Earlier this year, reporting from The Wall Street Journal revealed that one of the most powerful members of Abu Dhabi’s royal family and a senior United Arab Emirates (UAE) security official, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, made a $500 million investment in a Trump family cryptocurrency venture. Coming mere months before a deal that allowed the Emiratis access to advanced U.S. computer chips, the investment raises serious concerns beyond Trump’s self-enrichment—which is itself ethically problematic. It appears that Trump effectively allowed the highest bidder to purchase access to one of the United States’ most guarded technological assets, advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips, and unprecedented leverage over companies critical to U.S. national security, while Trump and his family stood to financially benefit from such a deal. If so, this would represent the worst violation of the foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution—a provision specifically intended to prevent a sitting president from being vulnerable to the interests of foreign governments. The dynamics also call into question whether Trump’s pro-crypto turn marks a more sinister development in U.S. foreign policymaking, one in which the president prioritizes self-dealing over the national interest.
The UAE’s big deal
On January 16, 2025—days before Trump’s second inauguration—Sheikh Tahnoon (the UAE’s national security adviser, known as the “Spy Sheikh” for overseeing cyberespionage against dissidents abroad) purchased a 49 percent “secret stake” in World Liberty Financial (WLF), the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture launched during the 2024 campaign. At launch, Trump and his family controlled about a 60 percent stake in WLF. The president himself is listed as WLF’s “Co-Founder Emeritus,” while his sons Eric and Donald Jr. serve as “Co-Founders,” and Trump retains a huge financial stake in the company.
According to the Wall Street Journal report, Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firm immediately wired $187 million in upfront payments to the Trump family’s coffers, World Liberty Financial, as part of an overall $500 million investment. The deal also routed $31 million to the family of Steve Witkoff, who would later become Trump’s Middle East envoy. This deal effectively made a foreign national security official the largest shareholder of Trump’s company. This initial deal also laid the groundwork for further financial deals between Sheikh Tahnoon and the Trump and Witkoff families, though it has drawn intense scrutiny from congressional committees investigating the intersection of the president’s private business interests and UAE-led initiatives in the AI and crypto sectors.
In May 2025, WLF announced that its brand-new stablecoin, USD1, would be the chosen currency for MGX—the Abu Dhabi state-backed firm owned by Sheikh Tahnoon—to finance a $2 billion investment in crypto exchange company Binance. Rather than a traditional cash transfer, the deal was executed using USD1, a stablecoin that was a brand-new asset recently issued by WLF, and because the deal routed the $2 billion through the Trump family’s proprietary cryptocurrency, it functioned as a massive injection of liquidity and fees for WLF, which still funnels 75 percent of its net profits directly to the Trump family.
Tit for tat: Where policymaking and moneymaking collide
Less than two weeks after this deal, the administration rescinded Biden-era AI export rules, streamlining the screening process by significantly loosening export controls. By rescinding the “AI Diffusion” rule days before it was to take effect, the administration dismantled years of U.S. export controls that, due to national security concerns, strictly prohibited the transfer of high-end processors to the UAE. In January 2026, the U.S. Department of Commerce codified this major policy shift—first announced by President Trump in late 2025—loosening restrictions on the export of chips by moving the licensing posture from a “presumption of denial to a case-by-case review.” This effectively lowers the barrier for high-end technology transfers.
This reversal has authorized the sale of millions of AI chips to the UAE—including the NVIDIA H200 and AMD Instinct MI325X, which were previously restricted—and created a direct pathway for the Emiratis to import NVIDIA’s even more powerful, highly advanced Blackwell-class AI chips. Whatever one thinks of the UAE’s policy on President Trump’s war with Iran or its ever-closer relations with Israel, these restrictions were neither arbitrary nor ill founded. Their imposition was originally based in part on documented ties between UAE state-linked entities and the Chinese military industry. Indeed, one of the Emirati firms in question is G42, a holding company specializing in AI that is chaired by none other than Sheikh Tahnoon. Given the nature of the UAE-China relationship, U.S. national security officials feared that Emirati access to these chips would serve as a conduit for this sensitive technology to reach China, compromising the United States’ strategic edge on AI technology development. Despite these concerns, the new terms of the May 2025 deal specifically earmarked 20 percent of these chips, or 100,000 units annually, for G42, the very entity previously banned for its close ties to China. The May 2025 AI chips deal also coincided with a $1.4 billion arms sale to the UAE. The arms deal was finalized despite a congressional hold protesting the UAE’s support for the brutal Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia in Sudan.
The pattern of a presidency for sale
The president has long maintained that federal conflict-of-interest laws do not apply to him. Yet he has simultaneously relied on and cites the broad immunity granted to him for official actions he takes as president to shield policy decisions like lifting AI chip export controls that have financially enriched his family and business partners. He further insists that there is no conflict of interest since his “assets are in a trust managed by his children.” However, by placing his interests in a family-run trust rather than an independent blind trust (as has been the standard for most presidents), the president has broken with the ethical norms followed by nearly every modern predecessor. The absence of real separation is hard to miss: Because the president continues to promote his family’s crypto ventures while staying in direct contact with the family members who control them, the conflict of interest isn’t mitigated; it’s ongoing. The truth is, whatever “control” Trump has transferred to his sons, he is still the financial beneficiary, retaining a significant financial stake in World Liberty Financial and the Trump stablecoin.
When the Trump administration authorizes the export of the United States’ most sensitive technology to companies connected with foreign adversaries while the first family simultaneously signs multimillion-dollar deals with those same recipients, the American people must question whether that policy serves the strategic interests of the United States or the personal financial interests of Donald Trump. This UAE deal is just the latest example of the “pay-to-play” system the president has put in place during both his administrations. From the Qatari private jet to exclusive private dinners for crypto investors, these deals appear to be nothing more than self-enrichment, plain and simple. The president’s cryptocurrency ventures—which have generated billions of dollars in personal profit for the Trump family—directly benefit from his authority to shape foreign and global economic policy.
These schemes effectively amount to foreign policy for sale and pose serious national security risks, hindering the United States’ ability to effectively protect the homeland and preserve technological innovation that has served as an engine of historic growth. Americans deserve a president who is acting in the nation’s best interests, not for his own bottom line.