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." 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. 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.
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