Photo: Karim Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images
President Donald Trump is planning a trip to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in mid-May, where White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said he will be “strengthening ties” with regional leaders. After this week, those ties are going to be quite strong, thanks to a bunch of money coming his way from regional leaders in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
On Wednesday, Trump Organization executive vice-president Eric Trump was in Qatar, where he secured a deal to build a golf course on state-owned land with Qatari Diar — a real-estate firm that was launched by the Qatari sovereign wealth fund and is led by a government minister.
To someone concerned with antiquated ideas like “corruption” or “conflicts of interest,” this may seem like a breach of the Trump Organization’s ethics statement issued in January vowing that it would have “no new transactions with foreign governments.” But Trump had a nice workaround for this. A Saudi developer with ties to the Saudi government, Dar Global, purchased the land from Qatar — just as they did for a Trump resort on state-owned land in Oman. So everything checks out there.
A number on the deal in Qatar has not yet been reported. But the Trump Organization is cleaning up with other deals with Dar Global in Jeddah, Riyadh, and Dubai — where a new Trump Tower will boast the “highest outdoor pool in the world,” according to a press release made public on Wednesday.
Coming Soon! Trump International Hotel & Tower, Dubai pic.twitter.com/kyyosOfkrF
— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) April 30, 2025
Trump wasn’t done, zipping across the Persian Gulf to attend a cryptocurrency summit in Dubai on Thursday. It’s here that he began to make the real money for his father’s businesses. Most real-estate these days for the Trumps are actually licensing deals in which the organization lends its gilded name to a developer who owns and operates the property. Such deals, like the one in Qatar, tend to rake in millions. But in Dubai, he was onstage at at the crypto conference Token2049, where a deal was announced for billions.
Trump was sitting next to Zach Witkoff, his partner in business (he is a co-founder of Trump’s crypto firm World Liberty Financial) and nepotism (he is a son of Steve Witkoff, a Trump friend and current special envoy to the Middle East.) Onstage, through one of those untrustworthy-tech-executive-headset microphones, Witkoff announced that the Emirati firm MGX would use the Trump-owned crypto property USD1 to invest $2 billion in Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange.
It’s difficult to exaggerate how much in the above sentence would have been possible if Donald Trump were not elected president. Let’s begin with the Trump crypto property, which is called a stablecoin. It is a token pegged to a stable asset, like the humble U.S. dollar, in order to help deals go through in a sector known for its extreme volatility. Trump’s business announced the USD1 launch in March, just days before Republicans put forward a bill regulating stablecoins — legislation that could provide the Trump coin with a bailout if the crypto market tanks during trade war season.
So a MGX, a state-established firm in Abu Dhabi run by the country’s national security adviser, is using Trump’s brand new and totally untested crypto asset in order to help lend it legitimacy in a deal with Binance. Until recently, Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, was under U.S. government oversight after pleading to anti-money-laundering laws and sanctions violations in 2023. The company was also fighting an ongoing civil lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. But that suit has been put on hold twice under the Trump administration. As of today, the president now has business ties to the exchange that has reportedly laundered billions for hackers.
Overall, not a bad couple days in the Gulf.
