Legacy media outlets love nothing more than a hit piece about President Trump’s family.
ABC News thought it finally had one. Gavin Newsom couldn’t share it fast enough.
Then the story vanished in under a day, and the confession ABC slipped out afterward says plenty.
ABC Bet Big on a Trump Family Money Story
ABC News splashed a report across its website under the headline “Trump sons’ investments have won billions in Pentagon contracts since his election.” The piece claimed companies with financial ties to Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump had cashed in on billions of dollars in government work.
Anduril sat at the center of it. ABC told readers that 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Don Jr serves as a partner, grabbed a major stake in the defense technology company through a $2.5 billion investment.
Democrats ran with it. California Governor Gavin Newsom, widely seen as gearing up for a 2028 run, pushed the report out to his followers with a message that sounded an awful lot like a campaign ad.
“The American people were fleeced. Accountability is coming,” Newsom wrote.
But less than 24 hours later, ABC scrubbed the article from its website. The network gave the public no explanation. The link simply went dead.
And Don Jr wasn’t about to let that slide.
“ABC deleted this article in less than 24 hours because it’s false. Sounds about as long as your presidential campaign would last,” Trump Jr fired back at Newsom on X.
The Editor’s Note ABC Hoped Nobody Would Read
ABC eventually put the story back up with a brand-new headline, a pile of revisions, and an editor’s note. The note admits the original version “contained errors in the description of certain company investments, government contracts and event chronologies.”
Investments. Contracts. The timeline. For a story built entirely on investments, contracts, and timing, that’s pretty much the whole ballgame.
The worst whopper involved the $2.5 billion figure. 1789 Capital never put anything close to that into Anduril. But that number represented Anduril’s entire funding round, which drew money from a long roster of investors.
The corrected version now says 1789 Capital invested $50 million in a company valued at more than $60 billion. Anduril founder Palmer Luckey pegged the stake at roughly 0.1 percent of the company and said Anduril gave ABC’s reporter data showing exactly that.
Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for 1789 Capital, had already called out the network publicly. She insisted that “1789 Capital does not have a ‘major stake’ in Anduril” and rejected ABC’s claim that the Trump brothers personally backed several other companies on its list.
And according to a spokesperson for the firm, Don Jr doesn’t even sit on the three-person committee that makes 1789 Capital’s investment decisions.
And Luckey didn’t stop at the stake. He said the claim that the Pentagon had locked in $6.6 billion in contracts with Anduril “is also a lie,” explaining that the figures reflected “hypothetical contract ceilings” rather than dollars the government will actually pay out.
Then came the new headline. ABC dropped its splashy Pentagon-billions banner and replaced it with this: “New shipyard announced amid earlier Democratic concerns about potential conflicts of interest.”
So once the numbers fell apart, ABC propped the story up with Democrat talking points. Funny how that works.
Same Network, Same Target, Same Kind of Mistake
Anyone with a decent memory knows ABC has stepped on this rake before.
During a March 2024 episode of This Week, George Stephanopoulos told viewers that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape” in the E Jean Carroll civil case. The jury found no such thing. Trump sued, and in December 2024 ABC agreed to steer $15 million toward his future presidential library, pay another $1 million in legal fees, and publish a note saying the network and Stephanopoulos “regret statements” about him.
Fifteen million dollars makes for an expensive lesson. Apparently it didn’t stick.
But a single bad story isn’t really the problem. Reporters make mistakes, and editors miss things. What ought to bother readers is the direction the mistakes keep breaking, because when a newsroom like this one blows a Trump story, the error almost never seems to land in Trump’s favor.
Look at what the original report actually did. It stacked “active or promised” contracts together into one big scary number and hung that number around the necks of the President’s sons. Promised contracts can shrink, stall, or never materialize at all. Critics online jumped on the obvious problem, pointing out that ABC seemed to treat investment capital like revenue.
A Pentagon official told ABC that “outside affiliations, investors, or political connections play absolutely no role” in funding decisions. A spokesperson for the Trump brothers called the effort to portray their investments as improper “a deliberate distortion of the facts.”
ABC buried both responses under a headline that implied the exact opposite.
And the timing tells its own story. Heading into the 2026 midterms, Democrats badly need a corruption narrative. Congressional Democrats asked the Pentagon’s inspector general back in May to dig into contracting tied to the Trump sons, and ABC’s rewritten headline now leans directly on those “earlier Democratic concerns.”
Other outlets keep chasing the same angle, too. The Washington Post ran its own tally of Pentagon money flowing to Trump-linked investments. Expect more of these pieces, not fewer, as the election calendar tightens. And expect Democrats in Congress to wave them around at hearings whether the numbers hold up or not.
Newsom deserves a footnote here. A governor with his eye on the Oval Office shared a story about “fleeced” Americans that its own publisher later had to tear apart and rebuild. Don Jr’s crack about the length of a Newsom campaign landed because Newsom handed him the setup.
But nobody at ABC has explained who signed off on the original piece, or why the network pulled it before telling readers what went wrong.
Maybe that answer shows up in another editor’s note someday.
Nobody should wait up for it.
Sources: Mediaite, “ABC News Acknowledges Errors in Trump Sons Report It Mysteriously Deleted”; Mediaite, “Firms Backed by Trump’s Sons Have Scored Over $6B in Pentagon Contracts: Report”; Washington Free Beacon; Raw Story; The National News Desk; Twitchy; The Daily Beast; Variety, “ABC News Settles Donald Trump’s Defamation Suit for $15 Million”; Fox 9, “ABC, Trump settle defamation lawsuit”