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The latest Next Comes What by Andrea Pitzer, “Booed, Sued, and Blocked,” steps into what’s working and, I pray, what can eventually finish off this regime’s authoritarian honeymoon, the way the people of Hungary sent Viktor Orbán and the jackals profiting from his ponderous pilfering packing.
And it has me thinking, like almost any sampling of the news in 2026, about corruption.
A complete catalog of the Trump family’s bald corruption since the new regime took power would fill a rare-earths mine in Kazakhstan. But that mine is a good place to begin.
Last September, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trump cut a deal with Kazakhstan, previously only a concern to America as the homeland of Borat. The deal gave the U.S. access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of a mineral used in missiles, fighter jets, and chips. Within weeks, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Lutnick’s own sons had equity stakes in the private entities positioned to grab the rights. Six days later, Kazakhstan granted exclusive access, and the U.S. government backed the deal with up to $1.6 billion in federal financing.
The mineral rights weren’t a one-off, either. The Times reported just today that Trump’s nuclear-energy push, including a new deal opening Saudi Arabia to American reactor technology, runs through the same family. Same donors, different rocks.
Trump Media is merging with a nuclear fusion startup, TAE Technologies, in a $6 billion deal. TAE has been living on Energy Department grants since Trump’s first term. Eric Trump and Don Jr. are in on a nuclear fuel company called Quantum Leap Energy, partnered with a Rick Perry outfit chasing federal reactor money in Texas. Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners is sitting on $2 billion from the Saudi wealth fund, arranged by MBS right after Kushner finished negotiating Saudi nuclear access for the U.S. government the first time around. Howard Lutnick’s old firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, spent the year raising money for Oklo, Energy Fuels, and enCore. Peter Thiel’s General Matter picked up a $900 million DOE contract plus $4.2 billion in Export-Import Bank financing, from a board Lutnick himself sits on.
Tungsten, uranium, fusion fuel: pick the resource, and the government is short on it. A Trump son already owns a piece of the company selling it back to them.
Credit Mobilier needed a web of fake construction companies to skim money off the transcontinental railroad. Teapot Dome needed an Interior Secretary willing to go to prison for backroom oil leases. Tammany Hall needed an army of ward bosses buying votes one delivered favor at a time. Neither the tungsten deal nor the nuclear one needed any of that. Nobody bothered hiding it behind a shell company, because in this administration, the shell company is the government.
And while the Trump family hoards more money than they could ever spend, unless the law eventually gets to them, kids who were born into families that didn’t make them millionaires at age 8 starve.
A Lancet-published study projects that USAID cuts could kill up to 4.5 million children worldwide by 2030. When Congressman Ro Khanna cited that number out loud, Elon Musk called him a liar and threatened to sue him — which tells you which part of the sentence actually scared him. Meanwhile the “One Big Beautiful Bill” delivered the deepest SNAP cuts in American history, stripping food assistance from more than 4 million Americans, 1.5 million of them children, to help fund trillions in tax cuts for people who do not need trillions.
Courts and Crowds
Andrea’s been saying, over and over, since she launched Next Comes What: courts and crowds decide how long an authoritarian keeps his grip. This week she dug into some rich, recent examples of how both work.
E. Jean Carroll’s attorneys finally forced Trump to pay the $5.6 million he owed her, over his objections, after a federal judge rejected his last effort to delay the payment. Separately, a federal judge blocked the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, a deal Trump ally Larry Ellison was counting on to hand one family two studios, two streamers, and two news networks. And a West Virginia judge threw out the DOJ’s suit demanding the state’s unredacted voter rolls, the thirteenth straight loss in the administration’s push to build a national voter file before the midterms.
The crowd side is cheaper and just as effective, and a boo does more work than applause ever will: it’s an on-the-record verdict a public figure can’t spin, redact, or sue into silence. The Township Council of Montclair, New Jersey pulled more than $91 million out of Citizens Bank over its financing of CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two biggest private ICE jailers in the country. State Senator Gustavo Rivera told Andrea that when moments like that come, “you have to actually bask in them a little bit.” Three days later, Citizens folded and cut its ties to both companies. Down in Frederick, Maryland, the Trump administration threatened to pull funding and Olympic placement from any sport that let trans women compete. The Baltimore Ferals suited up anyway. When USA Rugby banned trans women from the sport, the team’s answer came from former Flamingos president Val Pizzo: “We’re not asking for permission to be here. We’re playing.”
The Hungary Model
The trap where everything is a funnel that juices the poor for the benefit of the richest and their allies in the regime is what Viktor Orbán ran for sixteen years, until Péter Magyar showed what breaks it. Orbán had a lock on state media and an opposition that only talked to itself in Budapest. Magyar skipped state TV entirely and built Tisza Islands — local networks, livestreamed town halls, citizen reporters — and carried the evidence of regime graft into hundreds of rural towns the opposition had written off a decade ago.
On April 12, 2026, Magyar’s Tisza party won 141 of 199 seats — a supermajority that ended Orbán’s rule outright. Not a coup. Not a courtroom. A guy with a camera who went to the towns the state press had given up on and showed people what their government was actually doing to them.
The Job
Here’s what the tungsten deal, the nuclear deal, the SNAP cuts, and the tax windfall have in common: they’re the same theft, wearing different clothes for different audiences.
Loot a kid’s school lunch on Tuesday, hand a billionaire a bigger yacht on Wednesday, and call both of them fiscal responsibility. It’s the GOP’s actual governing agenda and has been for generations: move the country’s money to the people who already have the most of it, and count on the scale of the theft to make it sound too abstract to be theft at all.
Our job is to keep it from sounding abstract. Name whose sons got the equity stake. Name which kid lost the lunch so a senator’s donor could bank the tax cut. Then turn that into something with teeth: pulled accounts, divestment votes, primary challengers, judges willing to follow the money all the way home.
Every court ruling, every bank that pulls out, every crowd that shows up says the same thing back: we saw that, and we’re not shrugging.
This ends with these people out of power — voted out, prosecuted out, whatever it takes — because a protection racket only survives as long as courts and crowds keep treating it like business as usual.
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