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What can you give a person who already has everything? The usual remedy is something of sentimental value. In Donald Trump’s case, Qatar has found the perfect blend — a $400mn jumbo jet for which he has indicated nostalgia in advance. Trump inspected the plane at Palm Beach airport a few weeks after he was sworn in. Long after he covers the aircraft’s fixtures in gold plating, he will associate his next Air Force One with Qatar’s ruling family. Or so they must hope.
In practice, Trump’s gratitude has limited shelf life. Ask Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose $1mn gift to Trump’s inauguration and $25mn to settle a meritless libel suit have not saved his company from large threatened fines. With Trump, however, you should never say never. Maybe Zuckerberg will find his own sentimental emolument to secure Meta relief from Trump’s antitrust attorneys.
It is no accident that Trump’s first overseas trip is to Saudi Arabia and then other Gulf kingdoms — as it was during his first term (his recent trip to Rome for Pope Francis’s funeral was obviously short notice). The distinction between public and private has little meaning to the House of Saud. Their country is literally named after them. At least in theory, US ethics laws against conflicts of interest put Washington on the other end of the spectrum to Riyadh. In reality, federal ethics rules are now decorative.
Former officials who were required to declare gifts of more than a few hundred dollars will be surprised to hear that Trump’s lawyers deemed a $400mn one does not violate the US constitution’s emoluments clause. The same applies to the memecoin $Trump that Trump issued a few days before he was sworn in. The top 220 investors in Trump’s purely speculative offering will attend a private dinner with him next week. That too apparently passes legal muster.
Some people play this game more nimbly than others — few better than the Gulf’s royal families. This month, an Abu Dhabi investment fund pushed $2bn worth of stablecoin through the Trump family’s majority-owned crypto company, World Liberty Financial. That name is packed with intention. On the transaction’s other side is Binance, the crypto exchange that paid a record $4.3bn penalty for money laundering during Joe Biden’s presidency.
Trump has since suspended Biden’s restrictions on semiconductor exports to a group of countries, including the United Arab Emirates. The UAE has also promised to invest $1.4tn in the US over the next decade. Neither Brussels nor Ottawa could begin to match that.
Should middle America study the content of Trump’s deals, might it have something to say? Most of the alarm since January has focused on the spectre of Trump’s authoritarianism, especially over deportations and free speech. But as author Anne Applebaum has convincingly argued, autocracy’s twin is kleptocracy. On the latter, Trump seems much further advanced. Congress is not even pretending to provide oversight on these conflicts of interest. Perhaps Capitol Hill is paralysed by the breadth of choice.
They also raise questions about the motives behind Trump’s foreign policy, particularly with Qatar. The small Gulf kingdom has done a huge amount to support Hamas by pouring tens of millions of dollars into Gaza. It also plays host to the Palestinian militant group. Yet the Trump family is up its eyeballs in commercial deals with them.
This April, the Trump Organization struck a deal with Qatar to build an 18-hole golf course with luxury branded Trump villas. Qatar is also an investor in Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s investment fund and is expected to unveil at least $200bn in US investments this week. Though large chunks of such headline numbers might prove to be a mirage, non-patrimonial systems like Canada’s cannot operate this way. This gives a huge advantage to non-democracies in negotiating with Trump.
Such deals are also hard to reconcile with Trump’s promise of “America First”. Should Qatar come good on its free jumbo jet, Trump’s so-called palace-in-the-sky would be at the expense of Boeing, which is under contract to resupply the ageing Air Force One fleet. How will Trump’s rash of impending Gulf towers and resorts serve America’s economic or diplomatic interests? That is open to debate. Yet the financial boost to Trump and his family is plain for all to see. The suspicion arises that the US president’s real agenda is Trump First. The rest is sleight of hand.
edward.luce@ft.com
Edward Luce’s book, ‘Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet’, is out now
www.ft.com
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