Trump family deal spree could open door for future presidents to profit from office

    New York, Apr 13 (AP) For decades, presidents avoided even the appearance of profiting from their office.
    Harry Truman refused to lend his name to any business, even in retirement. Richard Nixon so feared a brother might profit off their ties, he had his phone tapped. And George W Bush dumped his individual stock holdings before taking office.
    President Donald Trump is taking a different approach.
    The family real estate business is undergoing the fastest overseas expansion since its founding a century ago, each deal potentially shaping everything from tariffs to military aid.
    Led by Eric, and his brother, Donald Jr., the family business has expanded into cryptocurrencies with ventures that brought in billions of dollars but raised questions about whether some big investors received favourable treatment in return.
    The brothers have also joined or invested in a number of companies that aim to do business with the government their father runs. Last month, they struck a deal giving them stakes worth millions in an armed drone maker seeking contracts with the Pentagon and with Gulf states under attack by Iran and dependent on the US military led by their father.
    The White House and the Trump Organisation deny there are any ethical problems. Asked about the issue at a recent crypto conference, Donald Jr said, “Frankly, it's gotten old.”
    The problem of conflicts of interest goes back a decade to when Trump first ran for office, but some government ethics experts and historians argue it's more pressing than ever as conflicts pile up in his second term that they consider unprecedented, blatant and dangerous to democracy.
    “I don't think there's any line right now between policy decisions and political calculations and the interest of the Trump family,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University.
    
    Deal-making spree abroad
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     In Trump's first term, the Trump Organization did zero deals in foreign countries. In a little over a year into his second term it did eight, all ostensibly complying with the Trump Organization's self-imposed rule not to do business directly with foreign governments.
    But governments in authoritarian and one-party states rarely take a hands-off approach — especially when the business belongs to a sitting president.
    In Qatar, a Trump golf club and villa project is being developed in part by a company owned by the Qatari government. In Vietnam, where The New York Times reported the government pushed farmers off their land to make way for a Trump resort, the country's deputy prime minister signed off on the deal at a ceremony. And in Saudi Arabia, a planned “Trump Plaza” resort on the Red Sea is being built by a Saudi real estate developer close to the ruling family.
    Whether the deals played any role in changing US policies in ways these countries sought is nearly impossible to know but the countries did get what they wanted – access to advanced US technology for Qatar, tariff relief for Vietnam and fighter jets for Saudi Arabia.
    And the Trump Organization got something too: Tens of millions in fees.
    Asked about those projects, the Trump Organization said it has done no deals with governments so far, noting that the Saudi company was private and has said it is “collaborating” with the Qatari business and had not struck a “partnership” with it that would have broken its self-imposed rules.
    
     The UAE, crypto and Binance
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     Another deal raising conflicts of interest questions first came to light in a Wall Street Journal article in January — a year after it was struck.
    Days before the inauguration, the Trump family sold nearly half of its World Liberty Financial crypto business to a UAE government-linked company run by a member of the UAE royal family for USD 500 million.
    A second UAE entity, a government fund, invested in the offshore cryptocurrency exchange Binance using USD 2 billion worth of a digital currency called a stablecoin issued by World Liberty. That allowed the Trump company that received the dollars to put it in safe investments such as bonds or money market funds and keep the tens of millions of dollars in interest for itself.
    Shortly after, the Trump administration reversed a Biden-era restriction and granted the UAE access to advanced US chips. Binance's founder, Changpeng Zhao, later got a pardon from Trump, despite having pleaded guilty to failing to stop criminals from using his platform to move money connected to child sex abuse, drug trafficking and terrorism.
    A lawyer for Zhao denied any connection between the Binance's business with the Trump family and the pardon.
    “Any claim of a quid pro quo by Binance or CZ, or preferential financial treatment by Binance, is a clear misstatement of the public record,” said Teresa Goody Guillen in a email to the AP, referring to Zhao by his initials.
    Asked about the pardon, the White House said federal authorities had unfairly punished Zhao in what it called “The Biden Administration's war on crypto.”
    World Liberty dismissed the notion of a conflict, saying the UAE deal had no connection to the president's chips policy.
    
    Crypto billions
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     World Liberty has also provided a separate income stream to a new Trump limited liability corporation through sales of “governance tokens” that give owners certain voting rights in its business, though not equity stakes, raising USD 2 billion last year. That translates into hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trumps through their World Liberty ownership stake and a separate side deal allowing them a cut of these sales.
    One big token investor was Justin Sun, a cryptocurrency billionaire who as a foreign citizen would be banned under US law from making political donations to US politicians. Between Trump's election and inauguration, Sun spent USD 75 million on the tokens.
    In February last year, a federal lawsuit charging Sun with duping investors was paused before being settled last month for a USD 10 million fine.
    Then there are the souvenir-type “meme” coins stamped with Trump's face that went on sale days before he took the oath of office last year.
    Over the next four months, the coins generated USD 320 million, mostly going to Trump-related entities, according to blockchain tracker Chainalysis. That is more than double the money collected in four years running his Washington DC hotel in Trump's first term. (AP)
    
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(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)