Trump's Middle East Trip Calls Attention to His Personal Business Ties

Yahoo

16-05-2025

This week, President Donald Trump made the first official state trip of his second term to the Middle East, where he hoped to announce a series of high-profile deals with the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The deals, which include a commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the U.S., an arms package with Qatar, and commercial deals with the UAE, involve countries where the Trump family itself has significant business ties.
During his first term in office, the Trump Organization, which is owned privately by Trump and jointly controlled by his two sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., refrained from pursuing new foreign business deals. However, the organization did not renew that commitment after Trump's election in November, and his sons have already initiated several foreign deals since January.
Potential conflicts between the president's personal business and official duties emerged even before Trump left the United States, when reports emerged that the administration was preparing to accept a luxury Boeing 747-8 jet from the Qatari royal family to use as a new Air Force One. On May 11, ABC News reported that the plane would be given to the U.S. Air Force for Trump's use during his presidency, but would then be transferred to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library at the end of his term, suggesting the $400 million aircraft could be used by Trump as a private citizen following his presidency.
ABC News reported that lawyers in the administration had reviewed the deal and determined it did not violate U.S. law. 'Any gift given by a foreign government is always accepted in full compliance with all applicable laws,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the outlet. The White House and Department of Justice reportedly believe that, because the gift is being made to the U.S. Air Force—not Trump directly—and is not being made in exchange for an official act, there is no violation. Ethics experts, however, question whether the deal violates the Emoluments Clause—a provision of the Constitution that generally prohibits federal officials from accepting gifts and other objects or services of value from foreign governments, officials, or representatives without congressional consent.
'I don't buy the explanation at all,' professor Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics adviser to President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007, told The Dispatch. 'The Emoluments Clause is in the Constitution to prevent any gifts from foreign governments, whether or not there's a bribe.'
Kedric Payne, vice president, general counsel, and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, agreed. 'It's almost impossible to mask the fact that this is a foreign government giving a gift to a president, which falls squarely into the Emoluments Clause,' Payne told The Dispatch. 'So they can try all the legal gymnastics of explaining how this deal is structured, but, at the end of it all, the foreign government is giving a gift to the president, and that raises huge constitutional questions about how the Emoluments Clause applies.'
Some legal experts, however, think the case is less clear—especially if the aircraft is decommissioned once given to Trump's presidential library foundation. 'Assuming that the reporting is correct that the Qatari jet will be decommissioned and will not keep flying once Trump is out of office, then that is not at all clear cut,' Jed Shugerman, professor of law at Boston University, told The Dispatch. While Shugerman believes that there were many Emoluments Clause violations during Trump's first term—such as foreign governments spending lavishly at hotels owned by the Trump Organization—and that the administration is likely violating the Emoluments Clause again through its involvement with cryptocurrencies, he does not think that the gift of a Qatari aircraft necessarily falls in the same bucket. 'I doubt a court would call that a violation of the Emoluments Clause.'
In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a pair of lawsuits over potential violations of the Emoluments Clause during Trump's first term, saying that the cases were moot after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and left office.
The Qatari jet deal is not the only potential conflict of interest with the nations Trump visited this week. His family's business ties with the three Persian Gulf states run the gamut from real estate to cryptocurrency to his son-in-law's involvement with foreign sovereign wealth funds.
In December, the Trump Organization announced that it was licensing its name to several real estate projects in Riyadh—Saudi Arabia's capital—and Jeddah—a port city on the country's Red Sea coast. The projects are being developed by London-based Dar Global, the international subsidiary of Dar Al Arkan, a Saudi luxury real estate developer with close links to the Saudi government. The Trump Organization has previously worked with the firm on other projects across the Middle East, including a golf community in Oman.
The Trump Organization's foreign real estate deals are mostly licensing agreements, in which a developer pays a fee to the organization for the right to market and operate a property under the Trump brand. (Other agreements, like its Oman project, also pay the Trump Organization to manage the properties.)
The Trump Organization is also linked to the Saudi government through its partnerships with LIV Golf, a professional golf tour owned by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. The effort, like Qatar's bid to host the 2022 World Cup and Saudi Arabia's prolific spending on its professional soccer league, has been criticized by some as a form of 'sportswashing'—a term describing the use of popular sporting events to distract from human rights abuses and corrupt state behavior. Trump's Miami and Bedminster, New Jersey, golf clubs both hosted LIV events during the tour's inaugural 2022 season, and, in 2023, three Trump clubs—Miami, Bedminster, and Washington, D.C.—hosted the series. Trump's Doral club in Miami has since hosted two additional LIV tournament events in April 2024 and April 2025. LIV Golf reportedly paid a site fee 'of around seven figures' to Trump's courses, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.
'The deals connected with the president's company are clear violations of the ethics norm that a president should not have financial interests that present a conflict,' Payne explained. 'Presidents, in the past, have made sure that they don't have financial interest and conflict with their job to avoid this appearance of a problem.'
Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund has another connection to the Trump family through Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. In 2022, the fund invested $2 billion with Affinity Partners, a private equity firm founded by Kushner in 2021. Last year, the fund's assets under management increased by 60 percent to nearly $4.8 billion following additional capital injections from two of its existing investors: Qatar's sovereign wealth fund and Lunate, an investment manager based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Though the invested capital does not belong to Kushner himself, it is standard practice in the private equity industry for firms to earn management fees applied to total assets and performance fees applied to investment profits. Democrats have questioned whether the arrangement could allow foreign governments to influence Kushner and other individuals close to the Trump administration.
'Kushner got that $2 billion from the Saudi royal family against the advice of their own financial advisers,' Painter said, citing a 2022 New York Times article that reported that the panel that reviews investments for Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund had serious reservations about investing with Kushner's firm before being overruled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 'It really creates a bad impression that they're trying to screw around the ethics rules and get personal benefits and profit from the presidency.'
Kushner, who served as Trump's top Middle East negotiator during his first term, has not taken a formal role in his father-in-law's second administration. However, Kushner reportedly began advising the administration quietly in preparation for negotiations with Arab leaders during this week's tour. According to CNN, Kushner has been 'heavily involved' in discussions with Arab nations surrounding diplomatic normalization agreements with Israel—an issue he also took the lead on during Trump's first term.
In April, Qatari Diar—a real estate firm established by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund—and Dar Global announced that they would partner to develop a Trump-branded real estate project in Qatar. The project reportedly will include a golf course and villas and is part of a larger $5.5 billion development project in the coastal town of Simaisma.
Qatari links also extend directly to the Trump administration. Attorney General Pam Bondi—who, with White House lawyer David Warrington, determined that Qatar's gifting of an aircraft was legally permissible—was formerly a lobbyist on behalf of the Qatari government. According to Foreign Agent Registration Act disclosures, Bondi represented the Embassy of the State of Qatar 'providing advice, counsel, and other assistance with respect to efforts to combat
human trafficking,' while working for the lobbying firm Ballard Partners, for which she was paid $115,000 per month.
Bondi departed her role at Ballard Partners in November 2019 to take up a temporary position in the Office of White House Counsel during Trump's first term. Once that job ended, however, Bondi rejoined Ballard Partners and resumed lobbying on behalf of Qatar in 2020.
The UAE is closely involved in the Trump Organization's ventures in both real estate and cryptocurrency.
On April 30, the Trump Organization announced that it and Dar Global were developing the Trump International Hotel & Tower in downtown Dubai. A similar Dubai project in partnership with UAE state-owned real estate company Nakheel was previously announced by the Trump Organization in 2005, but the project was canceled in 2011.
Earlier this month, Zach Witkoff—co-founder of World Liberty Financial (WLF), a crypto firm controlled by the Trump family—also announced at a cryptocurrency conference in Dubai that WLF's stablecoin, USD1, would be used by the Emirati state-owned investment firm MGX to close a $2 billion investment in Binance, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges. Zach Witkoff is the son of Steve Witkoff, a longtime Trump ally who currently serves as the United States special envoy to the Middle East. The deal grants the early-stage stablecoin increased legitimacy in the crypto industry, and, if Binance decides to hold onto the $2 billion worth of USD1 used for the investment, would allow WLF to earn tens of millions of dollars in yield from the U.S. Treasury bonds used as USD1's underlying reserves.
In April, Emirati crypto investment firm DFW Labs also purchased $25 million worth of WLF's governance tokens, which grant the firm a right to vote on changes to WLF's underlying digital platform. (See this previous Dispatch piece on the administration's involvement in cryptocurrency for a primer on stablecoins and governance tokens.)
The investments only scratch the surface of the Trump family's deepening entrenchment into the world of cryptocurrencies, which also includes a series of digital NFT trading cards, a viral 'memecoin,' and other cryptocurrency investment products. 'Cryptocurrency could be used to pay bribes—it's used for money laundering and bribes all the time because cryptocurrency transactions are so difficult to trace,' Painter explained. 'So, this is a situation where we may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg.'
While no evidence has emerged that the Trump family or administration has explicitly violated the law through its involvement with cryptocurrency, the violation of broader presidential norms is still problematic. 'Whether you're violating an ethics norm or you're violating the Constitution, you are still violating the public's trust and their expectations of what their highest elected official is doing in office,' Payne said.