There is a certain dark poetry to this week. In the same season America learned the hard way that the future of war is the cheap, disposable drone, the president’s two oldest sons positioned themselves to sell that future back to the Pentagon. This week, a one-year-old company called Powerus announced it had advanced to the qualifying round for Phase II of the Pentagon’s $1 billion Drone Dominance Program, the federal effort to field tens of thousands of low-cost attack drones. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. back Powerus, which is going public through a reverse merger with a Trump-linked golf-course company that lists its courses as drone-testing grounds. We are not making any of that up.
Our friends at The Bulwark argued this week that the United States got out-fought in the Persian Gulf the same way Russia got out-droned in Ukraine, because Washington was stuck in the past while its adversaries fielded thousands of machines that cost a few thousand dollars each. Our affiliated 501(c)(3) has been making that point for almost two years because it has always been a story of corruption.
But here is the part that should make your jaw tighten. Ukraine worked out cheap drone warfare under live fire, offered to teach the United States, got waved off by a president who publicly snubbed the help, and is now watching its own battlefield innovation get acquired, rebranded as American, and sold back to the American military at a markup by Eric and Don Jr.
Everything below is just the receipts.
Powerus Selected to Compete in Phase II of the Pentagon’s 1 Billion Dollar Drone Dominance Program
Powerus press release via GlobeNewswire, May 27, 2026
The company says it qualified for Phase II with its MatrixFold attack drone, putting it in line for a slice of a $1 billion Pentagon push to buy tens of thousands of low-cost drones. To be precise, this is a qualifier and not a won contract. The field is wide, with reporting describing roughly 48 companies and about 78 competing designs, and the Gauntlet II round alone carrying at least $300 million for 60,000 drones. So, nobody has handed the Trump sons $1 billion (yet). What they have done is build a company racing for that money in a market the administration created.
Powerus was founded in 2025, sits in West Palm Beach near Mar-a-Lago, and is merging with Aureus Greenway Holdings. Yes, the golf company. Yes, the same West Palm Beach.
Some background: According to Reuters, Aureus Greenway, the golf company backed by the Trump sons, agreed to merge with Powerus, and Aureus hired Dominari Securities to raise roughly $9 million for the deal. The Trump sons have a big stake in Dominari, too. Oh, and it’s based in Trump Tower. The Wall Street Journal reported that Powerus is in talks to acquire Ukrainian drone makers or license their designs, so it can manufacture combat-tested Ukrainian systems under an American label and sell them to the US military at American military prices. The Ukrainians who bled to invent this stuff get a one-time check. The president’s sons get the public listing, the recurring contract revenue stream funded by you.
Retired LTG Keith Kellogg spent his stint as Trump’s special envoy for Russia and Ukraine pushing the United States to buy Ukrainian drone technology. He stepped down from that job last December, was replaced by Steve Witkoff, and by spring had joined the advisory board of Powerus, the private company now positioned to execute exactly the kind of deal he had been building inside the government. C.Q Brown, the Joint Chiefs chairman Trump fired, joined the same advisory board. Two men who held the public trust on Ukraine policy and on the entire United States military are now lending their names to a venture owned in part by the president’s family. Once upon a time, former senior officials had a “cooling off period” before moseying up to the feed trough – even feed bins less gross than this. But since we no longer enforce laws, we only ask that you remember their names.
There’s more: Unusual Machines Secures $5 Million Order from Powerus for Counter-Drone Systems
In April, Unusual Machines announced an order worth more than $5 million from Powerus to supply US-made components for the very counter-drone systems Powerus is pitching to the Pentagon. If you wondered, “Maybe Donald Trump Jr owns this company, too?” you’re almost as good a guesser as Don Jr is a stock picker. That stock closed up 57% yesterday.
So, Don Jr. is connected to the buyer and to the seller. And the broker. And the parts supplier. But don’t forget Eric. Back in February, Eric Trump joined a group of investors backing a $1.5 billion merger between the Israeli drone maker XTEND and a Florida construction company called JFB Construction Holdings. This deal would take XTEND public on Nasdaq as XTEND AI Robotics. And Don Jr.’s Unusual Machines invested too. The deal carried a $152 million investment commitment, with $42 million funded at signing, and it was announced on February 17, eleven days before the United States went to war with Iran. For a final flourish, JFB put Stefan Passantino, a former Trump White House ethics lawyer, on its board.
Even if Trump won’t admit it, America has suffered a humiliating defeat that serves notice (especially to China) that the American-led global order has yielded to China. And American corruption has been China’s greatest ally. Our military would have been better prepared for this moment if our defense giants, like the Thiel-backed Anduril, had not had a corrupt business model that lived off lobbying the Pentagon for expensive hardware. That myopia helped keep American innovation pointed at the costly systems that just failed in the Gulf. Cheap, disposable drones do not buy Thiel mansions in “backup counties.” Before that, we watched his former colleague, Elon Musk, restrict Starlink at a pivotal moment in Ukraine, teaching the world that American power now answers to its oligarchs.
Now, after a spectacular defeat like the one America has suffered, a responsible leader would withdraw, study mistakes and rebuild. But the very on-brand Trump response is to send in the children to scoop up the contracts for the cheap, disposable drones that America’s defeat just proved it needs. At every fork in the road, the answer has been corruption.
Princeling Monitor
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The sheer depth of corruption is staggering. Thank you.
Thank you VERY much!