Trump's Middle East envoys are partners in duplicity

Trump’s Middle East envoys are partners in duplicity
Special envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are proof of what happens when conflicts of interest meet diplomacy

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published April 16, 2026 9:05AM (EDT)


(Salon) There was a time when the very concept of a conflict of interest in politics was a serious matter that could cause investigations and resignations in the federal government. Long before Watergate, Richard Nixon was famously accused of corruption when it was revealed at the height of the 1952 presidential election, in which he was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s running mate, that some supporters had set up a slush fund to help pay for his expenses. Nixon went on television and delivered his famous “Checkers” speech to upwards of 60 million people, insisting that his wife Pat wore a respectable Republican cloth coat and that they intended to keep Checkers, the little dog a supporter had given to his daughters. He got away with it that time, but the moniker ‘Tricky Dick” stuck with him throughout his political career.

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The way money and power converge in our political system, some amount of corruption is probably inevitable. In fact, the system is built for it. But Donald Trump and his cronies have made all the previous cases look like child’s play. As the president himself would say, “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

And if you want to really see why these prohibitions once existed, you have only to look at Trump’s special envoys for peace: Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, whose lack of experience and conflicts of interest have turned the Middle East into a raging fire and even helped lead to the Iran war.

The New York Times reported on Monday about an event that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago when Republicans were shrieking that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should be disqualified from running for president because she would supposedly sell out America’s national security to procure money from foreign leaders to fund her family’s global charity. In late March, as the Iran war was dragging into its 26th day, Kushner appeared at a Saudi investment conference in Miami. The president’s son-in-law, who had represented the U.S. in the failed talks that led to war breaking out with Iran, was not in south Florida as an American official but as the founder and chief executive of Affinity Partners, an investment firm that had received billions from the Saudi Arabia sovereign wealth fund. ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/04/16/trumps-middle-east-envoys-are-partners-in-duplicity/