In May, between the two payments, Trump, overruling objections from his national-security advisers about Emirati ties to China, approved a huge sale of cutting-edge A.I. computer chips to the U.A.E. (A spokesman for World Liberty said that the President and Steve Witkoff had not had “any involvement whatsoever” since the election and that the Emirati deal had nothing to do with Trump’s decision about the chips. Trump told reporters that he does not know about the investment and that his sons “are handling that.”)
It is well documented that Trump and his immediate family have exploited the Presidency for personal profit on an unprecedented scale. Last summer, The New Yorker calculated that over the past decade those profits came to $3.4 billion. Six months later, at the end of his first year back in office, that tally had climbed to more than four billion. But the Emirati payment raises novel questions, beginning with the Constitution’s prohibition against officeholders accepting any “present” or “emolument” from a foreign state without congressional consent. In Trump’s first term, his lawyers contended that renting hotel rooms at Trump properties to foreign states was not the kind of “emolument” that the Founders had in mind. They argued that this was a “fair value” exchange and that, in any case, Trump donated the profits to the U.S. Treasury.
Trump did abstain from new business deals outside the U.S. in his first term. In his second, he has abandoned such scruples. Yet the Trump Organization maintains that it still avoids deals with foreign governments—a claim the Emirati payment appears to vitiate. Will Trump say that it, too, was a “fair value” exchange and donate the profits?
Then, there’s the secrecy. The sheer brazenness of the Trump family’s operations has been in some ways Trump’s strongest defense against charges of corruption. Because Presidents cannot be expected to jettison all their financial ties, government ethics rules rely mainly on public disclosure to allow voters, and their elected representatives, to judge whether a President puts personal interests ahead of the public’s. And, until now, Trump always seemed unembarrassed to crow about his side hustles. But, if the Emirati payment was kept secret, what else might be? Both World Liberty and Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars from unnamed investors over the past year. Neither the companies nor the President has disclosed the sources of that money.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, Bob Bauer, who was a lawyer in the Obama White House, and Jack Goldsmith, an Assistant Attorney General under President George W. Bush, published a book, “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.” In it, they offered reforms to curtail the opportunities for the abuse of executive power that Trump’s first term had exposed—opportunities that his second term has taken to extremes. To address potential financial conflicts of interest, one proposal would require Presidents to certify that they have fully removed themselves from any role in any private businesses in which they own stakes, with no access to information about them that is not also available to the public. A second would force any such business to disclose its assets, liabilities, and other stakeholders (precluding a secret investment by a foreign government). A third would give teeth to the emoluments clause: any business connected to a President would be required to publicly report any expected payment or benefit from an arm of a foreign state. If Congress did not consent to it within sixty days, a President would be forced to sell off that interest.
Such measures are, of course, out of the question as long as Trump has a veto. But most of our current government ethics rules date back to a bipartisan backlash after the Watergate scandal. It is hardly impossible that Trump’s self-enrichment, at four billion dollars and counting, might yet trigger a similar wave. ♦
