Here is a thing that is supposed to be very hard to do, and turns out, under the right administration, to be quite easy.
You find a small company. Not a famous one. A three-year-old startup, founded by a business school student, with fewer than fifty employees and, as recently as early last year, less than ten million dollars to its name. You have a venture fund take a stake in it, the size of which nobody has to disclose. And then, roughly three months later, the federal government commits six hundred and twenty million dollars to that same company, and its estimated worth climbs from around two hundred million to something near two billion.
Ten times larger. In five months. On a phone call.
The company is called Vulcan Elements, and it makes rare-earth magnets in North Carolina, and the venture fund that bought in before the money arrived is a firm called 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. This is not a hypothetical. It happened, it is documented in Defense Department records obtained by ProPublica, and the reporting is the reason we can talk about it with specifics instead of suspicion. What follows is an attempt to explain how a thing like that comes together, and why the most alarming part is not the part that looks like a crime.
The Problem Is Real, Which Is the Whole Trick
Before any of the ugliness, I want to grant the administration everything it is entitled to, because the piece does not work if I don’t, and because it happens to be true.
There is a genuine national emergency buried underneath this story, and it has nothing to do with the Trumps. China controls the rare-earth supply chain to a degree that should frighten anyone who thinks about it for more than a minute. These are the elements that go into the magnets that steer Tomahawk missiles and spin up the engines of F-35s, into drones, satellites, semiconductors, electric motors, the physical guts of both the modern military and the modern economy. As of last year China produced the entire planet’s supply of samarium, one obscure metal among many that the Pentagon cannot build weapons without. The raw ore is scattered all over the earth. The refining, the difficult chemistry of prying these elements apart from the rock and from each other, is something China spent decades learning to do and almost everyone else did not.