Good morning. There are two Donald Trumps: the candidate, and the president.
Donald Trump the candidate spent much of his campaign presenting himself as a champion of peace, arguing that his opponents had delivered a world of “death and destruction”. He vowed to restore order, promising to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine on his very first day in office.
Donald Trump the president is a different story. While he took credit for pushing Israel and Hamas towards a ceasefire as he entered office in January, he was widely criticised for allowing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to abandon that agreement and relaunch the war in Gaza for a further seven months. He has also authorised US bombings in Yemen and Iran, is threatening war with Venezuela, and has demanded concessions from Ukraine that have shocked European allies.
So which Trump is real? A peacemaker whose deals cut through diplomatic deadlock, or a president who talks of peace while pursuing power and profit? For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Mohamad Bazzi, director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and an associate professor of journalism at New York University. That’s after the headlines.
In depth: ‘One quick way to please Donald Trump is by enriching his family business’
Allegations that the Trump administration had shared elements of a 20-point peace plan with Russia before fully presenting it to Ukraine drew widespread condemnation. But what stood out most to me was how Trump defended his special envoy, Steve Witkoff (pictured above). When a leaked recording appeared to show Witkoff advising a Russian official on how to appeal to Trump, the president brushed it off as simply “what a dealmaker does”.
Supporters point to the renewal of the Gaza ceasefire in October and a series of peace initiatives elsewhere, from Thailand and Cambodia to Armenia and Azerbaijan, and even India and Pakistan, as evidence that Trump’s outsider approach has delivered breakthroughs. Critics counter that this logic reduces diplomacy to leverage alone, sidelining questions of sovereignty and international law.
Mohamad Bazzi told me there is something darker beneath these truces. The issue, he argues, is not that Trump and his inner circle operate a business mindset in one lane and diplomacy in another, but that the two have fused in a way that is dangerous for democracy.
“It’s difficult to keep up with all the ways that Trump and his family have been profiting from the presidency,” Bazzi says. “A lot of the deals that have emerged are with international players – whether they’re companies, billionaires, governments – that want to make nice with the US president. They’ve seen that one quick way to please Donald Trump is by enriching his family business.”
A family affair
Every US president since the 1970s has voluntarily adhered to rules designed to prevent conflicts of interest, typically by placing their businesses into blind trusts and stepping away from direct management, Bazzi says. But things have been astonishingly different with Trump, who argues that he is not directly involved with his business because his children manage the Trump Organization. This argument persists despite the fact that profits from the family business flow straight back to him.
Bazzi pointed to the Trump Organization’s increasing number of real estate deals with companies in Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. These companies, he says, have connections to their respective countries’ sovereign wealth funds or, in some cases, to their royal families. Bazzi says that these partnerships involve billions of dollars’ worth of real estate transactions and new golf course developments.
“In many of those cases, the Trump Organization isn’t putting up its own capital. They are branding deals where the Trump Organization leases the Trump name to these developers and they put in all the capital and investment to create these developments. The Trump family gets a licensing fee as well as a 20- or 30-year operating licence to manage these sites,” he adds.
Recent disclosures showed Dar Al Arkan, a publicly traded Saudi real estate developer, paid the Trump Organization $21.9m (£16.4m) in license fees in 2024 for projects in Dubai and Oman.
The Trump family business also ventured into crypto, launching a dollar-sign Trump meme coin days before his second inauguration. According to Bazzi, this coin’s value is purely speculative, but has still proved to be profitable for the family. “Ultimately, Trump and his family are raking in millions of dollars in fees as the coin is being traded back and forth. And so the crypto ventures provided the Trump family with new ways to profit from being in office,” he says.
The prodigal son
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was everywhere in his first term. “He was involved in foreign policy, in Covid-19 policy, in prison reform in the US,” Bazzi says. “But throughout the campaign last year, Kushner had pledged not to get involved in the next administration.”
He wanted to instead focus on his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, and was keen to avoid his role in the government looking like a conflict of interest. But that didn’t last long: Kushner has reemerged as a central player in negotiations over the ceasefire in Gaza and in negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
“He’s a private citizen who is negotiating some of the most important foreign policy agreements on behalf of the US government,” Bazzi says. “Yet at the same time, his diplomatic work overlaps with his business dealings.”
Take Gaza, for example. The peace agreement includes a framework for Gaza’s postwar redevelopment, Bazzi explains, and the three Arab states that will probably have the biggest role in paying for it – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE – are also the states that provide almost all of the funding for Kushner’s private equity firm.
“Is there a way to separate Kushner’s role as the diplomat peace broker from his role as the head of a private equity firm that’s funded by some of the same governments that he’s negotiating with? The lines are blurred in ways almost never seen before in the US,” Bazzi says.
Expensive friendships
Trump rolled out the red carpet for Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) when the latter visited the White House in November. Shortly after Trump’s re-election, the prince pledged to invest $600bn (£449bn) in the US economy over the next four years. A year later at the White House, he promised to increase that investment to $1tn.
I asked Bazzi what countries such as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations were receiving in return for the eye-watering sums of money they had pledged to the US economy or to the Trump family.
“In Saudi Arabia’s case, it’s been this guaranteed defence pact that Trump announced when MBS visited him at the White House. He announced something similar, through executive order, for Qatar last October. Trump has promised the US will come to their defence if attacked, and promised to sell advanced US weaponry,” he says.
There are, however, limitations. Both these countries, and others in the region, now view Israel as a greater threat to their security than Iran. “They see Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu as willing to attack Doha and willing to cross all of these supposed red lines, sowing chaos and instability throughout the region,” Bazzi says. “But Trump and US foreign policy are still largely tilted toward Israel.”
And yet the investments continue. “They want to stay in Trump’s good graces and to show him that they’re dependable allies who will keep the money flowing to the US and to his own family business as well.”
Could Trump’s black and white thinking – essentially wanting countries and companies to show him the money – break the US away from hawkish foreign policy, particularly towards the Middle East? Bazzi doesn’t think so.
“It seemed to me for a time that Trump’s transactional instinct and eagerness to make a deal and have the photo op would work toward achieving a bit more stability and solving some thorny problems in the Middle East, such as making a deal with Iran,” Bazzi says. “But then he carried out the direct US attack on the three major Iranian nuclear facilities.”
And the other side of Trump’s deal-making instinct is his desire to be aligned with the stronger power, he adds. “That’s one way that Putin and Netanyahu have been able to appeal to him, by projecting a sense of strength. He wants to be a winner.”
If you are reading this on the app over the Christmas period, the headlines and sport will not appear. To get the full First Edition experience in your inbox every morning, please sign up here.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
