President Donald Trump is unrivalled in American history in one respect: None of his predecessors ever cashed in on the presidency as he has.
The Teapot Dome scandal under Warren Harding? Richard Nixon’s slush funds during Watergate? Those seem like junior high school by comparison with the present culture of corruption.
The fire hose of disclosures has been overwhelming. A New York Times editorial estimated conservatively that the Trump family had made more than $US1.4 billion ($1.98 billion) in documented gains by exploiting the second term of his presidency. (Others offer higher figures.)
And all that pales beside the latest bombshell: a $US500 million secret deal backed by a government leader in the United Arab Emirates, just four days before Trump was inaugurated for his second term.
Here’s what we know. The Wall Street Journal broke the story, reporting that on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, the Emiratis purchased 49 per cent of a Trump family cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial, for $US500 million. It’s difficult to see why anybody would pay so much for a fledgling company — unless the point was to enrich the Trumps.
Most of the money, in effect, went to the Trump family, but some found its way to the family of Steve Witkoff, a co-owner of the venture. Trump had selected Witkoff to become the United States’ special envoy to the Middle East.
The purchase was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser. Known as “the spy sheikh”, Tahnoon is a brother of the president of the UAE. On top of that, an Emirati-backed fund deposited $US2 billion into World Liberty, generating a revenue stream expected to amount to at least tens of millions of dollars a year in additional profits.
The UAE had long sought large numbers of advanced computer chips from the US, but security officials had denied permission for fear that some would end up in China, with which the UAE has close ties. The concern was that the transfer of chips could undermine American leadership in AI development.
However, soon after the infusion of cash from the UAE into Trump family pockets, the Trump administration approved the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced chips to the UAE.
A masterly Times investigation last year found that the US chip negotiations intersected with World Liberty business. There wasn’t evidence of an explicit quid pro quo — “You write me a cheque, and I’ll give you chips” — but the investigation raised fundamental questions about whether American national security decisions were being shaped by Trump’s business interests.
The latest revelations make the picture even more troubling. The sums were invested in secret, and to me at least, they look less like an arms-length business transaction than a money transfer. The transaction also raises two fundamental questions: First, did the Emirati decision to enrich the Trump family lead the administration to approve chip sales that put at risk American competitiveness and national security?
Second, did the Emirati investments buy Trump’s silence about the UAE’s role in backing a militia that the US accuses of committing genocide in Sudan? Hundreds of thousands of people have died there, and vast numbers have been raped, yet Trump has averted his eyes — and in the face of that silence, the killing, rape and torture continue.
Democrat senator Chris Murphy called the Emirati investment in World Liberty “mind-blowing” — a “secret deal to make Trump rich in exchange for national security favours”. Democrat senator Elizabeth Warren suggested that administration officials had “sold out American national security in order to benefit the president’s crypto company”.
Other Democrats called for the chip sales to the UAE to be cancelled. But Republican leaders are staying silent.
(If it had been $US500 million in cash delivered to the White House in paper bags, like the $US50,000 reportedly handed to Tom Homan in 2024 as part of a mysterious FBI sting — he denied it — that might capture the public imagination. But it would be less practical: I calculate that in $US100 bills, the sum of $500 million would fill 450 standard grocery bags full of cash. Sadly, my editors wouldn’t let me expense $500 million to fact-check this.)
And that doesn’t include the extras. “World Liberty has earned the Trump family at least $1.2 billion in cash in the 16 months since its launch, not counting paper gains of at least $2.25 billion from various crypto holdings,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
The White House and World Liberty dispute the accusations of graft. They argue that Trump himself was not involved in decisions about World Liberty (Eric Trump signed the transaction documents) and that the investments had no connection with the approval of chip sales to the UAE. White House counsel David Warrington said Trump followed ethical principles and that to suggest otherwise would be “either ill-informed or malicious”.
The White House also denied that there was anything untoward about Trump’s pardon in October of Changpeng Zhao, the founder and owner of the overseas crypto company Binance, after Binance heavily backed a World Liberty product and enormously increased its value.
During my career, I’ve seen mind-boggling corruption in many places: Former Indonesian first lady Madame Tien, known as “Madame Tien Per Cent”; a Chinese friend, the son of a Politburo member, who told me that he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to do no work for a company, so it could use his name to win land deals. I never expected to see anything like this in America — yet that is what happens under authoritarian leaders.
Let’s step back for a moment. When former president Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, his Justice Department investigated whether he could accept it. The US Constitution and statute law ban any official from accepting a gift or emolument from any foreign state. The Justice Department cleared the Nobel Prize only because it was not granted by Norway itself but by a private Norwegian group — and the lawyers made it clear that if the money came from the government, a president could not accept it.
If accepting a state-funded version of the Nobel Peace Prize would be unconstitutional, how can it be legal for this president to rake in vast amounts of cash in effect from a foreign leader?
When will America rebel against this culture of corruption?
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Nicholas Kristof is an opinion columnist for The New York Times, writing about foreign and domestic issues.