With midterm elections only months away, Democrats have come together at conferences and in conversation to sketch out what their agenda should look like should they retake control of the House or Senate. Although much of the attention has centered on things such as affordability and economic opportunities, it has also focused on one topic in particular: corruption.
Democrats are considering how they should address the fact that President Donald Trump, aided by Republican allies throughout Congress, has overseen not only the most corrupt administration in modern American history, but how his administration has obliterated many key anti-corruption statutes and initiatives. Given the deluge of corruption-related developments – luxury jets and crypto payments from foreign governments, paid-for pardons, slush funds for political allies, and politicized prosecutions – it will be important for Democrats to focus on how such corruption has corroded American statecraft, entrenched kleptocratic regimes abroad, and turned the United States into a friend of corrupt and crooked networks both at home and around the world.
There are plenty of directions Democrats could take their emerging anti-corruption agenda, but one path promises the most in terms of substance and political advantage: investigating the corruption of the Trump family and focusing, at least initially, on the second-generation members of the family who have managed to profit so spectacularly from their proximity to power. Let’s not forget that Republicans are on the record as being deeply concerned about a president’s children profiting from their connections to power. As Democrats plot their approach, they should consider modeling it after the 1975 Church Committee, which remains the best example for an investigation of this scope.
Second-Generation Profiteers
For most of American history, the children of sitting American presidents generally shied away from monetizing their relationships with their father. Although there are one-off examples, such as President Jimmy Carter’s son being recruited as a client for Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship in the Philippines, they are few and far between. But, in the 21st century, that norm started to slip, and has now completely fallen away.
The shift began with Hunter Biden. His various financial misadventures – from Ukraine to China and beyond, all linked to his willingness to peddle his last name and connections with the White House – don’t need to be relitigated here. But the lesson of Hunter Biden’s career isn’t simply that children of presidents must be barred from monetizing that relationship. Rather, it’s that when president’s children engage in corrupt behavior, it provides a clear political opening for opponents – and, with the right approach, a springboard for both investigations and reform.
Now, under Trump, the president’s family members such as Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Jared Kushner are also enriching themselves, but this time at a scale and speed never seen before in the United States. Forbes reported that Trump Jr.’s worth jumped six-fold in 2025 alone, while his brother Eric has seen any even steeper rise, growing at least 10 times wealthier than he was prior to his father’s election. Much of that explosion in wealth has come from the family’s crypto business and government defense contracts with companies connected to Trump’s sons. After his company landed a $24 million Pentagon contract, Eric Trump openly bragged about it. Meanwhile a company with ties to Don Jr. received a $620 million loan from the Pentagon, the largest loan ever provided by the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital.
Kushner became a billionaire last year, thanks to a raft of foreign deals connected to his private investment firm, Affinity Partners. Kushner and his company have brought in billions from foreign patrons, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. He’s pursued these deals while also serving as special envoy and lead negotiator to end Israel’s war in Gaza, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and Trump’s war against Iran.
These examples provide multiple openings for Democrats to investigate how the pursuit of private profit has warped U.S. government policy and procurement. In doing so, congressional investigators can train their sights, and the public’s anger, on Trump’s children who are becoming extraordinarily wealthy thanks to their political connections. Congress can expose the people, the companies, and the governments that are behind the payments to Trump’s family members – whether domestic or (especially) foreign – and how they are looking to influence American policy and pursue their own interests.
The investigation can and should focus on potential ethics violations, especially as they pertain to how Trump’s family members monetize their relationship with the president. Similar to the Republicans’ investigation into the Bidens, which focused largely on the role of Hunter Biden, Democrats in Congress should investigate how the Trump children and Kushner arrived at such lucrative deals. The investigation, of course, can and should expand from there. It should follow any evidence that suggests criminal activity, or evidence pointing to the Trumps acting in the interests of a foreign government, concerns that Democrats have raised in the past.
There are also ample questions about how this corruption overlaps with national security concerns. For example, what role did these deals play in Kushner’s failed negotiations with Iran, which led directly to the United States’ greatest strategic defeat in decades and to rising costs for ordinary Americans? Kushner’s firm has received staggering sums from Iran’s adversaries in the Gulf, and the company directly profits from Israeli expansion in the West Bank. Affinity Partners is the largest shareholder in an Israeli company called Phoenix Financial, which is one of the leading insurers of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories. What about World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm that the Trump family co-founded? It secretly sold a significant stake to the UAE’s leadership despite clear opposition from national security experts. And how have the Trump sons’ pursuit of profit influenced the Pentagon’s buying decisions? Are the best products for the U.S. military being purchased, or merely those from which the Trump family benefits financially?
The outcomes of such a congressional investigation are two-fold. It can highlight the various ethics violations that have been breached, as well as expose the loopholes and opportunities available for self-enrichment among family members of a sitting president, presenting openings for policy responses to curb future corruption. The congressional investigation can also build momentum for broader, and much-needed, anti-corruption efforts throughout government.
There’s an additional benefit of focusing on the children, as well. Trump has turned the American presidency into a cash grab, but he has managed to avoid any consequences for his corruption. His children and in-laws, on the other hand, present a soft underbelly for those trying to investigate the apparent profiteering taking place in the current administration. Much of this vulnerability is structural. Unlike Trump, or even other members of the executive branch, children of the president (and other administration officials) were never voted in and are unaccountable and unelected. However, their corruption is linked directly to Trump’s White House. In other words, in investigating the children, a path emerges to investigating the president himself.
Take Them to Church
The idea for a select committee is not new. Indeed, such committees have a noteworthy history in Congress – and they remain the lodestars for investigations related to corruption and abuse of power in Washington. Although other committees and subcommittees, especially the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), have their own remarkable histories, it is only a new select committee that will be able to focus exclusively on the younger generation of Trumps.
There are members of Congress serving on existing committees who may oppose the creation of a select committee, largely because it could mean redirecting resources or diminishing their reach, but such opposition would be short-sighted. After all, there’s a reason why the single-most important investigative committee over the past several decades – the so-called Church Committee, which pulled back the curtain on corruption and abuses within American intelligence agencies – was a select committee. Overseen by Sen. Frank Church (D-ID), the Church Committee (known officially as the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities), remains widely viewed to this day as the most successful congressional investigation of its kind over the past half-century.
Thanks to Church’s leadership, as well as both the flexibility and focus that a select committee model provided, the Church Committee unearthed a sprawling, years-long campaign of misappropriated resources and abuses of power permeating U.S. intelligence agencies. What initially began as an investigation into CIA abuses quickly spread to the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and more.
Even a half-century later, the committee’s findings remain shocking. Most memorably, Church and his congressional allies discovered multiple American plots to assassinate foreign officials, from Cuba to the Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond, as well as efforts to secretly drug American citizens with LSD. The committee also discovered that the FBI specifically targeted American organizations dedicated to causes such as expanding civil rights and opposing the Vietnam War. It also revealed that the government specifically targeted and harassed figures like Martin Luther King., Jr. The Church Committee additionally uncovered efforts to oversee large-scale telecommunications surveillance, with American intelligence officials intercepting everything from telegrams to mail and more.
Any one of those discoveries would have been sufficient to cause an uproar. Taken together, they provided fuel for more reforms in the American intelligence sector than ever before. Before the hearings, American intelligence agencies had previously been largely unsupervised and used as tools for different administrations to do whatever they wanted. After Church’s investigation, however, these agencies were brought to heel. Among the reforms were the creation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the formal banning of political assassination.
These reforms went a significant way to cleaning up rampant abuses in the intelligence world. Of course, they didn’t prevent all future abuse, just as anti-corruption reforms certainly won’t prevent all corruption. But it was a watershed moment thanks to the fact that Church not only operated a select committee, but that he used that select committee as a springboard to expand his initial lines of inquiry. It’s a model worth emulating, a half-century later – and is needed now more than ever, especially as it pertains to corruption.
Looking Forward
Democrats should pursue a select committee dedicated to investigating how the president’s family members have profited from their relationship to the White House – and what that has meant for both taxpayers and American interests. With Kushner, for example, congressional investigators can directly tie how his private business is profiting from his government access, and how that conflict of interest is contributing to the U.S. war in Iran and driving up costs for Americans at home. Plus, there is less risk of these investigations being dismissed as partisan hackery. Even among Republican officials (and especially among the Republican base), there is little support for Kushner, or for any of these other figures.
Ultimately, the Trump family’s corruption should be used as an entryway into a broader examination of the executive branch: the insider deals, the pay-to-play access, the taxpayer funding going to cronies and crooks alike – and the foreign autocrats and oligarchs benefiting as a result. Corruption as an investigatory target provides an avenue for lawmakers to highlight the sheer unfairness of this administration and how it has further fueled the billionaire class, while many Americans struggle to pay their bills.
Corruption, after all, overlaps with other messaging and policy priorities for Democrats, from affordability and good governance to health care and education policy. Corruption corrodes governmental services, hollows out policy priorities, and allows crooked elites and connected businessmen to prioritize their interests over policy outcomes that benefit Americans. Through enough corruption, a regime can even transform into an outright kleptocracy, looting health care, infrastructure, and educations budgets at will–and transforming a struggling democracy into an authoritarian state. Corruption can dissolve any distinction between domestic and foreign policy. As the problem intensifies, Americans are growing more concerned about corruption. As the Financial Times recently reported, “Navigator Research, a Democratic-aligned pollster, now tracks [corruption] as nearly tied with inflation and the cost of living as the top issue across 67 battleground districts.”
Clearly, corruption is salient to voters in ways it hasn’t been in decades. It therefore behooves those leading Congress after the midterms to transform that interest and concern into a select committee that will identify the people who are profiting at the country’s expense. Hopefully such an effort will build momentum for the long-overdue reforms necessary to prevent this level of corruption from taking root again.
