By Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Susannah George, Emily Davies, Todd C. Frankel — President Donald Trump kicks off the first major international trip of his second term Tuesday in a region where his family business has grown significantly in recent months, presenting his administration with more potential conflicts of interest than ever.
The president’s sons, who head the Trump Organization, have spent the past few weeks crisscrossing the Middle East, laying the groundwork for deals that will benefit the company and, in some instances, Trump himself. Government watchdogs, presidential historians and other critics say it is an escalation of unethical and even unconstitutional conflicts between the interests of the United States and its president.
A week before Trump was scheduled to land in Saudi Arabia for a trip that would also take him to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, his son Eric spoke to a crowded convention center in Dubai about the Trump Organization’s plans to build an 80-floor hotel and residential tower there. He boasted that the “incredible icon” would “redefine luxury” and have the highest infinity-edge pool in the world, overlooking the towering Burj Khalifa building.
“On behalf of myself, on behalf of my family,” he said, “we love Dubai. … We have such a great relationship between the United States and just one of the greatest places and I’m glad to call so many of you friends.”
Trump’s relationship with the Persian Gulf states offers insight into the instincts of a lifelong businessman who has made a career of selling. Trump has notably declined to duplicate his first-term pledge to not advance his personal business interests from the White House, but he has also managed to evade efforts by Congress and the courts to rein in his potential conflicts.
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have appeared at events in the region to advance deals including cryptocurrency and luxury penthouses, signaling the family intends to continue to pursue international deals even as Donald Trump leads U.S. foreign policy in the region.
Qatar, where the president is scheduled to visit Wednesday, has previously paid his attorney general, FBI director and head of the Environmental Protection Agency, among others, to lobby or consult on behalf of the country and its royal family, a Washington Post review of Foreign Agents Registration Act filings and disclosures found.
Trump himself has appeared unconcerned about conflicts of interest.
On Monday, he spoke glowingly of a $400 million Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet that Qatar has offered as a gift, which would become Air Force One for the duration of his presidency and then turned over to his presidential library foundation.
“I think it’s a great gesture from Qatar. I appreciate it very much,” Trump said of what he has called a “palace in the sky.” “I would never be one to turn down that kind of offer. I mean, I could be a stupid person [and] say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’ But it was – I thought it was a great gesture.”
Two weeks ago, Eric Trump entered into an agreement to build the $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club, Simaisma – “a beachside ultra luxury community” in Qatar that the company said will boast an 18-hole golf course and luxury villas emblazoned with Trump’s name.
The president will end his trip in Abu Dhabi, where his family’s cryptocurrency venture, already at the center of allegations of corruption, is increasingly intertwined with Middle Eastern investment. Last week, an investment firm backed by Abu Dhabi said it plans to plow $2 billion into the venture.
Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University who has written books on Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, said Trump’s willingness to wade into conflict of interests that benefit him threaten to exceed anything that has come before him. His actions and those of his family are aided by a Congress and media apparatus overwhelmed with the hydrant of activity from the White House and a team of attorneys making sure they abide by the letter, if not the spirit, of the law, Brinkley said.
“There’s yet to be proven illegality,” Brinkley said. “But it’s taking a wrecking ball to convention and norms and the thought that it was a sacred trust that the president would not financially benefit from his time in office.”
The president and vice president are exempt from conflict-of-interest laws but are restricted by the Constitution from receiving gifts from foreign governments without the consent of Congress.
The White House has denied accusations that Trump is putting his own financial interests ahead of the country’s.
“President Trump is compliant with all conflict-of-interest rules, and only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to The Washington Post.
During Friday’s press briefing, Leavitt said it was “frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit. He left a life of luxury and a life of running a very successful real estate empire for public service.”
The White House did not provide a list of the people Trump will meet or a manifest of those who are traveling with him on Air Force One. They have also not provided a comprehensive schedule of the president’s travel or a pre-trip briefing to reporters who are following the president around the world, as is customary. Even after Air Force One took off midday Monday, it was unclear whom the president would be meeting with during his four-day swing.
The Trump family businesses also have interests in Serbia, Albania and Vietnam. But the company’s deepening ties in the Middle East are particularly concerning, experts said, because of the region’s critical role in U.S. foreign policy.
Trump’s first planned foreign trip comes as his administration has been beset by a wide range of regional security concerns: the fate of Gaza, Iran’s nuclear program and Trump’s long-held goal of a deal that would normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
White House officials told The Post those security issues would take a back seat during the 3½ days Trump will be on the ground, a testament to the president’s more restrained vision for the role of the U.S., and increasing focus on investments and deals.
During Trump’s first term, he attempted to separate himself from his business by placing his sons at the helm – an arrangement that allowed the president to retain influence over the company’s management, said Noah Bookbinder, a former federal corruption prosecutor who is now the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group.
Members of this administration, too, are more publicly tied to the gulf region than his staff from eight years ago. Attorney General Pam Bondi – who helped draft the White House’s analysis finding that Qatar’s donation of the airplane would be “legally permissible” – had been registered to lobby for the gulf state.
The president’s businesses and dealings with the United Arab Emirates have already complicated his agenda.
An entity affiliated with Trump and his family holds a 60 percent stake in the crypto company World Liberty Financial, according to its website. Eric Trump serves on the board of managers of that controlling company, WLF Holdco LLC, and is a prominent spokesman for USD1 tokens. The president himself is listed as “Chief Crypto Advocate” in a paper the company released last year.
This month, the company announced that its stablecoin – a crypto coin pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar – would be used in a $2 billion transaction between MGX, the state-backed Emirati investment firm, and the crypto exchange Binance.
The announcement, made by World Liberty Financial’s co-founder onstage as he sat next to Eric Trump at a crypto conference in Dubai, added to concerns among Democrats that the president’s crypto activities could be a vector for corruption or influence-peddling, prompting them to unexpectedly rally against a bipartisan Senate bill that would have created a regulatory framework for stablecoins.
David Wachsman, spokesman of World Liberty Financial, said in an email to The Post that his company is “proud” MGX chose its stablecoin for its $2 billion investment. And he emphasized that the company is not a political organization and no one at the company is an elected official or government employee.
It is yet to be seen whether there will be a political price for perceived ethical lapses from a man who was elected after being impeached twice and convicted of 34 felony counts.
In a pre-election Marquette University Law School poll, 61 percent of Americans said “behaved corruptly” described Trump at least “somewhat.” And more than 6 in 10 Americans said the word “corrupt” applied to Trump either “a lot” (46 percent) or “a little” (18 percent), according to a March YouGov poll.
Accusations that Trump blends business interests with those of the nation are not entirely different from what has become a hallmark of modern presidencies. Many early presidents died destitute, having devoted their lives to public service. But the country’s leaders in modern times have used the power of the presidency to make millions after leaving office. Ronald Reagan, among the first to earn large post-presidency sums, was paid $2 million for two speeches in Japan. Bill Clinton, after his time in office, became one of the highest-paid speakers in the world.
Even Joe Biden, who long bragged about being the poorest man in the Senate, made more than $15 million from speaking fees and book deals after serving as Barack Obama’s vice president. After leaving the White House this year, Biden signed with the talent agency CAA, which represents Hollywood stars including Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt and Zendaya.
Some presidents, too, have come under intense scrutiny for ties to foreign business deals while sitting in the Oval Office. House Republicans, most memorably, launched an impeachment inquiry into whether Biden was improperly involved in Hunter Biden’s businesses – which included ties to Chinese investors and a seat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his father was leading policy affecting the same country.
What is different about Trump in his emboldened second term, experts said, is the scale of investments his family has made with ties to his dealings as president.
“Hunter Biden might have been able to support a drug addiction, but not very much more,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a public interest group. “The Trump family is generating potentially billions and billions of dollars.”
Hauser also drew a distinction between the way Biden talked about his troubled son and how Trump has celebrated the accomplishments of his family organization.
“Hunter was the rogue, prodigal son that was loved,” Hauser said. “But that business enterprise was not blessed.”
The Trump Organization’s ties to the Middle East date back to Trump’s first term, when it opened the Trump International Golf Club in Dubai.
Since then, the Trump Organization has expanded to Oman, Saudi Arabia and most recently Qatar.
In the gulf, many in the business community say they welcome the Trump Organization’s expansion and are unfazed by concerns about conflicts of interest. Most of the largest real estate developers in the gulf have close government ties, relationships that many in the local business communities praise, saying it allows development projects to move faster than in other countries.
“For us these business deals are good, they’re good for the region, good for business,” said one individual familiar with the thinking within the business communities in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
“If the Americans are concerned about a conflict of interest,” he said, “that’s their responsibility to enforce their own laws.”
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George reported from Dubai. Michael Birnbaum in Riyadh, as well as Emily Guskin, John Hudson and Julian Mark, contributed to this report.