Corruption: The spy sheikh and the president

Tahnoon and Trump: In business

(Image credit: X / USAinUAE)

President Trump is embroiled in a half-billion-dollar corruption scandal, said Mohamad Bazzi in The Guardian, and “we’ve hardly noticed.” The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that just days before Trump’s second inauguration, a senior member of the United Arab Emirates’ royal family signed a $500 million deal to buy almost half of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s main cryptocurrency company. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, nick-named the “spy sheikh,” paid half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities and $31 million to entities linked to the family of Steve Witkoff, a co-founder of World Liberty who is now Trump’s Middle East envoy. “What did the UAE get in return for its money?” Well, four months after the deal, the Trump administration let it buy 500,000 advanced AI chips. Such sales were previously blocked over fears the UAE would share the technology with China. Under any other president, such self-enrichment at America’s expense “would cause a political earthquake in Washington.” But amid Trump’s succession of news-swamping outrages, it has “hardly made a blip.”

The administration’s defenses of this deal “are not reassuring,” said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly maintained Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public,” a perfect encapsulation of Trump’s monarchical “theory of governing: L’état, c’est moi.” Meanwhile, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed Trump was transparent about the deal—never mind the UAE’s investment in World Liberty, “the apparent quid in the quid pro quo,” was a secret “until the Journal ferreted it out.” The House GOP spent hundreds of hours grilling witnesses over the Biden family’s self-dealing, said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review. But Republicans have now lost interest in such presidential corruption, even though the $27 million allegedly brought in by the Bidens amounts to “a rounding error” when compared with the Trumps’ colossal UAE haul.

With no checks on his power, Trump has become “perhaps the most corrupt elected official in human history,” said Jeet Heer in The Nation. A “small-scale con man” in his first term, he upped his ambitions after realizing “nobody cared” about his corruption, signing pardons in exchange for donations and cutting real estate deals with Arab tyrants. The New Yorker has calculated that Trump made $4 billion by leveraging the presidency in just a year. “‘Nobody cared’ could serve as the epitaph for the Trump era.” If his blatant corruption goes unpunished, it might also “be the epitaph of American democracy.”