Donald Trump’s Dirty Self-Dealing: The Audacity of His Rapacity

That is merely one of what CREW estimates will be 19 such deals in the works in coming months. In an agreement inked in November 2022, the Trump Organization is also building a Trump resort on the coast of Oman, working directly with that country’s government and Dar Global, a builder tied to the Saudi government. Similarly, Trump is also partnered with the Saudi Public Investment Fund in the LIV Golf Tour and tournament, which brings considerable revenue to his Doral resort in South Florida. And a new Trump Tower is under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with yet another just announced for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

More troubling than any of Trump’s media and real estate enterprises, however, is his family’s rapidly expanding cryptocurrency business—which seems almost designed to foster bribery, money laundering, and criminality. World Liberty Financial, the company set up by Eric and Don Jr. in partnership with Witkoff’s sons and others, has in fact already received a suspicious-looking investment from a Chinese crypto entrepreneur named Justin Sun, who advises the firm. He plowed $75 million into the project, a move that was followed in due course by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s suspension of an investigation into his business practices.

Meanwhile, other crypto companies have flocked to do deals with World Liberty, presumably in recognition of Trump’s power over their industry and in appreciation of his promise to make the United States into the “crypto capital.” Most recently, World Liberty announced that it would issue its own “stablecoin,” a category of crypto pegged to the value of a fiat currency, in this case the U.S. dollar—and promptly saw an Emirati firm, controlled by the UAE’s royal family, buy up billions of those coins to finance an investment in the Binance crypto exchange, which has been employed in the past by terror groups, drug cartels, and sanctions busters.

Trump has rewarded the crypto industry by dismantling much of the federal oversight, regulation, and prosecution that its advocates find burdensome and by promoting legislation to advance its interests. Among those bills is a plan to create a “Crypto Strategic Reserve,” meaning a stockpile of various cryptocurrencies, notably including Bitcoin, Ether, and various denominations held by World Liberty Financial and other Trump-allied firms. Unlike a strategic oil reserve, which has obvious utility, the crypto reserve has no public purpose that mainstream economists can detect. But it would pump Treasury revenue into supporting crypto currencies, thus raising their price—as it already did as soon as the Trump administration indicated its backing.