Ben Shapiro on report that Russian oligarch paid for Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding celebration: “Suspicion of corruption here is not totally unavailing”
Shapiro: “If you change the name Donald Trump Jr. to Hunter Biden, would Republicans be screaming bloody murder about it? If the answer is yes, it is a bad thing.”
Published
On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea. “It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.
That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin. Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.
Citation
From the September 15, 2026, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Now, I don't care whether you're Joe Biden's kid or Donald Trump's kid, avoiding the appearance of corruption is a good and necessary thing.
And this brings us to one of the big media stories of the day out of ProPublica. Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin, footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses for Don Junior, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. Some longtime friends of Don Trump Jr. told associates they were disappointed not to be invited, though a few of his closest business partners, executives at the Trump family crypto company World Liberty Financial and the venture capital firm 1789 did make the cut. President Trump himself skipped it.
Now, again, Donald Trump Jr. has his own sort of constituency inside and outside the White House. He's very close to some people inside the administration, obviously. Bettina and Don Jr. clarified in an Instagram post what happened here. Again, the allegation is that a Russian oligarch who barely speaks English and is very, very close to Vladimir Putin dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars to basically throw a big party for Don Jr. and his new bride, Bettina.
...
SHAPIRO: Okay. I have a lot of good friends. I'm not sure how many of those good friends are going to drop, you know, four hundred, five hundred thousand dollars for an elaborate post-wedding party. And also, I will admit, I do not have a lot of good friends with whom I cannot converse because they don't speak my language. Right? Umar apparently speaks mostly Russian, and also, again, happens to be very, very close with Vladimir Putin.
So again, suspicion of corruption here is not totally unavailing. It's not unwarranted. If you change the -- here's my rule. If you change the name Donald Trump Jr. to Hunter Biden, would Republicans be screaming bloody murder about it? If the answer is yes, it is a bad thing. It is a not good thing.
Now again, none of this means that President Trump is the pro in any quid pro quo. Like Don Jr. is receiving a wedding gift, and therefore President Trump does something. But Don Jr., with this sort of stuff, does his dad a disservice. Just as it is a major disservice to his father's administration and to the Republican Party generally and to the country for World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm and its shaky assets, to be taking in hundreds of millions of dollars for what appears to be vaporware. It's not a service to the administration or to the American people when 1789 Capital, which is a firm in which he is invested, is getting government contracts with companies in which it is invested. Or tungsten mining in Kazakhstan, or rare earth companies in Brazil. Again, maybe there's law breaking here, maybe there's corruption here, but it doesn't actually take that in order to give the appearance of corruption. And it's not good for the administration. It is not good for the Republican Party.
And I promise you, you're going to get two long years of investigations into all of this. You will know the names of everybody at World Liberty Financial and 1789 Capital and all the minerals companies in Kazakhstan and Brazil by the time this is over. Whether you are Hunter Biden picking up sacks of cash in Ukraine, or whether you are Donald Trump Jr. going to the Middle East and picking up sacks of cash from World Liberty Financial, the appearance of impropriety is bad -- was that good for Joe Biden? Again, because what I care about here is what's good for the American people.
This is not to say that people can't engage in normal business pursuits. Obviously, they can. But if you are using insider information, if you are using the name of the president of the United States in order to rug-pull people on a crypto coin, for example, that is a bad thing that is going to blow back on the administration, blow back on the policies many of us care about, blow back on the Republican Party more generally.