Our Best Stuff From the Week of Trump’s Middle East Trip

Hello and happy Saturday. There was a bit of a theme to the week’s biggest news stories: deals. Tariff deals, investment deals, ethically and legally questionable deals—a veritable buffet. Let’s dive in.

On Monday, the U.S. and China announced a temporary tariff reduction, walking back duties that had led to decreased activity at West Coast ports and factory closures in China. The U.S. dropped its tariffs on Chinese goods from 145 percent to 30 percent, and China dropped its from 125 percent to 10 percent. As we noted in The Morning Dispatch, most experts are calling it a win for China: “This is another signal to China that we’re not serious,” Derek Scissors, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told TMD.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump kicked off the first official state trip of his second term in Saudi Arabia (he also attended Pope Francis’ funeral in April). Riyadh was the first of three stops, as he also visited Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. In Saudi Arabia, he announced a commitment by the Saudis to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the United States; in Qatar, it was an arms package worth $200 billion; in the UAE, it was a series of commercial partnerships including a $14.5 billion deal for Etihad Airlines to purchase Boeing jets. But those weren’t the deals that everyone was talking about. 

Days before Trump departed, ABC News reported that the Qatari royal family planned to give the United States a $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8—and that Trump was prepared to accept it. While the plane would be gifted to the Defense Department, specifically the Air Force for the president to use as Air Force One, it would be transferred to Trump’s presidential library when he leaves office. The report prompted immediate outcry about corruption, and critics were not assuaged by the fact that Attorney General Pam Bondi—who made $115,000 a month as a lobbyist representing Qatar before and after a temporary stint in the first Trump administration—signed a letter saying the gift was legally permissable. 

As Nick Catoggio noted in Boiling Frogs (🔒), the outrage didn’t just come from the left. Even some notable MAGA figures—including Ben Shapiro, Laura Loomer, radio host Mark Levin, and “MAGA leftist” Batya Ungar-Sargon, a supporter of Trump’s tariffs—wrinkled their noses. What’s bugging them, Nick wondered, about this particular issue? He suspects that it might be concern over what it portends for Middle East policy, namely a shift away from the U.S.’s traditional support for Israel. Nick writes:

His relations with the Sunni gulf states are getting warmer. He’s giving them the honor this week of being his first destination abroad since returning to office, visiting Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and—where else?—Qatar as part of a mutual charm offensive. The Qataris are greeting him with gifts, and I don’t just mean a fancy shmancy plane: Under pressure from Qatar and Egypt, Hamas released Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander on Sunday as Trump was kicking off his trip.

What are they expecting from him in return?

In a reported piece, Alex Demas spoke to some ethics experts who suspect that the gift violates the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits government officials from accepting gifts from foreign states without the consent of Congress. “It’s almost impossible to mask the fact that this is a foreign government giving a gift to a president, which falls squarely into the Emoluments Clause,” Kedric Payne, vice president, general counsel, and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, told Alex. “So they can try all the legal gymnastics of explaining how this deal is structured, but, at the end of it all, the foreign government is giving a gift to the president, and that raises huge constitutional questions about how the Emoluments Clause applies.”

Jonah Goldberg, meanwhile, scratched his head over some other aspects of the deals that Trump announced on his trip. In the Friday G-File, he called attention to Trump’s speeches overseas in which the president vowed that Qatar would be “protected by the United States of America” and that “nobody’s going to be bothering” our relationship with the Saudis.

Given that Trump has complained about our NATO commitment and slapped tariffs on allied nations because, he says, they are “ripping us off,” what’s up with the promises to help these nations? He raises the specter that oil could have something to do with it, but that doesn’t explain why Trump is treating Middle East countries so favorably after spending the early months of his term going after Canada—which supplies us with way more oil than Saudi Arabia.

The Gulf states sell oil, a lot of it. But they don’t sell that much to us. You know who does? Canada—you know that Western, mostly Christian, mostly European, mostly English-speaking, entirely democratic, peaceful neighbor to the north? You know the one that is so much like us that the president wants to make it part of America? Right. That one. 

Trump treats that country like crap. He fawns on Arab Muslim despots—some with a long track record of funding terrorists—but heaps ridicule and scorn on our northern neighbors.

Elsewhere in our virtual pages, Jonah wrote an opus on the definition of conservatism, Yascha Mounk wrote about how European nations have fallen behind the U.S. economically, and Yuval Levin criticized Republicans for believing that Trump’s policies are reducing the deficit. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.