It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump’s second term focus on greed, grift and personal enrichment would lead to a major national security crisis.
The explosive moment came when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang surfaced in the middle of a so-called “honeypot” scandal involving a fetching female executive alleged to be a Chinese spy.
The scandal rises to a the level of a major national security threat because Nvidia is no run-of-the-mill tech company. It makes computer chips that power the artifical intelligence (AI) revolution and lead the world in their advanced design.
The United States has been locked in a heated competition with China to dominate emerging AI technology and its application to a wide variety of uses in manufacturing and most significantly advanced, 21st-century weapons.
Thanks in large part to Nvidia, the United States holds a slim edge over China, which makes its computer chips highly valued to advance the Communist nation’s political and economic goals.
Wbile Trump is feigning indifference to the scandal and his administration is scrambling to portray it as the foibles of an ethically challenged chief executive, the scandal actually is deeply rooted in the Trump administration.
Nobel Prize-winning Economist Paul Krugman summed up the situation in a substack post today (Nov. 12).
“Jensen Huang is a fool who should never again be allowed close to anything involving national security. But the Nvidia honeypot story is about much more than one man.
“Because the way the Trump administration handled it — basically, its attempt to bury any inquiry into the clear threat Huang’s affair posed to U.S. interests — is part of a bigger story of betrayal at the highest levels.”
As Krugman noted, a clear element of betrayal by key Trump administration figures underlies the scandal. It amounts to an ethical and moral failure to safeguard the national interest. Instead the focus has been on selling out the nation for personal gain.
The elephant in the room, of course, is Trump’s inexplicable obesience to Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial Russia over Ukraine, a Western European democracy, fighting for its life against a Russian military invasion.
Only recently has it become clear that Trump and the cronies surrounding him are counting on a quick end to the war — on Russia’s terms– to pave the way for lucrative, private business deals and the lifting of economic sanctions.
Trump has been dogged for years by reports that he is both indebted to Russian oligarchs –who allegedly bailed out his real estate companies with millions of dollars in laundered money — and possibly compromised by salacious behavior in Russia secretly recorded by Russian intelligence.
Trump’s deep involvement with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and credible allegations he raped underage girls as part of Epstein’s sex trafficking ring only lend credence to those claims.
Krugman also believes Trump, Elon Musk, and many other hard right oligarchs in Trump’s inner circle look at Putin’s autocratic style of government and crony capitalism as a model for the United States.
One thing is certain, Trump’s attempt to cover for Huang is inexplicable unless it’s viewed through the prism of money flowing to Trump, his pet projects and his cronies.
For his part, Huang went to great lengths to ingratiate himself with Trump, donating $25 million to the Trump ballroom and serving as one of Trump’s technology “advisers.”
Trump, who likes to equate himself with success has surrounded himself with tech oligarchs from Musk to figures like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks, Oracle Founder Larry Ellison, and Planitir Co-Founder Peter Thiel among others.
Musk, in particular, raises national security red flags not only because of his morally questionable behavior and heavy use of drugs like ketamine, but also because of his business ties in China. Yet, Trump gave him carte blanche access to the government through DOGE.
Musk was part of sex trafficking pedophile Epstein’s ring of friends or associates at at time when Russia may have been attempting to “blackmail” and recruit him as an agent of influence, according to reports out of Europe.
Alnur Mussayev, the former chief at the State Security Service of the Republic of Kazakhstan during its time as a Soviet satellite, said Epstein was pertinent to Putin’s effort to collect kompromat.
At least four Kazakh businessmen, whom he identified on social media, were recruited by Putin’s FSB to provide girls for Epstein’s island and Trump’s Mar a Lago. The girls were FSB plants and collected intelligence for the Russian spy agency, he said.
The Wall Street Journal reported in October a year ago that Musk and Putin have been in regular contact by phone for at least the last two years.
Trump son-in-law and Middle East negotiator Jared Kushner is being paid huge sums by Middle Eastern potentates and has been leading negotiations with Russia in conjunction with Steve Witkoff, another long-time Trump crony with business interests with the president.
Jensen Huang mistress Alice Huang (no relation) was first publicly identified as a suspected Chinese intelligence asset in an October New York Times investigation. But U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI had internally flagged her potential espionage activities roughly two years earlier.
U.S. and Taiwanese authorities began monitoring Huang and her Singapore-based company, Megaspeed, after the firm rapidly purchased billions of dollars in restricted Nvidia AI chips.
In 2024, under the Biden administration, the U.S. Commerce Department checked out her company, and Singaporean authorities opened a formal investigation into potential chip smuggling in February 2025, according to media reports.
A senior U.S. government memo concluded that China’s Ministry of State Security had specifically recruited her to gather intelligence on U.S. chips and influence Nvidia’s sales to China, according to The Times.
Intelligence officials briefed Trump on the assessment in 2025, but Trump ignored findings against Alice Huang’s company and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Trump largely downplayed the warnings and continued to expand Jensen Huang’s access to the White House and U.S. policy decisions. In Dec 2025—shortly after his initial fall intelligence briefing—Trump announced a major policy shift allowing Nvidia to sell advanced H200 AI chips to approved buyers in China. In exchange, he negotiated for a 25% cut of Nvidia sales for the government.
In March, Trump appointed Jensen Huang to the newly established President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
When the scandal broke, Trump’s first publicized reaction was to phone Huang and urge him to “keep fighting for his job.”
After Huang resigned as CEO yesterday (Nov. 12), Trump called him a “fine man” and a “tremendous talent” who built an “unbelievable” company. He expressed confidence that Huang would “end up on his feet.”
In the wake of the scandal, White House insiders are allegedly trying to scapegoat Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, which some administration critics say is an attempt to deflect responsibility from Trump.
On a talk show this morning, (Nov. 13), Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent clearly pointed the finger at Lutnick.
“Treasury, War, USTR, and State were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the [black list] list for months, but Commerce has the pen. You will have to ask them about their internal processes,” he said.
“The important thing is to realize that the people running this country, while they love to wave the flag — Hegseth is now claiming that to criticize him is to attack the troops — are utterly unpatriotic,” Krugman wrote.
“They are completely unwilling to make personal sacrifices, no matter how small, or to pass up personal opportunities, for the sake of the nation. And of course at a fundamental level they hate everything this nation stands for, beginning with democracy and the rule of law.”
It would be one thing, if this were an isolated incident. But incompetence and Trump’s greed, graft and cronyism are infused throughout his administration.
Cleaning house should be the first order of business for the new Democratic Congress. It’s not about revenge, it’s about accountabilty to the American people.
Keith Girard has four decades of experience as an award-winning reporter, editor-in-chief, and senior media executive. Keith’s career began in Washington, D.C., where he was a reporter for The Washington Post and a contributing editor for Regardie’s and Washingtonian magazines. He also worked as a writer/producer in CNN’s Washington Bureau and has written non-fiction books on the U.S. Marines in the Gulf War and Donald Trump and two novels, “The Heidelberg Conundrum” and “The Curse of Northam Bay.”