Tracking Trump’s national-security conflicts of interest

It is a quirk of constitutional checks-and-balances interpretation that presidents are generally exempt from laws that seek to prevent U.S. officials from acting in their own interests instead of the country’s. Still, modern chief executives have customarily taken steps to reduce conflicts of interest—particularly to keep the prospect of personal gain or foreign pressures from emboldening or even empowering America’s enemies.

Not Donald Trump.

During his first term as president, Trump declined to divest his global businesses, leading to more than 3,400 conflicts of interest, as counted in 2020 by the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Now, as he returns to the Oval Office, policy experts and watchdog organizations say Trump’s record, 2024 campaign, and transition process suggest that his second-term conflicts of interest will be far more numerous, blatant, and dangerous.

“I think that that people have essentially internalized and normalized that we have a president coming in who is going to disregard basic ethical principles and use the presidency for his own benefit, in ways that might result in decisions that are not in the interest of the American people,” CREW President Noah Bookbinder said. “I hope the American people will express real concern about this.”

Defense One spoke with experts from CREW, Public Citizen, and the Campaign Legal Center, three organizations that track Trump’s conflicts of interest, about business dealings that could lead to national-security vulnerabilities.

Hotels, golf courses, and more

Many of the Trump Organization’s overseas business ventures that represented conflicts of interest in 2016 remain so: hotels, buildings, golf courses. 

Others are new. Trump's business ties to the most powerful Arab nation have deepened since he first took office. CREW reported that during the earliest days of Trump’s first term, Saudi lobbyists spent nearly $300,000 on stays at his luxury hotel. Close ties remained between the Trump Organization and Saudi officials who continued to support his business interests. In turn, President Trump went to bat for the Saudi regime after the 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

More recently, the Trump Organization began working with a Saudi regime-tied firm on a state-backed golf resort in Oman. And UAE developer DAMAC Properties, a Trump partner in one Dubai golf course with plans for a second, said it will invest at least $20 billion in U.S. data centers. 

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is expected to retain close ties to the administration during this term, founded a private equity firm that received an initial $2 billion investment from a Saudi fund with ties to Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Last month, Kushner said his fund had received another $1.5 billion from Qatar and UAE investors.

“Kushner is running a multi-billion dollar investment fund that's backed by the Saudi government in a situation where there's internal documents published showing that the Saudis didn't think that he was a serious investment advisor, but someone they wanted to invest in to stay connected to Trump,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Interest.

As of September, the three-year-old fund had yet to return any profits to its investors, who have paid fees of $112 million, the New York Times reported.

Even something as small as a golf tournament represents a potential conflict of interest for the president. Saudi-backed golf league LIV Golf announced that it intends to host a tournament at a Trump locale.

“We're already seeing the Saudi-controlled golf tour announcing an event at Donald Trump's Doral Country Club at some point this year,” Bookbinder said.

Trump also has business ties to China, which the incoming president’s own team has called America’s most pressing threat.

In 2017, the Center for American Progress reported on several of these, including Trump Organization trademark applications that had languished for years until its CEO became U.S. president. As well, Trump was literally in debt to the Chinese government.

“Trump has been dependent on Chinese money for quite a while,” CAP wrote. “According to an investigation by The New York Times, Trump holds 30 percent ownership of an office building in Manhattan at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, for which four lenders, including the state-owned Bank of China, provided a $950 million loan in 2012.”

But money began flowing the other way once Trump took office. Financial documents recently released by House Democrats reveal that the Chinese government and other state-controlled entities spent more than $5.5 million on Trump-owned properties when he was last in office.

Then there’s Russia, the main antagonist of America’s NATO allies and the belligerent in the ongoing war on European soil. Trump has long sought to extend his real-estate empire into Russia, and he is a voluble fan of Vladimir Putin. It is well-established—by a GOP-led Senate committee and Robert Mueller’s special-counsel investigation—that Moscow has sought to help Trump and that members of his team, at least, welcomed the assistance. Still, questions about Trump’s ties to Moscow have never been conclusively resolved. That is not expected to change in his second term.

“There's a lot of evidence that Russia did act in various ways to try to help Donald Trump,” Bookbinder said. “It seems like over the years, Putin has been generally supportive of and aligned in some ways with Donald Trump, and it seems like Trump knows that and may act accordingly.”

Other ventures

Trump’s ventures beyond real estate present their own potential conflicts. 

Take World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company that Trump launched in September with his sons and two other men. The company is also partnered with the Tron crypto platform, which reportedly has ties to Iran-backed terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

“It’s highly unusual for a presidential candidate to embark on a new business just weeks before Election Day, and even rarer for one to aggressively promote a venture designed to benefit himself and his family,” the New York Times wrote. “But throughout his political career, Mr. Trump has engaged in business dealings that ethics experts have flagged as problematic.” 

Just days before his second inauguration, the president-elect "launched and promoted a new cryptocurrency venture, raising fresh ethical questions about his attempts to monetize the incoming administration’s deepening political ties to the industry," the Washington Post reported.

Cryptocurrency as “a way to channel money to Trump is just unprecedented,” Weissman said. “You're paying money for basically nothing except for access to the President.” 

Trump also owns the social media platform Truth Social, on which he spends a significant amount of time and benefits financially. Caputo noted that foreign actors could invest in Truth Social “to help raise the value of the company, which leaves an opening for, again, the conflicts of interest to present themselves.”

People

To a greater degree than in his first term, Trump is surrounding himself with businesspeople in a position to benefit from their roles in government.

“Trump has pretty consistently shown a willingness to use his political power and the presidency to help those who he perceives as helping him, and some of those folks may have business interests and personal interests that don't align with the public interest,” Bookbinder said.

Among those helpers is Elon Musk, the billionaire businessman who contributed $250 million to Trump’s campaign and in return has been tapped to head a Department of Government Efficiency whose purported missions include slashing government spending and cutting federal employees. 

“I think the Musk issue is a gigantic conflict of interest,” said Weissman.

Brian Hughes, Trump-Vance transition spokesperson, told Defense One, "The transition team will ensure the Department of Government Efficiency and those involved with it are compliant with all legal guidelines related to conflicts of interest." 

The CEO of X, Tesla, and SpaceX is deeply—some say dangerously—enmeshed with China, having borrowed heavily from Chinese banks and become dependent on Chinese factories to make Tesla vehicles. For example, InsideEVs reported that he took $1.4 billion in loans from Chinese government-backed financial institutions to build a Tesla gigafactory in Shanghai.

But Musk is also a major supplier to the Pentagon through his Starlink satellite network, which Aerospace America called “a near monopoly of some 6,500 satellites in low-Earth orbit.” 

The U.S. military has increasingly relied on Starlink to provide satellite internet.

In a letter, Senators Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., from the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, requested an investigation into Musk concerning intelligence vulnerabilities related to Starlink, as they drew attention to his business dealings and behaviors.

“Dependence on Starlink is deeply unhealthy for democracy and for our national security, even if [Musk] weren't whispering to the President all the time, but even more so now that he is,” Weissman said.

Trump has also tapped Steve Witkoff. a World Liberty Financial partner and fellow New York real estate mogul, to be his envoy to the Middle East. As the New York Times put it, Witkoff “will soon be negotiating with leaders of nations that are past, and potentially future, lenders to or buyers of his family real estate projects.” One of Witkoff’s embattled New York hotel projects drew foreign investment with ties to funds from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

“This is a volatile region,” said Danielle Caputo, legal counsel for the Campaign Legal Center. “There's a lot going on and to learn that nominees who will be serving in these roles have interests that aren't just the public's interest or the country's interests, it really would make an individual question, ‘Is this person acting in my best interest, or are they acting in their own personal financial interests?’”

As a government employee, Witkoff would in fact be beholden to criminal and civil conflict-of-interest laws that would force him to step away from his business pursuits. But he may attempt to sidestep those regulations by claiming to serve as Trump’s nongovernmental advisor.

A new term

Last month, when the BBC asked Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt about the conflicts of interest, she said that at the beginning of his first term, "President Trump removed himself from his multi-billion-dollar real estate empire to run for office and forewent his government salary. Unlike most politicians, President Trump didn't get into politics for profit – he's fighting because he loves the people of this country and wants to make America great again."

In fact, Trump handed control of his businesses to his two oldest sons in 2017 but pointedly retained ownership.

Now, as he declines once again to remove himself from his business activities, watchdog organizations expect the emergence of new national-security vulnerabilities as his second term begins.

“We want a president acting in the interest of Americans, not in [his own] financial interests,” Weissman said. “The [Foreign Emoluments Clause] of the Constitution says that a president can't be getting things of value from foreign governments or domestic governments, but it's very hard to run a big international business without violating that.”