Casey Michel writes:

When Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign nearly a decade ago, there was a deluge of concerns about his foreign financial entanglements. And rightfully so. Given the financial overlap between Trump, his family, his company, and a constellation of kleptocratic regimes, especially Russia, Trump presented an unprecedented opportunity for foreign regimes to directly access the White House and tilt American policy in the process.

Now, with Trump running for the presidency once more, those concerns have hardly disappeared. If anything, foreign governments — including brand-new regimes that weren’t involved in Trump’s first whirlwind in the White House — have only spied new opportunities to burrow into his pockets and into a second administration.

Many of these networks are already known, if forgotten. Trump’s financial links with regimes in places like China, Kazakhstan, or Indonesia were already reported in detail during his presidency. Even after Trump left the Oval Office, the revelations about his subterranean financial links as president with foreign regimes continued spilling out; it was only this year, for instance, that congressional investigators revealed that the first two years of Trump’s presidency included countries as far afield as Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey, and many more patronizing Trump businesses. Any of these details on their own would be exceptional — can you imagine how much any other presidential candidate’s secret Chinese bank account would dominate a news cycle? — but they’ve been subsumed in the broader morass of Trump’s scandals. They’ve become, to an almost shocking degree, normalized.

Look at Saudi Arabia. Years after Saudi tyrant Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) ordered the grisly killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi government has used an entire fleet of PR professionals and consultancy firms to launder its image, transforming the regime from a bastion of backwardness into one of progress and reform. (Saudi Arabia under MBS “almost feels like a start-up,” WeWork founder Adam Neumann purred last year at a Saudi-sponsored conference.) And part of that influence campaign has directly targeted — and directly used — Trump. Just last month, the New York Times revealed that the Trump Organization had inked a brand-new deal in the country, centered on Trump branding a new high-rise in Jeddah. The branding deal mirrors similar arrangements Trump has signed with foreign partners elsewhere, lending his name to developments in Azerbaijan and Panama. It’s unclear how much the new Saudi deal is worth, but as the Times noted, “Saudi Arabia has become one of the few reliable sources of growth for the Trump family’s business operations.” [Continue reading…]