The New York Times: Ο Κόσμος: Ο Τραμπ γίνεται πλουσιότερος – Ο Τραμπ θέτει υπό αμφισβήτηση τη συμφωνία για τα πυρηνικά της Σαουδικής Αραβίας – Απάτες ευεξίας με τεχνητή νοημοσύνη – Επαναλειτουργία μετά από ληστεία – Ο Τραμπ, τα χρήματά του και ο κόσμος – Influencers ευεξίας, που δημιουργούνται από την Τεχνητή Νοημοσύνη – Μια γκαλερί ανοίγει ξανά, χωρίς κλεμμένα κοσμήματα – Φιλιππινέζικη τούρτα

Good morning, world. This summer, we learned that Donald Trump made at least $2.2 billion in his first year back in the White House. That’s a crazy amount of money. No other American president or leader of a liberal democracy has even come close to becoming so rich while in office.

And it comes with an unprecedented number of potential conflicts of interest, not just at home but also abroad, in countries with a much worse track record for good governance than the United States. Today, I write about how Trump’s global moneymaking enterprises risk empowering autocrats and seeding corruption around the world.

Also:

Trump, his money, and the world

President Trump’s annual financial disclosure form gave my colleagues who scrutinize his finances a lot to work with.

I spoke with Eric Lipton, who covers the Trump family’s business operations. Throw a dart at the map, he suggested, and chances are it will land somewhere the American president or his family have business interests. As Eric has documented, Trump’s holding company last year collected at least $125 million in direct payments from foreign sources in countries including Britain, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Oman, the Philippines, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Turkey, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates.

Last year, an investment firm tied to the Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial. Four months later, the Trump administration agreed to give the Emiratis access to sophisticated computer chips powering artificial intelligence.

Not long after, Trump got on the phone with the president of Kazakhstan to help a little-known American mining company win access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a critical metal. A short time later, Trump’s two elder sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, became investors in a company that now owns a stake in that mining company.

The list goes on. Government officials in Vietnam fast-tracked a Trump golf development at the same time that they were trying to avoid steep U.S. tariffs. A South Korean company that has lobbied the U.S. to not impose penalties on its aluminum exports made a $2 million payment to Trump’s holding company for a golf course project. A drone maker backed by Trump’s two elder sons is negotiating with Gulf countries that need to defend themselves because of a war started by their father.

Many have written about the potential impacts of these dealings on the U.S. itself — their effect on the rule of law, on public faith in government, on Trump’s ability to focus on the interests of the American people, rather than his own.

What might be going underappreciated is that they’re likely to have ripple effects around the world, too.

From enforcer to enabler

For a long time, the U.S. played a very different role: It was an enforcer of anti-corruption rules.

In 1977, after a series of scandals in which American companies secretly paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to foreign officials, the U.S. passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It threatens fines and even prison sentences for executives who pay officials overseas to win or keep business.

Then, the U.S. went even further, lobbying to have its anti-bribery standard adopted by more than 30 countries. U.S. regulators began rigorously enforcing the law against not just American companies, but any foreign corporation that used the U.S. financial system or markets.

The enforcement efforts “were so intense and the penalties so severe that international corporations really became quite concerned and adapted their practices,” Eric told me.

Under Trump, two things have shifted, Eric said. On the policy side, one of the first things Trump did after returning to the White House was to largely suspend the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The administration effectively turned a blind eye to bribes from American companies in the name of economic and national security, arguing that the law, as enforced, made it harder for U.S. companies to acquire critical assets like minerals and deepwater ports.

Then there are Trump’s own potential conflicts of interest. Combined, the two risk being read as a green light for pay-to-play schemes around the world.

(The White House says there are no conflicts of interest because Trump’s sons run the family business operations.)

It’s impossible to say how much this has increased corruption globally. Such schemes, by definition, tend to happen in secret, making them difficult to measure.

But “the United States, the cop on the block, has walked away,” Eric said. We might not know the degree to which that has affected corruption around the world — but we can make a pretty good guess at the direction.

Transactional, with a twist

Liz David-Barrett of Sussex University, who studies transnational corruption, told me that America’s relationship with the rest of the world has changed. Today, she said, it’s looking increasingly like Russia’s or China’s relationship with the world.

Russia and China have a track record of regularly investing in countries with poor governance.

Russia, for example, exploited corrupt governments in Serbia and Hungary to get investment deals in the state energy monopoly and key infrastructure projects. China has cut deals with repressive governments around the world to secure critical resources, including oil from Venezuela and lithium from Zimbabwe.

It’s a transactional, no-questions-asked model favored by countries that have lax labor and environmental rules, and leaders open to corruption. Most experts agree it helped prop up corrupt and authoritarian regimes, including those of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Viktor Orban in Hungary.

Now, Trump is doing something that looks roughly the same, those experts say, but with a twist: He openly blurs the line between what’s in his country’s interest and what’s in his own interest.

That risks creating problems for America. But it might create problems for the rest of the world, too.

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