The Agony of Trump’s Oligarchs

The UAE invested $2 billion in a stablecoin from World Liberty Financial, in which the Trump family owns a 60 percent stake that Trump appears to have acquired without spending a dime. Two weeks later the UAE was permitted to import U.S.-produced AI chips in a quantity that the Biden administration previously made unavailable on national security grounds. It isn’t obvious to me how improving President Trump’s personal financial security enhances America’s national security.

World Liberty Financial, incidentally, appears to be attracting all sorts of skeevy characters, according to a recent report by the nonprofit Accountability.US. The most memorable player is TornadoCash, a crypto mixing service involved in money laundering that was sanctioned by the Biden administration—sanctions that the Trump administration subsequently lifted. As the financial services company Motley Fool delicately puts it, “Governance risk is … dramatically higher than what long-term investors typically prefer here. There are a handful of controversial partner ties, enormous political corruption concerns, and even baffling account freezes of high-profile holders, all of which inject risk.”

Nice little invention you got there. Too bad if something were to happen to it. The Commerce Department is contemplating imposing an annual tax of up to five percent of a patent’s assessed value on top of the fees already charged for a patent, which can run up to $10,000. This is different from a Trump proposal to reserve for the United States government some of the proceeds from university patents. That, at least, can be justified by the taxpayers funding university research (assuming taxpayers will continue to do so), though of course the Trump administrative motive here is entirely punitive. With an individual’s patent, the government typically does nothing; it merely extends rights already outlined in the United States Constitution, as Hans Sauer, deputy general counsel at the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, noted September 15 in The Washington Post.