The Washington Post reports White House claims of “the dealmaker in chief” securing more than $2 trillion in investment agreements during his Middle East tour this week appears exaggerated. Possibly, by a lot.
The administration announced $8.5 billion in projects involving Texas energy company McDermott, with one focused on Qatar’s liquefied natural gas expansion, for example. But the paper reports McDermott had already announced contracts for that initiative during former President Joe Biden’s administration as far back as 2023.
Another White House announcement of a $200 billion “new” cloud computing deal between Amazon and a United Arab Emirates state-owned telecommunications company had already been announced by Amazon in October. In fact, the $181 billion estimate the White House lauded for the local economy from the deal was already sitting in an Amazon-sponsored study from May 2023.
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Still another announcement regarding a $2 billion General Atomics agreement to sell drones to Qatar had already “been in the works for years,” according to a congressional aide. The notification for the drone contract was sent to Congress last March. And another $38 billion in “potential investments” announced by the White House hardly counts as a “deal” if it’s only potential. That $38 billion claim currently exists only in a “statement of intent” the administration penned with Qatar.
“A lot of it is going to be aspirational,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “A lot of it is going to be promised and not delivered on.”
The Post collected statements from anonymous Middle Eastern officials admitting Saudi Arabia doesn’t have enough cash on hand to fund everything Trump has promised Americans. And some are not sure the money is there to fund even half the claims.
Some of Trump’s big numbers could be arising from smoke blowing in from strange places. One businessman close to the Saudi royal family claims the family reached out to “all the top businessmen” in the Gulf nation “and they were asked, ‘How much have you invested in the United States in the last two years? How much have you put in the United States in any kind of investment — real estate, stocks, bonds?”
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The intent, said the anonymous source, was to give the U.S. president a nice, big number that would look good on press releases.
Read the full Washington Post report at this link.