When Benjamin Franklin left Paris in 1785, after nearly nine years as the American emissary to France, King Louis XVI presented him with a parting gift. The token exuded the rococo extravagance of the ancien régime: a portrait of the monarch, surrounded by 408 diamonds, held in a gold case. It was frequently described as a snuffbox, a term that hardly captures its opulent nature; the item was likely far more valuable than anything Franklin owned.
Under the Articles of Confederation—the document governing the still-fragile republic—Franklin could keep the gift only with the explicit permission of Congress, which it reluctantly granted. But the gift unsettled the country. The Constitution, written two years later, barred federal officeholders from accepting any gift, payment, or title from a foreign state without Congress’s explicit consent. The Founders feared that European monarchies would seek to control the new country by showering it with gifts, which would undermine its capacity for self-government.
Until Donald Trump, no U.S. president had ever yielded to royal temptations from abroad. But in his second term, Trump has discarded that old inhibition in its totality. Since 2022, the Trump family has been promised hundreds of millions of dollars—in the form of investments, real-estate licensing deals, even an airplane—from Gulf monarchies and the business entities they control.
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During his second term, and especially during Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s recent visit to Washington, Trump has rewarded his benefactors with sweeping geopolitical favors. Their huge investments in his family’s businesses are hard to describe as anything other than the spectacular subversion of American sovereignty, wherein the nation’s foreign policy reads as a thank-you note to the president’s biggest financial boosters.
Really, Trump is adopting the governing style of his backers. In the Gulf states, hardly any distinction exists between public and private interests; the royal family governs the state and dominates the economy. They oversee sovereign-wealth funds, control the largest companies, and treat nominally private enterprises as instruments of royal policy. When a Gulf developer or investment vehicle pays Trump—or licenses his brand—it is not a private commercial transaction. It is a political act: a foreign monarch using his wealth to cultivate influence, dependence, and favor.
In a monarchy, a ruler governs in part through beneficence—binding subjects through appointments, indulgences, and other blandishments. That this model might be applied to American officeholders was the gravest threat to the republic: Leaders enriched by a foreign monarch cannot be trusted to act independently. When a leader is financially entangled with foreign regimes, it becomes impossible to discern their motives: Are they acting out of conviction, or obligation? That uncertainty was precisely what the Framers sought to banish.
The timing of Trump’s deals with the Saudis tells a disturbing story. Before he became president, he never managed to break into the kingdom’s real-estate market. But during his first term, he proved his worth. He stood by MBS after the Saudi leader ordered the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump backed the kingdom and its Emirati allies during their blockade of Qatar in 2017, despite the fact that the United States maintains one of its largest military bases there.
The Trump family was rewarded for its demonstrations of loyalty. In 2021, Jared Kushner—Trump’s son-in-law, who was a top adviser during his first term—sought a $2 billion investment from the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund for the private-equity firm he was creating. The Saudi fund’s professional advisers warned that the fledgling Kushner firm’s operations were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” But the crown prince controls the fund’s board, and the board overruled the professionals.
Then, after Trump announced that he was running to reclaim the presidency, the Saudis began to shower him with real-estate deals. In 2022, Dar Global—the international arm of a Saudi developer that is routinely described as having “close ties” to the royal family—contracted with the Trump Organization to manage a hotel and golf course in Oman. Two years later, the company unveiled a Trump Tower in Jeddah, followed by plans for a Trump Plaza in the city. The pattern was unmistakable: The Saudis were licensing the Trump name for a series of lavish mega-projects in places such as Riyadh, Dubai, Doha, and the Maldives.
The Trump family has become enmeshed in Saudi investment deals to an extent possible only with the crown prince’s approval. But have these entanglements actually corrupted American foreign policy? As the Founders understood, that question drifts into the murky realm of motives—always difficult to parse and almost impossible to prove.
American foreign policy was already becoming pro-Saudi long before Trump arrived for his second term. Although Joe Biden came into office vowing to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” for killing Khashoggi, he softened his stance over time and pursued a grand bargain: Saudi normalization with Israel in exchange for Israeli movement toward a two-state solution. That shift didn’t stem from personal enrichment or private dealings involving the Biden family; it emerged from geopolitics. Biden did not want Saudi Arabia drifting into China’s orbit. And Iran’s growing menace ensured that any American administration—whatever its ideological priors—would be pushed toward cooperation with Riyadh, which stands among Tehran’s most committed regional adversaries.
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But Biden sought to extract substantial concessions as he deepened the alliance: not just Saudi diplomatic recognition of Israel but also assurances that the kingdom would keep the dollar at the center of its financial system. His administration pressed Riyadh to curb its brutal intervention in Yemen.
In his first months back in office, Trump has delivered the defense protections that Biden merely dangled before the Saudis. Last week, he even designated the kingdom a “major non-NATO ally.” He signed an executive order pledging to defend Qatar against any attack, not long after that country gifted him a $400 million airplane. (Technically donated to the Pentagon, the plane will be transferred to Trump’s presidential-library foundation no later than January 2029.) At Riyadh’s urging—“Oh, what I do for the crown prince,” Trump said—the president lifted sanctions on the new Sunni-led government in Syria. And to burnish the image of his family business’s financial benefactor, he once again excused the murder of Khashoggi. Yet he has extracted almost nothing in return—aside from vague promises of Saudi investment in American firms, commitments the kingdom has every incentive to make regardless of American favors. This is exactly the kind of one-sided arrangement the Constitution was written to prevent: a republic bending toward the preferences of a foreign monarch whose wealth has seeped into the president’s private dealings.
What the Founders feared as an existential threat to the republic is now unfolding in plain sight. The anxiety they enshrined in the Constitution is being flouted with barely any disguise. The Founders understood that the nation’s immune system needed to reject even the smallest, most seemingly innocent foreign attempts to influence American politics. The president is ceding American sovereignty to a foreign monarchy, and there’s hardly any price to be paid.
The post Why the Gulf Monarchs Shower Trump With Gifts appeared first on The Atlantic.
