New Orleans Yeah, I know President Trump at different times has raised the notion of buying Greenland, maybe Canada, and developing Gaza as a destination tourist resort, but reading about his first overseas trip of his second term to the Middle East, I’ve got questions. Is the United States for sale now?
You think I’m kidding? There are a lot of reasons to worry.
First, there’s this Qatari “gift” of a luxury 747 as a temporary stand in for Air Force One, since Boeing is late on delivery. This is sort of a gift to the United States Defense Department, but really to Trump. He would use the plane during his term of office, and then it would divert to his future, presidential library, which means in plain English, to his personal use. The estimated value of this gift is $400 million. That’s a head turner and a huge inducement to something.
Then there’s the lunch bunch in Saudi Arabia on his first official event. The guest list is a virtual rogues gallery of the rich and many big US corporations. This isn’t a diplomatic trip, but a trade mission to try to harvest Middle East petrodollars for US businesses, many of whom have made big and lavish contributions to Trump and his campaigns. Trump is unabashed about the purpose of this junket – he wants to sign a trillion dollars’ worth of deals with the Saudi’s alone. Are these deals for the country’s benefit or simply federal largesse for private interests? What is being bought and at what cost to the country? How is this not putting the US up for sale to the highest bidder?
You think not, well look at the guest list provided by the White House:
- Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX
- Stephen A. Schwarzman, chief executive of the Blackstone Group
- Larry Fink, chief executive of BlackRock
- Arvind Krishna, chairman and chief executive of IBM
- Jane Fraser, chief executive of Citigroup
- Kelly Ortberg, chief executive of Boeing
- Ruth Porat, chief investment officer of Google
- Andy Jassy, chief executive of Amazon
- Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI
- Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia
- Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir
- Jeff Miller, chief executive of Halliburton
- Travis Kalanick, former chief executive of Uber and founder of Cloud Kitchens
- Kathy Warden, chief executive of Northrop Grumman
- James Quincey, chief executive of Coca-Cola
- Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive of Uber
- Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami
- Reid Hoffman, executive chairman of LinkedIn
- Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA
- Patrick Soon-Shiong, executive chairman of Immunity Bio and owner of The Los Angeles Times
There we have banks, tech, chips, oil, soccer, airlines, investors, and more. Meta and Microsoft are about the only big leaguers not invited to the party. What’s up with the mayor of Miami at the table? Sure, part of this will just be throwing numbers around without much behind them as promises not to be kept.
Still, what are we selling and at what price? What’s the angle for Qatari? If Saudia Arabia has already promised $600 billion, experts are clear there’s no way they could hit the trillion that Trump is asking. Israel is not on the list for a visit, and these countries have been clear that they want a different plan for Gaza than Netanyahu and Trump have batted back and forth. Trump’s sons did a lot of the advance work for this trip over recent weeks. Was that for the US or for Trump and the family?
None of this smells good to me. The old saying is that “you’re known by the company you keep.” If this is Trump’s team, it’s not a win for the rest of us.