U.S. President Donald Trump speaks while hosting a Kennedy Center Board dinner at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 19, 2025.
WASHINGTON — A $400 million plane offered to President Donald Trump by Qatar may be a gaudy symbol of graft, but to some Democrats on Capitol Hill it’s also a distraction.
As Trump settles back into Washington after a week in the Middle East, Democrats are glad presidential ethics, or the lack of them, have finally been spotlighted, nearly five months into Trump’s second term. But many say the intense scrutiny Trump received while he was abroad barely scratched the surface.
“The plane is the second-biggest scandal on this trip,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Raw Story. “The $2 billion crypto investment in Trump stablecoin [by an Emirati firm] is the more offensive grift.”
Back in 2016, when Trump first won the White House, conflicts of interest involving Trump and his company were veiled by a nominal separation of his business and political interests. Trump vowed — publicly, at least — that the Trump Organization would only do business domestically.
Now, Trump is unshackled. The president and his sons aren’t even pretending to close shop: they’re expanding, thirsty for deals like the one they signed in April to build a golf club in Qatar.
“I'm glad we're having a conversation about the corruption,” Murphy said. “I wish it didn't have to be the plane that clued people into what has been a fairly consistent daily effort at the corruption of American foreign policy.”
‘Get the public on board’
Trump is estimated to have raked in $160 million from foreign entities in his first four-year term, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group.
This time round, that’s nothing.
From Trump’s November 2024 victory to his first month back in the Oval Office, the president pulled in close to $80 million.
That included multi-million dollar deals to pad Trump’s presidential library fund, while First Lady Melania Trump sold a documentary to Amazon for $40 million.
Now, such deals look like peanuts.
Democrats are up in arms over the eye-popping $2 billion cash infusion into the Trump family-backed World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin digital currency, from an Abu Dhabi firm.
Just a few years ago, Trump dismissed Bitcoin as a “scam.” Democrats feel they’ve found their foil.
“He and his family are trying to profit on this business that he was skeptical of years ago now that he found a way to make money off it,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA), the number three House Democrat, told Raw Story.
Confined to the minority in both chambers, Democrats want to rev up their base by focusing attention on ”crypto corruption.”
“We gotta get the public on board,” Aguilar said. “You’ve got to use public sentiment and bring these issues to the forefront until we have an opportunity to ask real, substantive questions with more authority.”
Trump is using his bully pulpit to play dumb, especially when it comes to his family’s ventures.
"I really don't know anything about it, but I'm a big crypto fan, I will tell you," the president told reporters while flying to Qatar.
Republicans are following Trump’s lead.
“Do you have any concerns with the president's family's digital coins?” Raw Story asked Tom Emmer (R-MN), the House GOP Whip.
“You guys are focusing on that, you got Joe Biden's kid who made millions off of, like, little kiddie drawings, totally illegal,” Emmer said, presumably referring to Hunter Biden’s work as an artist.
“The Trump family has been incredibly successful long before they ever came to [Washington], and until somebody shows me what is, like, violating the law, no, I'm not concerned. They're very successful. They always have been.”
Trump has declared bankruptcy six times. But the family’s business outlook is certainly soaring now, with Republicans providing cover.
“They’re doing their best to normalize it, and I think there's sort of an authoritarian game plan where you pitch that everybody’s a crook, but I'm your crook,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said. “And that excuse excuses the crookedness, and it also justifies the abuse of power.”
‘What he's doing is already illegal’
Earlier this month, Senate Democrats banded together in protest of Trump profiting off digital currencies, to derail the GENIUS Act, a measure to regulate stablecoin that was expected to sail through this otherwise gridlocked, if completely Republican-controlled, Congress.
The bill is seen as crucial to setting up a mere baseline of regulations for digital currency companies who, when not fighting tough actions from Joe Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission, have been writing their own rules.
Republicans are livid, arguing the broadly bipartisan bill has nothing to do with Trump.
“That is completely irrelevant to this bill,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), the lead sponsor of the GENIUS Act, told Raw Story. “That is just being used as a means to politicize what should be a nonpartisan issue.”
Some Democrats are trying to convince colleagues to relent and de-couple the crony-crypto debate from real-word regulations needed to protect millions of Americans who’ve embraced digital currencies.
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) is running to be Democratic Whip next year. While he decries Trump’s actions, he doesn’t think it’s wise to risk being seen as obstructionists by digital investors.
“What he's doing is already illegal, so we don't actually need a statute for that,” Schatz told Raw Story. “Now I would say his corruption complicates the conversation for sure, but I am not one of these people who think we need to make a new law to reiterate that the existing laws shouldn’t be broken.”
Schatz says the media has largely given a pass to Trump, his family and his cabinet of billionaires.
“The media has a tendency to treat corruption as way more interesting if they uncover it, as opposed to if it’s hiding in plain sight,” Schatz said, before decrying coverage of Trump’s official overseas visits.
“That is a euphemism. It's his business,” Schatz said. “It's not America and economic opportunity.”
‘I don't think it gets better’
As beleaguered as Democrats are, they counted last week as a win, because there was sustained attention on Trump’s countless conflicts of interest.
“It took a $400 million free bauble using the United States government as a shell corporation, right?” Whitehouse said, of the Qatari plane.
Whitehouse is putting his hope in his party retaking the House next year. While senators are more powerful on paper, he says his House counterparts enjoy certain tools, like subpoena power for the majority, that could derail some of what he sees as presidential self-dealing.
“I think the House in particular has very significant opportunities to do really good oversight,” Whitehouse said.
“If you look at the Jan. 6 hearings, they did a really, really nice job with those. And House subpoenas, unlike Senate subpoenas, can't be filibustered, so they actually can enforce it. And unless a lot more of Trump’s aides want to go to jail for failing to comply with subpoenas, then you get the information.”
As for the confluence of multi-billion dollar crypto investments, real-estate deals and a $400 million plane?
“That's just what we know,” Whitehouse said. “I don't think it gets better.”
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