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Guest Essay

By Casey Michel

Mr. Michel is the author of “Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World.”

President Trump’s trip to the Persian Gulf, which just ended, could be fairly described as dual-purpose. On the first day, he visited Saudi Arabia, where the Trump Organization — now in the hands of two of his sons — is engaged in a number of business deals.

In the fog of public outrage over this (and especially about things like Mr. Trump’s plans to accept the gift of a Qatari jet), we have forgotten that two things can be simultaneously true: that the kind of pay-to-play schemes emerging between the Trump administration and foreign patrons are far more brazen than anything else we’ve seen in American history and that Mr. Trump did not emerge in a vacuum.

Any one of the new foreign deals, the

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