Donald Trump speaks to reporters and members of the media at Mar-a-Lago on February 1, 2026 in Palm Beach, Florida.
(Al Drago / Getty Images)
Donald Trump is not given to regret, but he does get rueful when he thinks about how modest his corruption was in the first term. When he was first elected as president in 2016, Trump was primarily a real estate magnate and television personality who licensed his brand for money. He held on to both his properties and his branding practices in his first term, which meant that business people and foreign governments could indirectly enrich his coffers by staying at Trump-branded hotels. Foreign governments also handed kickbacks to the president by granting trademarks to the Trump Organization. Though both practices clearly violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, the bribery went on with impunity during Trump’s first term; predictably, the Supreme Court refused to review the matter.
It’s now clear that, in the grand scheme of things, Trump’s first-term corruption was penny-ante, involving tens of millions of dollars rather than billions. It’s not that Trump was less greedy; he simply lacked the imagination and connections to realize how the presidency could really be milked on a grand scale. But his four years out of office allowed him to remake his business empire, moving into realms like social media (with Truth Social) and cryptocurrency (with World Liberty Financial, founded in September 2024 with the Trump family owning 75 percent). During these years, the Trump family also deepened its ties to the wealthy elites of Middle Eastern petro-states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These shifts allowed Trump to move from being a relatively small-scale con man to his current position as perhaps the most corrupt elected official in human history.
In an interview last month for The New York Times, Trump lamented that he didn’t do business deals as president in his first term. He changed his position on this, he said, because “I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to. You know, George Washington, when he was president…had two desks. He had a business desk and he had a president desk, and he did both. It’s OK to do that.” (Trump has been using this line about Washington for many years; it won’t shock anyone to find out that it is nonsense.)
The New Yorker has calculated that Trump’s business deals leveraging his presidency have brought him upwards of $4 billion. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal reported on how one particular set of deals, involving World Liberty Financial, has all the earmarks of an open-and-shut bribery case. According to the newspaper,
Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for half a billion dollars, according to company documents and people familiar with the matter. The buyers would pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities.
The deal with World Liberty Financial, which hasn’t previously been reported, was signed by Eric Trump, the president’s son. At least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with the family of Steve Witkoff, a World Liberty co-founder who weeks earlier had been named U.S. envoy to the Middle East, the documents said.
The spearhead of this financial deal was Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who oversees a fund of $1.3 trillion that combines personal and government funds. Tahnoon is the brother of the UAE president, also serving as his sibling’s national security adviser.
The World Liberty Financial deal had an extra layer because MGX, a Tahnoon-led hedge fund, purchased $2 billion in stablecoin (a cryptocurrency tied to fiat currency, in this case the US dollar) from the Trump family company which was used to invest in Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange. This $2 billion was used by World Liberty Financial to invest in US Treasury bonds, which earn roughly $80 million per year. In effect, the purchase gives World Liberty Financial a substantial and secure nest egg.
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Binance was founded by Changpeng Zhao, who was convicted in 2023 of money laundering and now resides in the UAE.
Subsequent to these business deals, both Tahnoon and Zhao received much-desired policy victories from the United States government. Under Joe Biden, the US was reluctant to allow the UAE access to US AI chips, out of concern that the petro-state was too close to China. When Trump returned to the White House, Tahnoon lobbied for both access to US chips and a fast-track program that would allow the UAE to more easily invest in the US. He was able to push his case in meetings with Trump and half a dozen cabinet officials. (Former national security officials told the Journal they were stunned by the level of access Tahnoon had received. Under the Biden administration, visiting foreign officials typically met with their US counterparts.) In May, both these policies were enacted. In October, Trump pardoned Zhao.
It’s impossible, of course, to prove that there was a quid pro quo. The White House claims Trump was not involved in the World Liberty Financial deals, which were overseen by his sons. Witkoff, whose own son is also active in World Liberty Financial, also denies any involvement. In other words, both Trump and Witkoff want us to believe that the wildly lucrative deals their sons make, which happen to enrich them personally, have nothing to do with their actions as public officials.
It would be incredibly foolish to take these denials at face value. As ethics lawyer Kathleen Clark told the Journal, “This sure looks like a violation of the foreign emoluments clause, and more to the point, it looks like a bribe.”
Trump’s claim that “nobody cared” what he did in his first term is an indictment not just of his own disdain for anti-corruption norms. It is also a grim judgment on the entire political system. The Supreme Court has effectively rendered the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution moot. Republicans are completely in thrall to Trump and unwilling to exercise the kind of patriotism their party showed when leaders of the GOP broke with Richard Nixon over his crimes. Democrats, with some noble exceptions such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, have been notably reluctant to make corruption an issue, since it seems to have little political traction.
The sad truth is that Trump is corrupt on a scale that dwarfs anything ever seen in an advanced democracy. He is leveraging the presidency to make billions. “Nobody cared” could serve as the epitaph for the Trump era and might also, if Trump goes unpunished, be the epitaph of American democracy.
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