Governance by Auction

I read this reporting twice. And then I sat with it.

Because once you strip away the crypto jargon, the shell companies, and the carefully lawyered denials, what’s left is something deeply unsettling—and profoundly dangerous for American governance.

Four days before Donald Trump was sworn back into office, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase 49% of a Trump-linked company for $500 million. Not a hotel. Not a licensing deal. A major ownership stake in a company tied directly to the sitting president’s family.

The buyer wasn’t just a foreign investor. It was Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan—the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser, brother of the country’s president, and overseer of a vast intelligence, surveillance, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) empire that U.S. officials had already flagged as a national security risk.

Months later, the Trump administration approved unprecedented access for the UAE to hundreds of thousands of the most advanced American AI chips, technology that had previously been restricted over fears it could be diverted to China. This has been a concern inside national security circles for years. Now here we are.

Under the Biden administration, Tahnoon’s efforts to secure advanced U.S. AI chips were largely blocked. Intelligence officials and lawmakers, Republicans included, raised repeated concerns about his companies’ ties to Chinese firms, including Huawei.

After Trump’s election, the door reopened. Tahnoon met repeatedly with Trump, his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, and senior U.S. officials. He pledged massive investment in the United States. He was welcomed into the Oval Office and seated at White House dinners alongside cabinet members.

Two months later, the administration committed to giving the UAE access to roughly 500,000 advanced AI chips per year, enough to build one of the world’s largest AI data-center clusters. At this point, we have to stop pretending this is ambiguous. This is what corruption looks like in real time.

Not a bag of cash. Not a secret memo. But a foreign intelligence-linked official quietly purchasing leverage over the family of a sitting U.S. president, and then watching U.S. policy move in his favor.

That isn’t coincidence. It’s influence.

And when influence can be bought this way, American decision-making no longer belongs to the American people. It belongs to whoever can pay the most, hide it the best, and wait it out.

As someone who has worked inside the national security system, I want to be very clear: the risk here is serious.

Advanced AI chips aren’t just commercial products. They underpin surveillance systems, military capabilities, cyber operations, and global intelligence dominance. Decisions about who gets access to them are supposed to be driven by national security risk assessments, not private financial entanglements with the president’s family.

When those lines blur, national security becomes transactional. And once that happens, the damage doesn’t stay contained. It ripples through alliances and corrodes intelligence-sharing. Furthermore, it shatters America’s credibility when we warn the world about corruption and foreign influence.

This isn’t just corruption. It’s governance by auction.

Trump says he knew nothing about this deal. That doesn’t make it better. It makes it worse.

Whether through direct knowledge or willful blindness, the outcome is the same: a presidency structurally exposed to foreign money, foreign leverage, and foreign interests. Modern bribery doesn’t arrive in envelopes, it arrives through access and leverage. And it is the exposure of this country: its policy, its security, its future, to the highest bidder.

This shouldn’t be a partisan argument. At its core, this is about whether government answers to the public, or quietly to money, access, and influence. Most people agree on this much: concentrated power without accountability is dangerous. When political authority becomes entangled with private financial gain, especially foreign money, the risk isn’t ideological. It’s structural. That’s why safeguards exist and why conflicts of interest matter. It’s why transparency isn’t optional.

We’ve been told, repeatedly, that the goal is accountability in government. That waste should be rooted out. That corruption should be exposed. Systems should be cleaned up. That’s what DOGE claimed to stand for. But accountability doesn’t mean tearing down institutions while ignoring conflicts at the very top. It doesn’t mean obsessing over bureaucrats and process while excusing foreign money flowing into the president’s orbit. Accountability that only runs downhill isn’t accountability at all. It’s selective enforcement. And when accountability becomes selective, when it’s loud everywhere except where power is concentrated, it stops being a principle. It becomes a cover.

Why This Matters—Even with Everything Else Going On

I know what some people are thinking. Why should I care about this when inflation, immigration, wars, elections, and chaos are everywhere?

Here’s why.

Because this is how national security decisions get distorted, and how guardrails quietly disappear. This is also how Americans continue to lose trust in institutions, and for good reason.

Advanced AI chips aren’t abstract. They power:

• surveillance systems

• military applications

• cyber capabilities

• global intelligence dominance

When access to that technology is shaped by who paid whom, we all lose.

The consequences aren’t abstract. It affects U.S. competitiveness, military advantage, democratic credibility, whether American policy serves the public, or private interests with the deepest pockets.

Another example from Trump’s second term underscores the pattern.

Earlier this year, the government of Qatar gifted President Trump a $400 million luxury jet, an extraordinary transfer of value that immediately raised alarms among ethics experts and constitutional scholars. No court has ruled on its legality, but the concern is straightforward: when foreign governments provide lavish personal gifts to a sitting president, it creates access, indebtedness, and influence—exactly what the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause was designed to prevent.

What to Watch Next

This story doesn’t end with one deal. It opens a door. Here’s what matters next, and why it deserves sustained attention:

1. Congressional action, or silence: Will Congress request documents, call witnesses, or open formal inquiries tied to the World Liberty Financial deal and the AI chip approvals? Silence here isn’t neutrality. It’s permission.

2. Additional foreign money tied to U.S. policy decisions: This deal is unlikely to be an isolated case. Watch for new foreign investments involving Trump-linked businesses that coincide with favorable U.S. actions or access.

3. AI chip approvals and enforcement: Pay attention not just to what’s approved, but how it’s enforced. Who controls the chips once they’re deployed? Are guardrails applied—or quietly waived?

4. Crypto, stablecoins, and pardons: Crypto isn’t incidental here. It’s infrastructure. Watch for regulatory decisions, enforcement pullbacks, or pardons that benefit entities connected to these financial networks.

5. Inspectors General and internal resistance: Oversight bodies don’t get removed when systems are healthy. They get removed when scrutiny becomes inconvenient. Inspectors General were removed from their jobs in early 2025. The question now is how much independent oversight remains, and how much will be tolerated going forward.

The presidency is not a private business. U.S. foreign policy is not a commodity. And national security is not for sale.

If we stop drawing that line clearly, loudly, and repeatedly, we don’t just lose norms; we lose ourselves. We lose the country we’re supposed to be protecting.

This story doesn’t end here. It fades only if no one keeps watching.
I track the money, the policy shifts, and the quiet erosion most headlines miss. If that work matters to you, becoming a paid subscriber helps keep it going. Thank you so much for your ongoing support.

More soon,

Olivia