Days Before Inauguration, the Trump Family Secretly Secured $500 Million From UAE Royal Family for Its New Crypto Venture In Exchange for Handing it Sensitive AI Chips Technology

Donald Trump’s second term is remarkable for the extent to which he ignores all ethics rules and intertwines political and foreign policy decisions with his and his family’s financial interests. Now we have discovered that, just as he was taking office, the Trump family made a vastly lucrative—and secret—deal with the royal family of the United Arab Emirates.

The Wall Street Journal broke the story, and The New York Times follows up:

Days before his father’s inauguration in January 2025, Eric Trump, the president’s middle son, signed the agreement with the investment firm for a $500 million investment in World Liberty, The Journal reported. David Wachsman, a World Liberty spokesman, confirmed the transaction in a statement to The New York Times.

That agreement gave the Emirati-backed firm a 49 percent stake in World Liberty. Two top lieutenants to the U.A.E.’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, joined the board of World Liberty. …

President Trump, through an entity called DT Marks DEFI LLC, effectively controls a large stake in World Liberty, which generated $57 million for him just as the company was starting up, according to his financial disclosure report last year. …

Overall, the Trump family’s crypto investments in the past year have increased the family’s net worth by more than $1 billion, at least on paper.

At the same time that the crypto deal came together, the Emirati government secured an agreement with the Trump administration for the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced chips to power A.I. technology.

Trump consistently treats the presidency, and the government he commands, as his personal property, to be used not according to the interests or the laws of the United States, but to line his own pockets. No decision he makes, particularly in foreign policy, can be taken at face value rather than attributed either to personal vanity or to personal gain.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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