Trump is Selling Out Our National Security and the Constitution All At Once

Congress fails to protect the nation from an illegal cash grab with national security implications

The Constitution did not envision a president who would auction off the republic in broad daylight and dare the system to stop him. But it did anticipate the danger of foreign money corrupting American power enough to explicitly forbid it. Article I, Section 9, Clause 8, The Foreign Emoluments Clause, states that no federal officeholder shall accept “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever” from a foreign state without the consent of Congress. Even the appearance of foreign influence on an American president can corrode our democracy.

And yet, right now, Donald Trump is doing exactly what the framers feared: selling his office, his family’s business interests, and the nation’s strategic policy to foreign powers that clearly benefit from his decisions.

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser and de facto head of the country’s intelligence apparatus, agreed to invest roughly $500 million in a Trump-linked cryptocurrency venture just four days before Trump’s inauguration, with more than $180 million flowing directly to Trump-linked entities.

This is not a random business deal. It is a foreign government official, responsible for intelligence strategy and diplomatic influence, taking a major financial stake in an enterprise affiliated with the incoming American president and his chief foreign policy emissary, Steve Witkoff. There was no disclosure, no congressional review, and no ethics oversight.

The policy shift that followed is no coincidence.

Almost immediately after Trump took office, his administration approved expanded access to advanced U.S. AI chips for the UAE, overturning restrictions that had been put in place under the Biden administration, which feared that the chips could be diverted to foreign rivals, particularly to China.

These chips are the backbone of modern artificial intelligence, capable of powering everything from military systems to autonomous surveillance platforms. They are the very hardware that drives national competitiveness and strategic advantage. The United States restricts their export precisely to prevent them from strengthening rival intelligence infrastructures or fueling authoritarian control.

But now, after a foreign intelligence chief placed hundreds of millions of dollars into a Trump-linked enterprise, Trump’s government gave that foreign state access to the hardware.

This is not just a grift to enrich Trump. This is influence peddling with national security ramifications.

Sheikh Tahnoun chairs G42, a state-aligned artificial-intelligence and data conglomerate based in Abu Dhabi that sits at the intersection of AI, cloud computing, biometric surveillance, and national security. According to Republican members of Congress, G42 built substantial partnerships with Chinese technology companies and is deeply enmeshed in Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy, including firms tied to cloud computing, data analytics, and AI model training.

China has methodically embedded itself in Gulf-state tech ecosystems, using commercial partnerships as a means of acquiring training data, refining AI models, and skirting Western export controls. Americans officials explicitly identified G42 as problematic because of its position at that intersection as an Emirati firm with access to Western capital and technology, which maintains business and research ties to Chinese companies that American law treats as national-security risks. In response to sustained U.S. pressure, G42 later announced it would scale back or sever certain China-linked relationships but those assurances came after years of integration, and U.S. policymakers have remained skeptical that disentanglement can be fully verified or enforced in practice.

That history is what makes the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Sheikh Tahnoun’s secret investment in a Trump-linked crypto venture so alarming. When the same individual who oversees G42 — and who has navigated, and benefited from, China-facing AI relationships — also acquires a massive financial stake tied to the sitting American president, the firewall between American national security policy and foreign strategic interests collapses.

Put plainly, G42’s China ties are not a footnote — they are the predicate. They are the reason American officials restricted chip exports in the first place. And they are why Trump’s decision to loosen those controls, while foreign intelligence figures financially entangled with his business ecosystem stood to benefit, is not merely reckless policy. It is a national security failure layered on top of a constitutional violation.

The UAE example is outrageous on its own, but it fits a broader pattern, which is even more troubling.