Critics say Democrats should look into Trump's Middle East deals in future corruption investigations

Several polls of US voters taken around the recent midterm elections show that an overriding concern about the Trump administration is corruption.

Just days after the midterms, senior figures in the Democratic Party were quick to proclaim that they will be investigating corruption accusations when they take their seats in January.

It's highly likely that many of those investigations will center on the Trump administration's and the Trump family's links to wealthy Middle Eastern countries.

"The incoming Democratic majority in Congress will no doubt aggressively use their powers to investigate the administration's alleged wrongdoings," Amy Hawthorne, a non-resident fellow at the Washington-based think tank, the Arab Center, wrote in a commentary after the midterms. "Cases involving the Middle East will be their top targets."

Financial disclosures made by President Trump in the middle of this year showed that during 2025, his businesses made about $2 billion in income. This was triple the income he reported the previous year, observers noted.

"According to the information available … Middle Eastern countries and businesses have directly contributed to the bottom line of Trump's family businesses — more so than any other region of the world," Brian Katulis, a senior fellow and expert in US foreign policy at the Middle East Institute in Washington, wrote in a July text after the presidential disclosure. "Gulf entities paid around $300 million to the president's businesses in 2025."

Billions in cryptocurrency

A lot of the money Trump made in 2025 came from the sale of a stake in a cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial, Katulis noted.

The company was founded by the Trump and Witkoff families in 2024 — Steve Witkoff is Trump's special envoy to the Middle East — and in 2025, a large portion of it was sold to an investment firm backed by a senior United Arab Emirates official, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The latter serves as the UAE's national security advisor and is also the brother of the UAE's president.

The deal was done in January 2026 behind closed doors, shortly before Trump's inauguration as president. In May 2026, the US agreed to allow the UAE access to advanced artificial intelligence chips, despite objections from some national security advisers.

Trump's critics allege a connection, the Trump administration denies it.

There are also other alleged instances of Trump administration corruption with links to the Middle East.

Trump Towers in the Middle East

Various Trump deals with Saudi and Emirati real estate developers are also being questioned because of possible conflicts of interest.

The Gulf real estate developers, which have close ties to their governments and respective royal families, have agreed to build Trump-branded golf resorts, hotels, mansions, skyscrapers and towers in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and the Maldives.

In 2025, Trump reported $59.5 million in foreign real estate licensing income, ten times more than he made in 2023, business media outlet CNBC reported in August. Nearly two-thirds of that money came from projects in the Gulf, CNBC said.

Ethics watchdogs argue that, "the deals create conflicts between Trump's political leadership role and private interests" because some of those Gulf states and their developers were also "pursuing major US investments, seeking government permits or pressing for favorable economic and diplomatic relations."

Qatar's flying gift

When the Qatari royal family gifted Trump a luxury jet, worth around $400 million, in May 2025, politicians and ethics experts asked about the propriety of taking such a pricey present from a foreign government.

After his presidency ends, Trump was apparently planning to donate the plane to his Florida-based project, the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation. Currently, it is unclear whether the Qatari plane will end up there and there's been speculation Trump will try to keep it for personal use. 

The library is a non-profit and has received tens of millions in funding — an investigation by the CBS network traced over $100 million in donations — from lawsuits and via corporate donors.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren has already said the library project would be investigated. "Giant corporations and foreign governments should not be able to buy influence in Washington with donations to the president's library," she told CBS.

Gaza's 'Board of Peace'

Plans for the so-called Board of Peace were created in September 2025 and the body was to facilitate a ceasefire and reconstruction in Gaza. 

It was set up to be a kind of multilateral international organization, similar to the United Nations, except that Trump would serve as its chairman indefinitely and member countries donating $1 billion if they want to sit on the board permanently. 

The Board of Peace has not achieved much in Gaza, experts say, and there have been several worrying developments.

Four months after its establishment, the World Bank account set up to manage Board of Peace funds was empty, the Financial Times newspaper reported in May. Instead, money had been deposited into a private JP Morgan bank account, over which there was no oversight.

There have apparently been contributions of around $3 million from Morocco and $20 million from the UAE, as well as pledges of $7 billion from board members and $10 billion from Trump.

The board's legal status was also changed to make it into an international non-governmental organization. This change in legal status may aim "to avoid US congressional oversight and keep much of its activity opaque," Zaha Hassan, an attorney and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, warned in a June commentary. It also "gives Trump ultimate decision-making authority, including over financial matters," she noted.

'Trump crime family'

"The Trump crime family is the top of our investigative priorities," the most senior Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia, said after the midterms.

And he has already expressed concerns about the behavior of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner in the Middle East.

Most of the issues around Kushner involve potential conflicts of interest. Kushner is acting as a volunteer envoy in the Middle East and has been deeply involved in negotiations to end the Gaza conflict and the Iran war.

In early October, CNN published an investigation that detailed links between Kushner's private equity company, Affinity Partners, and investments into leading Israeli military manufacturers.

It's also been reported that while he was travelling in the region, Kushner was trying to raise billions for his equity firm.

In March, Democratic politicians, including Garcia, wrote letters to the president's office, saying they had "serious concerns about whether the White House is letting Mr. Kushner use his influence for personal financial gain."

The potentially most damaging claims against Kushner come from a recent book, "Prince and Thieves," published late October by American investigative journalist Matthew Cole.

Cole alleges, "Kushner worked with the UAE to shape US policy across the Middle East and that, in the course of this work, he was given access to bank accounts containing roughly $2 billion," the New York Times wrote in its review.

Kushner denies the allegations about any such slush fund held by an Israeli bank and has threatened to sue Vanity Fair magazine, which published excerpts from the book.

But, as the New York Times concluded, "Cole's work is sufficiently calm, detailed and forensic to necessitate a large-scale and urgent congressional inquiry."