By Jonathan Chait
Tuesday, February 03, 2026
The royal family in Abu Dhabi had a problem. Their AI
firm, G42, wanted American chips, but both the Biden administration and Republicans
in Congress feared letting them have any out of concern that the chips
would be transferred to China.
The family solved the problem last year, The Wall
Street Journal has discovered,
by using the simplest solution that businesses can now employ for a policy
obstacle: They seem to have made a deal with the Trump family. Sheikh Tahnoon
bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family sometimes called
the “Spy Sheikh,” purchased a 49 percent share in World Liberty Financial, the
Trump family’s crypto firm, thus sending $187 million to
Trump-family-controlled entities. That spring, the Trump administration
reversed American policy and approved the AI-chip transfer.
A sitting U.S. president shouldn’t have a business
partner. If he did, ideally, that partner would be a U.S. citizen and not an
agent of a foreign government. But if the president is going to have a foreign
operative as his business partner, ideally that partner would not have a
nickname like the Spy Sheikh.
President Trump has generally managed to confine the
proliferating conflicts between his business dealings and the public interest
to second-tier news stories. Trump and his spokespeople have rarely had to even
defend his choice to operate a global business empire that stands to profit
from his decisions.
The Journal’s explosive report, which constitutes
the first established instance of a foreign government official buying a large
share of a Trump company after the 2024 election, has at least briefly forced
the administration and the Trump family to explain themselves. The defenses put
forth are not reassuring.
One defense, via World Liberty itself, is that the
company need not follow any different ethical standards than other companies.
David Wachsman, a spokesperson for the firm, told the Journal, “The idea
that, when raising capital, a privately held American company should be held to
some unique standard that no other similar company would be held is both
ridiculous and un-American.”
The reason World Liberty might be held to a different
standard than other firms is that World Liberty was founded by, among others,
Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Barron Trump, and “co-founder emeritus” Donald
Trump during the home stretch of the 2024 presidential campaign.
A normal business can’t simply change government policy
in order to enrich itself. Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm in a blind trust
upon taking office to avoid the temptation to tilt the policy agenda in a
pro-peanut direction. Other peanut farmers did not have to establish blind
trusts in response to Carter’s election. That is the difference between a
business owned by a sitting president and one that isn’t.
Wachsman also assured the Journal that Trump and
Steve Witkoff, a World Liberty co-founder, “had no involvement in the deal and
haven’t been involved in World Liberty since taking office,” as the paper
paraphrased his answer. But because Trump’s sons can handle the firm’s
business, and presumably have regular opportunities to communicate with their
dad, that does essentially nothing to dispel the conflict of interest. All that
needs to happen to create a corrupt nexus is for Trump to find out who is
giving him money.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, appearing
on This Week With George Stephanopoulos, offered two additional defenses
that are even less convincing: “President Trump has been completely transparent
when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We
don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it
when it’s happening.” Blanche elaborated: “The president is ethical. He talks
more to the press. He says what’s happening more than any president in history.
You have a question about it, you can ask him. He gaggled on the plane last night
at midnight for, like, 20 minutes. Okay?”
To say that the president is taking money from interested
parties while delivering favorable decisions out in the open is not much of a
defense. The cliché “It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up” presumes that you
have enough shame to cover up your crime in the first place. Watergate would
have gone differently, but still not well, if Richard Nixon had held a press
conference in 1972 to announce that he was hiring a team of burglars to surveil
his opponents.
But even that threadbare defense isn’t true. Abu Dhabi’s
investment in Trump’s company, the apparent quid in the quid pro quo,
was a secret for more than a year until the Journal ferreted it out.
Having been caught red-handed, Trump is trying to pretend to have freely
disclosed it.
It is true that Trump entertains a lot of questions from
the press, to which he often replies by insulting the reporters who asked,
lying, or changing the subject. That is transparent in one sense of the word
(you can see right through him). But it is not transparent in the sense of
voluntarily placing pertinent information in the public domain.
Blanche also insisted that Trump’s World Liberty dealings
were not different from the business practices of his predecessor: “I love it
when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening
before, as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly
the same thing, and they were just in office.”
This is another defense that is not true and wouldn’t go
very far even if it were.
Joe Biden did not run a private business while in office.
His son Hunter did get involved in international businesses, such as the
Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, whose interest in hiring him was almost
certainly due to the belief that he could put in a friendly word with his
father. That arrangement was sleazy
enough. But selling the mere appearance of political clout—as vice president,
Joe Biden did not deliver any policy favors for Burisma—was not nearly as
unethical as Trump actually delivering for his partner.
The comic aspect of a Trump spokesperson pointing to the
Biden administration as precedent is that Trump has repeatedly called his
predecessor a crook. He has labeled Biden “Crooked Joe,” accused him of running
a “crime family,” and described him as “the most corrupt president in American
history—and that’s not even close.”
Now his administration says Trump is merely doing the
same thing as the most corrupt president in American history. That would mean
that Trump, by his own account, is tied for first place as the most corrupt
president in history.
The most revealing—you might even say transparent—defense
came from the White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “President Trump only acts
in the best interests of the American public,” she told the Journal.
“There are no conflicts of interest.”
This is a simple but fascinating statement. On one level,
it’s just a lie: There are documented conflicts of interest between Trump’s
businesses and his policy decisions.
On a deeper level, however, Kelly is asserting that the
very idea of a conflict of interest does not apply to this administration. It
is a dispute not over facts but over concepts. Trump is challenging the idea
that a conflict between the president’s and the public’s interests is possible.
This belief follows more or less from every other
decision Trump has made, which has collapsed the space between the president
and the state. Trump can apparently give himself and his friends carte blanche
to commit crimes, while deeming anybody who opposes him a criminal. He can turn
the government into a propaganda arm, naming parts of it for himself and making
the Army hold a parade on his birthday.
When his spokespeople claim there are no conflicts of
interest, they are defining Trump’s actual theory of governing: L’état,
c’est moi.
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