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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
“Trump Heads to the Middle East With a Single Goal: Deals, Deals, Deals.” That’s the headline of a New York Times piece our next guest contributed to as he follows the dealings of the Trump administration. Eric Lipton is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter with The New York Times, where his latest pieces are headlined ”Auction to Dine With Trump Creates Foreign Influence Opportunity” and ”Trump Sons’ Deals on Three Continents Directly Benefit the President.”
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Eric Lipton. Well, why don’t you start there? We’re looking at this first major international trip President Trump is taking, first stop Riyadh. We’re looking at the line of American CEOs and others who are shaking the hands of Mohammed bin Salman and President Trump, very prominently, of course, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, the Trump ally. If you can talk about who is behind the trip — you can talk about the advising of Jared Kushner, his son-in-law — and what all of them, and who we aren’t seeing right now, Eric and Donald Trump, have to gain?
ERIC LIPTON: The Middle East is the nexus of the Trump Organization’s global business operations at the moment. It’s really their single most important profit center by far. And it relates to the fact that there is such enormous wealth there. It’s the oil and gas revenues over many decades have been stuffed into the sovereign wealth funds. And the sovereign wealth funds are now looking to expand their engagement globally to become more prominent economic players in the world. And so, that’s the reason that there are so many venture capitalists and, you know, artificial intelligence or technology companies that are heading to the Middle East. And it’s the same reason that the Trumps and Jared Kushner are so tied to the Middle East, because they have hundreds of billions of dollars to give out. And that’s the reason that so many American corporations are in the Middle East with President Trump right now.
So, for the Trump family, they have $2 billion worth of capital that in the last several weeks the government of Abu Dhabi announced that it was going to put into World Liberty Financial, their cryptocurrency company, and that will pass through World Liberty on its way to finance the largest crypto exchange in the world. But while that money resides with World Liberty, the Trump family and its partners will be making interest off of that $2 billion, so we’re talking tens of millions of dollars a year.
Similarly, not very far away, in Qatar, as, you know, your prior guest was referencing, the government there is the landowner on a property where the Trump family is going to be doing golf and villas. And many of these projects in the Middle East are coordinated with a company called DarGlobal, which is a subsidiary of Dar Al Arkan, which is a Saudi-based real estate company that’s closely aligned with the government of Saudi Arabia. And DarGlobal has six different real estate projects with the Trump family, which basically are branding projects, where the Trump name, as Robert Weissman indicated, is put on these projects. The Trumps get millions of dollars in branding fees, and then they often get licensing and managing fees, as well. So, they have projects in Saudi Arabia, in Oman, in the United Emirates with DarGlobal. And that’s where the biggest growth chunk of the Trump real estate operations are, through DarGlobal and these branding projects.
And so, you know, when I looked at the list of who’s attending the Saudi meetings today, I actually — I did not see, and I looked closely — I didn’t see anyone from DarGlobal listed, although they may be there, and I didn’t see their other business partners listed as being present. But just being in that space is good for — the president being there is good for Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner has more than $2 billion in funds from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, which went into his private equity firm. And then, similarly, the Public Investment Fund is the single biggest investor in LIV Golf, which has played four tournaments in a row at the Trump family’s Doral golf course in Florida.
And so, the money from the Middle East is just in so many different ways — in crypto, in golf and hotels and Jared Kushner — flowing into Trump family operations. And so, it’s not surprising that this is, you know, a big trip that the president has taken to visit UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, three business partners of the Trump family.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk more about Eric and Donald Trump. In the first administration, we saw them all the time. They were front and center. But right now we’re not seeing them. You write an article, maybe that’s because they’re making deals on three continents that directly benefit the president. But also, the financial relationship between President Trump and his two older sons?
ERIC LIPTON: I mean, you know, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were in the White House in the first term, but Don Jr. and Eric Trump were never a part of the administration. They were part of the political operation, and they have always been a part of the political operation. So, in terms of their visibility and presence in the second term, I don’t see that much difference for Don Jr. and Eric. I mean, they are very active, and they are — you know, Eric Trump was just in Dubai giving a speech at a crypto event, and then he similarly was with DarGlobal having a grand celebration of the start of the Dubai Trump International Hotel project that’s on sale there now for, you know, more than — you know, I think it’s $12 million for some of the top condos there. So, they are — and, you know, Don Jr. is going to be in Vegas for a bitcoin conference, and he’s going to be in Qatar next week, as well, for another conference. And so, they are out there.
And Don Jr. is opening up a new club in Washington. He’s a part owner of something called “The Executive Branch,” which is, you know, obviously named after the White House, that’s paying — you know, going to cost you $500,000 a person to get a membership. And David Sacks, the president’s crypto adviser, is one of the founding members. And Jeff Miller, a lobbyist, who has dozens of clients that he’s gotten since Trump started — he’s a big fundraiser for Trump — is also one of the founding members. And Don Jr., the son of the president, is one of the owners. So, Don will be, you know, present at that venue in Georgetown once it opens.
So, I’ve seen a lot of Don and Eric, similar to what I saw in the first term. The difference is that they are much bolder in their deal making right now than they were in Trump’s first term, where they were a little more shy about pursuing profits as aggressively as they now are. There’s very little restraint at the moment. They’re just pursuing as many profitable deals as they can find.
AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk more about cryptocurrency? And I think there’s a problem in the United States, that a lot of people don’t even understand what it is. But earlier this month, the founder of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture said Thursday that a fund backed by Abu Dhabi will make a $2 billion investment in the crypto exchange — you pronounce it Binance? Talk more about that and how exactly President Trump is financially benefiting from this.
ERIC LIPTON: Yeah, so, there are at least three different ventures, and you could argue that there are four, that the Trump family has recently embraced relative to crypto. There’s the memecoin, which is the one that the president is having the auction that ended yesterday in order to — the more of his memecoin that you buy, you can get invited to a dinner and even a tour of the White House. And that is personally enriching him and his sons. And there are 220 people that next Thursday will be invited to the Trump National Golf Course in Virginia for a dinner with Trump, and 25 of them will have a, quote, ”VIP reception” with him. And then, that similar 25 will also be invited for a White House tour. And that’s because they spent, you know, in some cases, millions of dollars to buy the Trump family’s cryptocurrency memecoin, directly enriching the president and his family in exchange for getting access to the president.
So, again, you know, in history, if you make campaign contributions, you get access to powerful people. We’ve not had a tradition in the United States when if you personally enrich a person, you know, the president or a U.S. senator, that if you give money to the U.S. senator, that you then can have a meeting with the U.S. senator or with the president of the United States. That is not the tradition in the United States, but that has now become what Trump is doing. So, that’s one company. That’s the memecoin. It’s dollar sign T-R-U-M-P, all caps [$TRUMP].
And the second company is World Liberty Financial. And that one is — they’re trying to be, effectively, a JPMorgan Chase of the crypto world. They’re going to have, you know, lending and borrowing, you know, borrowing money and depositing your crypto in their accounts. They also have something called a stablecoin, where you can deposit your crypto, and it will be — maintain a dollar-to-dollar value for each stablecoin. And that’s the place where Abu Dhabi, which is a part of the UAE, has put $2 billion. So, overnight, that World Liberty went from becoming just started, in October, to now having one of the largest stablecoin deposit in the world. It’s one of the — and stablecoins are one of the most profitable chunks of the crypto world, because what happens is that $2 billion that the government of Abu Dhabi has put into World Liberty, much of that will be put into short-term treasuries to try to back up the dollar-to-dollar stablecoin, and the yield from those treasuries will go — the interest, the return on that investment, goes to World Liberty, not to the owner of the stablecoins, and so that’s why it’s so profitable. Tether, which is the world’s largest stablecoin producer, makes billions of dollars in taking that yield from people who deposited stablecoins. So, that’s a second venture.
The third one is that just yesterday Eric Trump announced that they’re going to have a publicly traded bitcoin mining company, which they are executives on. And the fourth, with Trump Media and Truth Social, they’re also talking about having some crypto nexus, although that one’s a little less clear.
So, the family is rushing into crypto because they see it as a potential profit center, and it is quickly emerging as one of the single biggest, if not the single biggest, sources of revenues and profits for the Trump family. And this is happening at the same time as the president appoints the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has been rolling back all kinds of regulatory enforcement actions of crypto, including partners of the Trump family have been given regulatory relief. And even one — the president himself pardoned Arthur Hayes, who is effectively a business partner of World Liberty Financial, so the president effectively pardoned a business partner. Again, it’s like it’s never happened before. And so — and then, the Justice Department is rolling back its own crypto enforcement program.
And so, at the same time as Trump is the chief regulator, he is also the regulated, and he is curbing the regulations in a way that directly benefits his own business operations. These are conflicts on a scale that we’ve never seen before in American history, and they’re playing out so quickly and at such a complex level that most of the American public just simply cannot follow it all. And to throw in a 747 being donated by the government of Qatar, I mean, it’s just headline after headline. They’re happening just day after day.
AMY GOODMAN: So, finally, Eric Lipton, you’re an investigative reporter. You focus on powerful people and the influence they have over American society and the world. You’ve been a reporter for more than three decades. Your work has received three Pulitzer Prizes. What has surprised you most in reporting on the Trump administration and this whole pay-to-play approach of the presidency so far?
ERIC LIPTON: It’s just how unrestrained it is. You know, during the first term, they were reluctant to be so brazen. They tried to appear to be more respectful to conflicts of interest and norms and standards. And I think that — and I’ve talked to Eric Trump about this, because Eric Trump and I have had a very respectful relationship for over a decade now. We talk. You know, we’ve had lunch. And he was angry over how they were treated in the first term. And he felt — and they were subpoenaed. They were — you know, they were sued. And he felt — his feeling was, “We tried to be good.” Now, you know, obviously, most of your viewers would think that they weren’t good, but they did at least make an attempt to — for example, they did not do new international real estate deals during the first term. And his feeling is, you know, “We tried, and we were still completely assaulted with lawsuits and subpoenas.”
And so, coming into the second term, they said, “You know what? We’re just going to — you know, we’re going to act ethically.” They feel like they’re acting ethically; you can argue over that. “But we’re going to do what we want to do. We’re not going to be restrained by appearances.” And they’re not restrained. And that’s the thing that’s most striking and startling, is just how completely unrestrained this is. And the conflicts of interest, it’s no longer an appearance of a conflict of interest. These are real, you know, provable conflicts of interest.
And many people want to use the word “corruption.” I’m less — I’m more reluctant to use that term. I mean, there are ethical violations everywhere that we’re seeing. There are conflicts of interest. There is an appearance of corruption. To me, corruption means when you are giving someone in exchange for a benefit. And that’s — the quid pro quo part of that appears to be the case, but proving that is something that, generally, I want to let a court, you know, or a prosecutor document the quid pro quo. We have all the ingredients of the quid pro quo, but, you know, whether or not there was intent to give a government benefit in exchange for financial assistance is something that, you know, is subjective. But all the ingredients are now there, in a way that is so brazen, striking and unprecedented in American history. It’s really sort of shocking. And that’s the thing that’s most surprising to me.
AMY GOODMAN: Eric Lipton, I want to thank you for being with us, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, investigative reporter at The New York Times. We’ll link to your latest pieces at democracynow.org.
When we come back, we go to Gaza, where Save the Children is warning every child is now at risk of famine, at risk of starvation, due to Israel’s 10-week-long blockade. We’ll speak with one of the leaders of Oxfam in Gaza City. And then we’ll go to Abubaker Abed, 22-year-old Palestinian accidental war correspondent. We spoke to him when he was suffering from malnutrition in Gaza. He’s now in Ireland. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Women Gather” by Sweet Honey in the Rock, performing in our Democracy Now! firehouse studio over 20 years ago.
