Trump Has a New Target in His Weird Renaming Crusade
Donald Trump made the “Gulf of America” so great again that he’s considering implementing a similar rebrand for another body of water—this time, one thousands of miles away from U.S. territory.
The president is considering renaming the Persian Gulf the “Arabian Gulf,” mere days after his family announced billions of dollars in forthcoming real estate deals in the region.
Those plans include a Trump-branded golf course in Qatar (as part of a $5.5 billion development project), a $1 billion Trump hotel and residence in Dubai, and a $2 billion investment by an Abu Dhabi firm into one of Trump’s cryptocurrency projects, the World Liberty Financial Coin.
The family also revealed in December that they would be expanding their presence in Saudi Arabia, announcing Trump Tower Jeddah. The price tag for the building has not been made public, but one of the developers on the project, Dar Global, compared it to another $530 million Trump Tower in the city, reported Reuters.
The Trumps have held deep financial ties to the region for years. After Trump’s first term, Saudi Arabia invested $2 billion in a firm belonging to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.
Trump is expected to travel to Saudi Arabia next week, where it’s anticipated that he’ll make the announcement publicly, according to two officials who spoke with the Associated Press.
As a reminder, it’s actually unconstitutional for presidents to profit from or receive compensation from foreign governments. The White House has contested that the deals are not a conflict of interest since the president’s assets are managed by his eldest sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. But Trump’s pockets will undoubtedly be lined by the deal—even if he has to wait a handful of years before he’s out of office to see the cashflow. In the meantime, he’ll receive myriad personal benefits from his relationships in the Middle East for arranging the deal.
Seven other nations surround the body of water, including Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Persian Gulf has been the body’s predominant name since the sixteenth century, but its moniker has also been regionally contested by other countries in the Middle East, where it is mainly referred to as the “Gulf of Arabia” or “Arabian Gulf,” according to The Daily Beast.
Referring to the inlet as the Arabian Gulf hasn’t served Trump’s diplomatic relations well in the past. During one such instance in 2017, former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told the U.S. leader that he needed to “study geography.”
“Everyone knew Trump’s friendship was for sale to the highest bidder. We now know that his geography is, too,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote online at the time.
Former President Joe Biden doesn’t think the election would have been any different if he’d dropped out sooner.
“I don’t think it would have mattered. We left at a time when we had a good candidate,” Biden told the BBC, in his first interview since leaving the White House. “Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away. And it was a hard decision.… I think it was the right decision. I think that … it was just a difficult decision.”
Biden dropped out a mere four months before Election Day, in the midst of mounting fears regarding his mental acuity. The White House insisted over and over again that he was as sharp as ever. Senator Chuck Schumer called the fears “right-wing propaganda,” former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said he was “at the top of his game,” and Senator Bernie Sanders said that Biden “seemed fine” to him. But the truth came out at the first televised debate between Trump and Biden, in which Biden delivered perhaps the worst performance of all time—a bumbling, sad, and incoherent showing that made it clear that he was not mentally prepared to run again.
It’s easy to play the “what if” game in hindsight. But it’s painfully obvious that Biden dropping out sooner would have allowed the Democratic Party to have an actual primary, in which a diverse field of candidates would have been able to sharpen their positions and differentiate themselves from one another. Instead there was no primary, no differentiation between Harris and Biden, and a brutal loss to show for it.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has a message for a hypothetical little girl worried that she won’t have more than two dolls because of Donald Trump’s disastrous tariff policy.
“I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life than your parents,” Bessent said, during an appearance on Fox News Tuesday night. “That you and your family, thanks to President Trump, can now be confident again that you will have a better life than your parents, which, working-class Americans had abandoned that idea.”
“Your family will own a home, you will be able to advance. You will have a good education, you will have economic freedom,” Bessent continued.
“Confident” is an interesting choice of words for Bessent, after consumer confidence sank a whopping 7.9 points in April, to its lowest level since May 2020.
The beleaguered Bessent has been desperate to rebrand Trump’s isolationist America First economic policy as a Buddhist-like maxim on desire as the root of all suffering. In March, Bessent claimed that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” In fact, being able to afford to live is a huge part of the American dream, and abundant consumer conveniences have become © New Republic
