Pay Attention to the Trump Family’s UAE Crypto Deal
Presidential Profit-Seeking Puts Us All at Risk
Right before President Trump took office last year, his family sold a 49% stake in its brand new crypto entity, World Liberty Financial, to a UAE royal, the Wall Street Journal reported on January 31.
If your eyes glaze over at this story, you’re not alone. Finance, crypto, and foreign policy are not at the top of most Americans’ concerns list. But it’s time to sit up and pay attention.
This deal illustrates a broader pattern: the Trump family and network profiting from the presidency in ways that create real risks for the public.
In this case, the WSJ reported, the UAE royal involved, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has for years been trying to get his hands on some of the most powerful AI chips. Previous administrations restricted such sharing over concerns about his companies’ historical ties to China. But just a few months after the Trump family went into business with Tahnoon, his administration approved exports of advanced AI chips to the UAE, including to Tahnoon’s AI company, G42. Other outlets have pointed out other potentially related deals between the administration and the UAE.
These are among numerous examples of Trump-related deals–especially through crypto–that, even if legal, pose obvious conflicts of interest (though the White House simply denies there are any such conflicts). While estimates vary, recent reporting in The New Yorker concluded the gains to Trump or his family from this profiteering add up to $4.05 billion in his first year in office.
The problem is not just that Trump and his family are leveraging his position for profit. It’s that the conflict of interest creates enormous risks that they are selling the rest of us out so they can get rich.
For example, with the UAE deal, there’s the risk national security experts have flagged that the UAE could share the AI chips with China, and that this could strengthen Chinese military capabilities and weaken US technological leadership, putting our security in danger.
There’s also the risk that Trump might make decisions on issues as significant as war and trade based on what serves his interest–even if it leads to people dying or prices at home going up.
More broadly, Trump’s immersion in the crypto world and closeness with the powerful players in it create incentives for him to favor them over you and me in ways that could be harmful, even devastating, for people who have nothing to do with crypto.
That includes potential impacts like the spike in electricity bills many Americans are seeing due to the explosion in data centers necessary to support crypto and AI growth.
It even raises the specter of wide-scale financial impacts as crypto becomes ever more enmeshed in our financial system. Experts point out that crypto is a highly volatile investment, and while a few have become very wealthy, people routinely lose their shirts using it. Without effective regulation, that volatility could spread to other sectors, including banking, potentially even setting the whole country up for yet a financial crisis.
But over the last year, the administration has moved aggressively to cut back on oversight of crypto. For example, it significantly scaled back Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement against the crypto industry. In turn, the SEC dropped investigations against crypto firms like Coinbase. Similar moves have happened at the Department of Justice.
As with the UAE deal, the Trump administration insists that its policies on crypto are driven by the best interests of Americans. But that’s hard to believe when the Trump family’s profits are so clearly intertwined with the president’s policy choices.
There’s an underlying problem here: the US president and vice president are not covered by US laws barring conflicts of interests, outside a specific provision of the constitution known as the “emoluments clause.” And Trump has not felt any need to follow past presidents’ practices of putting their assets into blind trusts (he put his Trump Media assets into a revocable trust to his sons, which still leaves a conflict of interest).
But there’s a clear solution too: Congress has both the authority and the obligation to act—by investigating these relationships and reforming laws that leave presidents free to profit from their office. Voters need to make their voices heard, and demand nothing less.