President Trump’s trip to the Persian Gulf, which just ended, could be fairly described as dual-purpose. On the first day, he visited Saudi Arabia, where the Trump Organization — now in the hands of two of his sons — is engaged in a number of business deals.
In the fog of public outrage over this (and especially about things like Mr. Trump’s plans to accept the gift of a Qatari jet), we have forgotten that two things can be simultaneously true: that the kind of pay-to-play schemes emerging between the Trump administration and foreign patrons are far more brazen than anything else we’ve seen in American history and that Mr. Trump did not emerge in a vacuum.
Any one of the new foreign deals, the memecoins and secretive crypto fund-raisers, the open attempts to court investments from kleptocratic regimes and oligarchs abroad — all while Mr. Trump’s children and in-laws travel around the world, pocketing new foreign clients — would have been, under previous administrations, a scandal of its own.
Mr. Trump might have single-handedly replaced things like Teapot Dome as shorthand for presidential corruption, but he and his family are merely surfing on a wave of previous administrations and officials who spent years looking the other way when it came to how foreign regimes and foreign oligarchs target, manipulate and directly bankroll American politics and policymakers.
Take how the broader Trump family has cavorted around the globe, unearthing all manner of inventive ways to profit from its patriarch’s return to office. There is the new Executive Branch club, peddling direct access to the administration for only half a million dollars. There is a new Trump family cryptocurrency business, which just inked a multibillion-dollar deal with a fund backed by Abu Dhabi. There are any number of deals directed to and through Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, in addition to multimillion-dollar investments with Mr. Kushner’s firm from numerous autocrats. Time and again, the Trump family has acted as if there were not only no concern to be had about potentially signing deals with kleptocratic clients but also no price to be paid for such dealing.
Are they wrong? It was only a few months ago that President Joe Biden, in one of his final acts of office, issued a blanket pardon to his son Hunter Biden — who, while his father was vice president, likewise spent years traveling the world trading on his last name. Even after Hunter Biden apparently lobbied American officials to aid at least one foreign client — a clear violation of U.S. foreign lobbying laws — he paid no legal price, making a mockery of his father’s campaign pledge to crack down on the practice. Why would the Trump children behave any differently?
It’s no secret that foreign governments view the Trump Organization as a means to influence Mr. Trump. This was the case throughout the president’s first term. Now foreign governments are even more explicit, with regimes — especially with the threat of tariffs now looming — openly expediting the process for new Trump Organization investments in their countries, all as a means of succoring Mr. Trump.
This is hardly the first time foreign dictatorships have funded American politicians’ pet projects in the hopes of currying favor. It was not long ago that the most popular nexus between foreign regimes and American political leaders was the Clinton Foundation. For years, it accepted millions of dollars linked to some of the most rapacious regimes extant, including those of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, in addition to a number of Russian, Kazakh and other oligarchs.
Could these regimes have been interested in the “simple belief that everyone deserves a chance to succeed,” as the Clinton Foundation pledged? Sure, theoretically. But that hardly explains why, by the early 2020s — when Hillary Clinton was no longer near the center of American politics — donations to the foundation cratered, falling some 90 percent from their highs when she was a secretary of state and a perennial presidential candidate. As Sarah Chayes, one of the United States’ leading anticorruption researchers, wrote in 2020, the Clinton Foundation was hardly an anodyne nonprofit but instead resembled “the U.S. versions of the ‘charities’ run by corrupt ruling families from Honduras to Uzbekistan.”
I do not mean to mitigate the grand corruption that Mr. Trump has now injected directly into the White House. Or to take away from the fact that in his second term he has decimated the United States’ counterkleptocracy powers, from kneecapping the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — America’s bedrock antibribery statute, on the books for decades — to dissolving all of the task forces dedicated to clamping down on foreign corruption to even announcing that the country’s new shell company registration requirements will simply not be enforced. In just a few months he has single-handedly dismantled many of the key weapons the country maintained in the fight against illicit finance and, in the process, imploded the nation’s reputation as a global leader in the fight against dirty money.
But we’re fooling ourselves if we think that reputation was well deserved. American politicians have been for sale for far longer than Mr. Trump has been around and in far more ways than he and his family have so far pioneered.
It’s a phenomenon that is hardly limited to one party or to one branch of government. (See, for instance, the recent conviction of Bob Menendez, the former Democratic senator convicted of secretly serving at the behest of the Egyptian dictatorship.) Nor is it just leading politicos. Cast around Washington, and you’re guaranteed to hit plenty of other institutes and organizations on the take. Think tanks sucking in tens of millions of dollars from kleptocracies. Universities accepting hundreds of millions more. Politicians on both sides of the aisle leaving office and soon flipping into foreign lobbyists, year after year. As one headline from nearly a decade ago read, the best way to make money from these regimes was simple: “Want to Be a ‘Foreign Agent’? Serve in Congress First.”
Thankfully, there are tools at hand to beat back some of these realities. In the short term, Congress must take the lead and do things like pass languishing legislation that would prevent former politicians from serving as foreign lobbyists, as well as shutter a loophole that allows foreign regimes to funnel funds to American politicians via lobbying firms — a practice that remains, somewhat shockingly, perfectly legal. While these regimes are technically barred from donating to politicians, the American lobbyists they hire can donate directly to the politicians themselves, including to the same lawmakers they’re lobbying for foreign clients.
Legislators should also build on similar legislation to target the family members of administration higher-ups; not only must children and in-laws of future presidents be prevented from foreign lobbying work, but they must also be barred from any new foreign deals or investments, period. This legislation could have thwarted much (though not necessarily all) of the Trump family’s financial arrangements with foreign patrons. We know that foreign regimes view progeny as little more than vectors of influencing the American presidency. They should be treated as such.
In the longer term, a new administration will be left to pick up the pieces. Here, there is a bit of good news. In his efforts to hack apart the few tools that kept foreign corruption of the office of the presidency and the country at bay, Mr. Trump has opted for shortcuts, relying on executive orders and announcements of nonenforcement rather than going through the legislative legwork of formal repeal. As such, things like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the shell company registry are still on the books and are simply waiting for a future administration to enforce them.
The blueprints for all of the counterkleptocracy task forces that Mr. Trump impaled are still here; a future administration should reinstate all of them, making sure they are fully funded and staffed. And, of course, should any former presidents be found to have illegally used their office to enrich themselves or their companies, future administrations should not hesitate in prosecuting them, regardless of any political cost.
All of that is in the future, though.
Casey Michel is the author of “Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World.”
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