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Donald Trump Jr, centre, speaks with his wife Bettina, left, as they wait for Trump to deliver remarks in Dublin last Saturday.
Columntrump dynasty
Stars and Swipes Donald Trump Jr, The Bahamas wedding and the Russian connection
It’s reported that Putin-linked oligarch Umar Kremlev paid hundreds of thousands of dollars towards Donald Trump Jr’s wedding, prompting concerns about security and access to Trump’s inner circle.
SO, LET’S GET this straight. Donald Trump Jr, whose fortune has surged by hundreds of millions amid a boom in crypto and other White House-adjacent businesses since his dad returned to the White House, had a substantial part of his lavish Bahamas wedding celebrations paid for by a Russian oligarch and close friend of Putin’s?
Yep. Umar Kremlev, convicted criminal, oligarch and member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, picked up the tab for a significant part of the wedding celebrations.
Trump Jr’s bride, Bettina Anderson, is the daughter of the late Palm Beach banker Harry Loy Anderson Jr, who handled Jeffrey Epstein’s accounts and once vouched for the late paedophile as “a gentleman of the highest integrity”.
Their early summer wedding, a gathering of about 50 people took place on two private Caribbean islands over three days, played out like a Temu version of John F. Kennedy Jr’s 1996 island wedding to Carolyn Bessette.
Except for the price tag.
According to ProPublica, a non-profit investigative news outlet that consistently scoops far bigger and better funded rivals when it comes to national security and other scandals, Kremlev stumped up for a bill running to ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses’ including the $100,000-a-night hire of the private island where guests stayed and celebrations were held, and a fireworks display that is estimated to have cost $70,000 (€61,000).
A notorious cheapskate, Trump Jr famously bartered a free engagement ring for his first wife, Vanessa Haydon – in exchange for an agreement to stage a photo op of him proposing to his future wife. The deal went down outside in a New Jersey strip mall, outside the jewellery shop that agreed to forfeit the sale price.
Early this year, a Forbes analysis of his wealth noted it had surged from an estimated $40 million (€34.67 million) in 2024 to as much as $500 million (€433.31 million) in between January 2025 and his wedding in May 2026. It attributed much of his newfound wealth to the crypto and defence deals he secured since his father’s return to the White House. Nonetheless, he seems to have blanched at the prospect of paying for his own wedding.
Who is Trump Jr?
His new wife inherited a modest fortune from her father, who died in 2013. The president of a Palm Beach bank, who handled Epstein’s accounts, he wrote a letter supporting Epstein’s attempt to obtain tax breaks in the Virgin Islands: ‘a gentleman of the highest integrity who enjoys an excellent reputation in our community.’ The letter was written in 1998, two years after complaints were made to the FBI accusing Epstein and Maxwell of the sexual abuse of underage girls.
It’s not clear if Kremlev’s reported outlay of hundreds of thousands of dollars extended to the catering and bar bill, the beer pong tournaments, or the beachfront party complete with DJs. Or the flying in of a five tier ‘funfetti’ wedding cake from Palm Beach.
Don Jr appeared to revel in taste-no-object excess of his nuptials. If you spent five minutes scrolling in the last week of May, you were assailed by a tsunami of photos and a gauzy video that culminated in Trump Jr carrying his bride aloft into the ocean – cheesy enough to make a Hallmark executive gag.
Hundreds, possibly thousands of enhanced and filtered images were posted and reposted on Twitter, Instagram of the three-day celebration. No detail was too banal to be celebrated and commemorated. We even got a lingering close-up of the lining of Trump’s wedding suit.
In the photos, Don Jr, the shortest of the Trump males by several inches, adopts a curious compensatory posture. He leans forward in a strange tippy-toe fashion, chest pumped up and thrust outwards in a pose that seems calculated to distract from the narrow sloping shoulders; the receding chin that is the Trump family’s distinguishing feature juts forward in a bid to likewise distract from the hitherto non-existent jawline.
What we didn’t get was a photo of Kremlev. Even in a wedding group shot that features all the guests, he’s accorded third-row ranking, positioned at the back with only the top of his head visible. The image – a collection of cosmetically enhanced early middle-agers looks like a stills shot for a Real Hucksters of Mar-A-Lago reality TV pilot.
Since Trump Jr, who hosts his own podcast show, later described the wedding as ‘really small, just really close friends’, it seems reasonable to assume he includes Kremlev in that category.
Kremlev would appear to have plenty in common with Trump Jr, including a fondness for extreme sports and penchant for far-right nationalism. A former leader of the Night Wolves, a notorious far-right Russian biker gang that acted as a paramilitary proxy for Putin, earlier convictions for battery and extortion were obscured by a 2010 name change.
Both befriended the far-right influencer Andrew Tate, who is currently remanded in a Miami prison with his brother Tristan, while contesting extradition to the UK on multiple charges of rape, assault and sex trafficking. Tate was on his way to meet Kremlev and Trump Jr at a bare-knuckle fight he was scheduled to emcee when he was arrested by US Marshalls.
Security concerns
The overlapping Venn Diagrams from the Trump nuptials are enough to give any national security expert palpitations. Not only did one of Putin’s trusted allies pay for and attend the celebrations, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s golf buddy and son-in-law, were fellow guests at the celebrations that followed the wedding.
This isn’t just about accepting hospitality paid for by a longtime member of Putin’s inner circle. It’s about a top Putin ally having unfettered and, critically, unmonitored and undocumented access to the duo that Trump has charged with negotiating a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
In short, Trump’s negotiators and a member of Putin’s inner circle spent at least 24 hours in each other’s company on a private island. That alone undermines any claim, however flimsy, that Kushner and Witkoff could make to being honest brokers in negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
Their lack of credibility, apparent from the outset, peaked last week when delegates attending last week’s Yalta European Strategy conference, when Kushner’s claim that Putin was ‘very committed’ to ending the conflict was greeted with a chorus of laughter from delegates in the room. That Trump has long had his thumb, if not his entire fist, on the scale for Putin is evident. It was even more so in Kushner’s recent phone in, when members of the delegation burst out laughing.
The party line from the White House, which is bleated out by Kushner at every opportunity, goes like this: if Zelenskyy would just give Putin what he wants, peace would swiftly follow, and business opportunities would blossom. By their telling, Zelenskyy is the obstacle to implementing a peace plan. By refusing to allow Russian tanks to roll unimpeded into Ukraine and Russian flags to fly over the heads of Ukrainian citizens, he is responsible for Trump’s failure to end this brutal, grinding war.
There is no evidence that Kremlev expected anything in return, but given the size of this gift and his closeness to Putin, it is an entirely fair question to ask whether there were strings attached.
Kremlev has been sanctioned by Ukraine because of his connection to Healthy Fatherland, an organisation that has been implicated in the abduction of more than 20,000 Ukrainian children. Concerned at the prospect of international sanctions, he relocated his business operations from Switzerland to the United Arab Emirates, a source of investment for Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Putin’s patronage landed him Russia’s biggest car dealership and a lucrative slice of its sports betting industry. He became head of the Russian Boxing Federation and is the current head of the International Boxing Association, which was charged with organising all Olympic boxing events before it was booted out by the International Olympic Committee in 2023.
Kremlev has been lobbying extensively to rejoin the Olympic fold, and with the Olympics scheduled to take place in the United States in 2028, he may have Trump in his corner.
Don Jr has already publicly stated his support for Kremlev’s attempts to bring the IBA back into the Olympic fold.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.
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