“Be allergic to free stuff.”
That’s the line I used to deliver in every ethics training I gave to White House staff when I was associate White House counsel under President Barack Obama. It captured, in plain English, a core principle of public service: You are there to serve the public, not your own interests, and even small gifts corrode judgment and squander the public trust.
It feels resonant this Presidents Day to understand that the opposite has become the norm, despite what our founders envisioned. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a $500 million transaction between an Emirati royal and President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency firm, World Financial Liberty, that had sent $187 million to entities tied to the Trump family just four days before his 2025 inauguration. Amazingly, this has all but fallen out of the news.
A $500 million transaction between an Emirati royal and President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency firm sent $187 million to entities tied to the Trump family just four days before his 2025 inauguration.
When I told staff to be allergic to free stuff, I said not to accept so much as a can of soda from anyone with business before the White House. Yet here’s a report of something orders of magnitude more significant, and as a nation, we barely paid it any mind. That’s a dangerous mistake. What the Journal report describes threatens not just the public trust or public decision-making but also our national security.
The Founders were clear-eyed about this danger. Alexander Hamilton warned that republics “afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption.” To guard against it, the founders included the Foreign Emoluments Clause in the Constitution, barring federal officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever” from a foreign state without congressional consent.
History shows how a broader regime of prohibitions was necessary to prevent corruption. The Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s exposed how easily senior officials could be bought in the absence of transparency and oversight. Watergate drove the point home. In response, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, expanding restrictions against federal officials accepting gifts and creating an Office of Government Ethics to oversee federal ethics compliance. Today, public officials must avoid not only actual impropriety, but also situations in which “a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts” would question their impartiality. As we advised White House staff: Even the appearance of something untoward squanders the public trust.
Even the appearance of something untoward squanders the public trust.
Now, some federal ethics rules and statutes apply to the president while some regulations apply only to staff. Some past presidents, including the one I worked for, insisted on voluntarily adhering to the highest standards whether they legally applied to them or not.
Contrast that with the Journal reporting: Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — the UAE’s national security adviser, a senior royal, and the head of one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds — purchased a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial for $500 million. Of that, $187 million reportedly flowed to Trump family entities, with additional tens of millions to entities tied to Steve Witkoff, who had recently been named Middle East envoy.
The reported UAE payment to the Trump family dwarfs the roughly $400,000 involved in Teapot Dome ($5 million in today’s dollars) or the roughly $1.5 million generated by sales of Hunter Biden’s artwork — another episode that raised concerns about the monetization of proximity to power. More troublingly, the UAE transaction involves money from a foreign official flowing into enterprises benefiting the president’s family.
This isn’t the only instance of Trump self-enrichment in his second term.
And, of course, this isn’t the only instance of Trump self-enrichment in his second term. The disturbing pattern of access, leniency and policy increasingly intertwined with private financial benefit includes the president pardoning Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, “following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company,” as the Journal reported in October. And the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped a fraud lawsuit against crypto billionaire Justin Sun after he bought “more than $90 million worth of two of the Trump family’s cryptocurrencies.”
The Foreign Emoluments Clause exists to prevent exactly this kind of foreign entanglement absent congressional consent — which was neither sought nor granted in these reported instances. Depending on the facts, federal bribery and honest-services fraud statutes could also be implicated. Even the Supreme Court’s (misguided) decision in Trump v. United States, which dramatically expanded presidential immunity for “official acts,” cannot plausibly extend to insulating a president from laws barring bribery or from constitutional prohibitions on accepting foreign emoluments. Ethics rules seek to prevent corruption before it takes hold. The Obama White House told staff to refuse even a can of soda because we understood something basic about human psychology. In 1971, psychologist Dennis Regan ran an experiment: Subjects came to a lab to rate art, and midway through, a researcher’s assistant wandered in and handed half of them an unsolicited Coca-Cola. Later, that same assistant asked each subject to buy raffle tickets. Those who’d received the soda bought twice as many tickets. A small gift of soda created a sense of obligation to reciprocate. That sense of obligation to reciprocate is real. And months after the reported payment, the Journal reported, the Trump administration reversed long-standing policy and committed to providing the UAE with hundreds of thousands of America’s most advanced artificial intelligence chips — chips that U.S. policy had previously denied them out of national security concerns. We shouldn’t lose sight of the $187 million. The question here isn’t merely soda but what the president might be proffering in return.
Ian Bassin is executive director of the nonprofit Protect Democracy. He was associate White House counsel from 2009 to 2011. 
