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.
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.
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.
Vice President JD "There's always tomorrow" Vance. "Let them eat dogs and cats."
