,000. The auction was “all donated”, but the Foundation actually spent at least $65,000 on purchases, even $6,040 in 2012 and only $3,310 in the end. There was also a cost of a car delivery, and the Sunny's family alone received over $35,000。

In addition, hundreds of thousands of money goes to other charities, several of which are more directly related to family interests than to childhood cancer; at least three have also raised funds at the Trump stadium. In 2013, Eric also spent US$ 1,600 to buy a decorated copper distillor and an antique bottlewasher near his liquor store. Of course, the Foundation did make a substantial contribution to St. Jude, from $220 million in 2007 to $2.9 million in 2016, when Trump was first elected。

Eric, who's a victim, thinks he's a bad guy

Politics quickly pushed the Foundation under the spotlight. At the end of 2016, Daily Bast and the Associated Press exposed its deal with the Tromp Club, while The New York Times reported that an investment manager had offered nearly $60,000 in a fund-raising auction for a cup of coffee with Ivanka Trump. The problem is not just public relations: under New York state law and federal law, such related transactions would have to be voted by the board of directors, leave their basis and be disclosed in tax returns。

So Eric decided to restructure and distance himself from the family: Trump withdrew all of his employees, including himself; he said that his father would avoid “observation problems” during his tenure, no more personal fund-raising before leaving office, and that the foundation, also known as Curetivity, would commit all donations to St. Jude. On the surface, it looks like he's back to his original purpose, but Eric hasn't changed, and the board of directors told Forbes the following month, "We have 100 percent free access to the world's top-level space, which is why the cost rate is the lowest ever."

The same day, he went to Fox News, where he described his review as a political conspiracy and persecution, comparing himself to the victim, “I raised tens of millions of dollars in exchange for hatred”

Two days later, the General Prosecutor ' s Office sent a letter to check the books. The survey caused serious damage to the Foundation: contributions fell sharply by more than two thirds in 2017, falling by $1 million, and administrative and legal costs surged from almost zero to about $50,000 per year. At the end of the year, the Director of Public Prosecutions sent letters calling for multiple issues, financial statements that did not comply with accounting standards, ignored the rules governing related transactions, marketed misled and were held hostage by the withdrawal of eligibility for collection。

Since then, the accounts have become less transparent. Following Eric's withdrawal from the Board, the occasional “associated party transactions” had disappeared, the “rent/scene charges” column had been left blank and fund-raising expenditures had fallen from $384 million in 2016 to $1.11 million in 2017. Until the end of 2018, when the Office of the Prosecutor-General advised that the investigation had shifted to compliance rather than law enforcement, Eric had re-entered the scene, returned to the propaganda material and was eventually crowned as the “founder” of Curetivity, with a rebound in fund-raising spending, which had reached a new high of $3.92 million in 2019. As to the number of flows back to the Trump Group, no information was available under the vague accounts。

Today, the fund-raising campaign continues in the name of Trump: in 2020 it was set up at the Sea Lake Estate, costing $3.09 million, and in recent years it has fallen on the Tripp Fields of North Carolina and Jupiter, Florida. If the fees are the same as those of the year, the Curetivity family will be able to bring in some $200,000 a year for the Trump business map, cumulatively over a million in 20 years。

The same script moved to encryption

This “pretty talk, value back from family” game, which did not stop at charitable foundations, has moved almost intact into American Bitcoin。

The company was previously packaged by Eric as a “note-printer” and publicly claimed to be able to dig mines at a discount of less than 53 per cent, at a cost of about $57,000 per bit. It sounds like the foundation's “global minimum cost rate”. However, as with charitable foundations, the books of accounts are unmatched。

It was the same Forbes journalist who exposed the Foundation nine years ago, Dan Alexander. He found that about 70 per cent of the company's bitcoin had not been dug up, but had been bought on the open market by developing new shares; once depreciation and sale had been calculated, the full-pack cost per item had been close to $90,000, well above Eric's declared $57,000。

Today, the company's stock price has fallen by about 90 per cent from the high point of about $175 at the end of 2025 and from the issuing price of about $14, with a cumulative loss estimated by the diaspora investors at about $500 million, and a net loss of financial losses of about $81.8 million in the first quarter of 2026, with a completely different view of the interior。

The founders had acquired shares at close to zero cost, and even if the price had collapsed at 90 per cent, Eric ' s personal holdings were still worth about $70 million; at the same time, his home was estimated to have risen to about $300 million. Eric did not respond positively to Forbes’ calculated costs and dilution, but instead moved out of the camp, holding more than 7,000 bright-eyed numbers to counter them, and denounced on X that Forbes had become a political weapon and a disgrace to the press。

Last September, Eric stood in the middle of the Wilshire Club party, hosting the nineteenth collection, surrounded by several important business partners. Since his re-election, his family has risen from an estimated $40 million in 2024 to 300 million today。