Lobbyists for foreign countries have long helped other governments influence US policy, but nothing compares to the brazen corruption of the second administration of Trump.
Given that anyone anywhere can quietly bankroll President Donald Trump via his “memecoin,” it’s fair to say that we’ve never seen a White House so saturated in foreign money.
(Paul Yeung / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
It’s difficult to overstate how significantly the world of foreign lobbying has transformed in the past few months. An industry that was once relegated to backrooms and back channels is now blasted out in public statements and social media posts. From India to Oman to Romania and beyond, governments are lavishing Donald Trump with luxury jets, high-rise towers, resorts, and crypto investments—and the president is unashamed, even bragging about it. Eight months into Trump’s second administration, it’s difficult to keep track of all the unprecedented ways that regimes have tried to curry favor with him.
The most recent example was the staggering multibillion-dollar deal between the Trump administration and the dictatorship in the United Arab Emirates, which saw a crypto transaction net the Trump family potentially tens of millions of dollars and the UAE gain access to high-end chips, despite legitimate national-security concerns. But that was only the latest in a litany of scandals. There was the $400 million jumbo jet that the Qatari dictatorship gifted to Trump. There is the government in Vietnam, dodging its own laws in order to fast-track a new Trump golf course—and potentially dodge debilitating tariffs in the process. There are autocratic regimes in places like Serbia and Oman, opening their doors to new Trump investments and glad-handing the president’s company in order to succor the new administration. And there’s Saudi Arabia, which is welcoming another Trump-sponsored skyscraper—the Trump Tower Jeddah.
These are just a few of the most egregious examples. Given the opacity surrounding the administration—as well as the fact that anyone, anywhere, can quietly bankroll the president via his “memecoin”—it’s fair to say that we’ve never seen a White House so saturated in foreign lobbying and foreign money. This is a golden era of foreign regimes bribing a sitting president.
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And yet, Trump is hardly the first US official that other governments have targeted. Foreign lobbying has deep roots in US history—one that’s long been overlooked and underappreciated. While Trump is the most flagrant example of a kleptocratic president, he’s only the culmination of a story decades in the making—one that began nearly a century ago, in the lead-up to World War II, when US legislators thought they’d hit upon a way to prevent foreign authoritarians from swaying policymakers in the United States.
In 1934, on a sweltering day in Washington, DC, a group of congressional officials hosted a man named Ivy Lee. At the time, the 56-year-old Lee was known for one thing: inventing the public relations industry. But legislators that day didn’t want to know about Lee’s work for Woodrow Wilson, Charles Schwab, or the Rockefellers, all of whom Lee had helped. Instead, they wanted to know about his work for another client: the Nazis. They’d heard rumors about Lee—by that point, something of a celebrity—pushing pro-Nazi messaging and whitewashing Adolf Hitler.
The conversation was initially cordial, with Lee denying that he had any “contract with the German government.” He wasn’t technically lying; there’s no evidence that he ever formally contracted to work with Hitler or the Nazis. Instead, Lee admitted that he’d inked a contract with the German conglomerate IG Farben—a company that served, as future investigators would discover, as one of the key planks of the Nazi economy. According to Lee, the company had hired him to set up meetings, monitor media, and highlight the benefits of potential partnerships in the United States—in other words, to sell IG Farben to US audiences.
But as the questioning wound on, Lee’s mask began to slip. He admitted that he’d worked to improve not just IG Farben’s image but the image of the Nazi regime overall, even going so far as to draft memos about which pro-Nazi messaging would work best on Americans. The company’s higher-ups “wanted advice as to how those relations [between the Nazis and the United States] could be improved,” Lee revealed. “So they made an arrangement with me to give them such advice.” Yet Lee kept denying, over and again, that he had “any relationship” with Nazi officials.
Soon, though, legislators spied an opening. One official, New York Representative Samuel Dickstein, asked Lee if he’d started receiving more money from IG Farben after Hitler came to power. Lee admitted that his income had exploded since Hitler became chancellor, with his contract worth the modern equivalent of half a million dollars.
From there, things began to unwind for Lee. He disclosed that he’d been recruited by IG Farben chief Max Ilgner, a Nazi collaborator. He also divulged that he’d met directly with Joseph Goebbels, walking the Nazi propaganda chief through how to fine-tune his fascist messaging; as the US ambassador in Berlin wrote at the time, “it was plain [Goebbels] was trying to apply the advice which Ivy Lee urged.” Lee even had a sit-down meeting directly with Hitler himself—all the better, Lee told the tyrant, “to better understand him if I could.” (An unsigned memo in Lee’s archives described Hitler as “an industrious, honest and sincere hard-working individual.”) Lee even admitted that he’d tried to spin “Hitler’s storm troopers” as “physically well-trained and disciplined, but not armed, not prepared for war.”
By the end of the hearing, legislators had reached an inescapable conclusion: IG Farben was a front for the Nazis. And Lee was essentially a mouthpiece for a regime that would, in just a few years, tilt the world into the most devastating war anyone had ever seen.
When Lee’s testimony was publicized, it shocked the public. (“Lee Exposed as Hitler Press Agent,” one headline proclaimed.) Lee, though, wouldn’t live to witness the fallout; just a few months after his testimony, he died from an inoperable brain tumor. But thanks to that testimony, Lee would no longer be known solely as the “father of the public-relations industry.” Thanks to his work for the Nazis, Lee is known as the father of something else: the foreign-lobbying industry. Because of Lee’s revelations, in 1938, Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which was supposed to shine light on this murky industry—and which was, Congress hoped—going to keep this industry in check.
At first, the efforts seemed to succeed; the industry went dormant for much of the Cold War. But as the Cold War was ending, the industry roared back to life—mostly thanks to one man: Paul Manafort.
Manafort is now famous for being Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, but his work ushering authoritarians into power long predated Trump’s rise. With his malign genius, Manafort is the clearest inheritor of Lee’s legacy. Like Lee, Manafort started by working with domestic lobbying clients, helping create the modern “swamp” as we know it today. Like Lee, he soon took his talents abroad. And also like Lee—who in addition to the Nazis, advised and whitewashed both the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s regime in Italy—Manafort signed on to help tyrant after tyrant.
In the Philippines, Manafort lobbied on behalf of Ferdinand Marcos, even after Marcos’s forces assassinated political opponents and attempted to steal an election. In Angola, Manafort opened door after door for warlord Jonas Savimbi, a man accused of sexual slavery and using child soldiers. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Manafort inked a deal with the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, helping push pro-Mobutu policies in Washington. And in Somalia, Manafort helped Siad Barre, who owed much of his success to his personal death squad. “We all know Barre is a bad guy,” Manafort told a colleague. “We just have to make sure he’s our bad guy.”
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Most notoriously, Manafort also tried to help the kleptocratic Viktor Yanukovych cling to power in Ukraine. Thanks in large part to Manafort’s help, Yanukovych gained the presidency in 2010. It was only thanks to Ukraine’s democratic protesters in 2014 that Yanukovych was tossed from power, preventing his efforts to cement a pro-Kremlin autocracy. It was that revolution that sent Manafort scampering back to the United States, waiting for another opportunity. And it wouldn’t be long before Trump hired him—all while, according to later GOP-led Senate investigations, Manafort helped aided Russian interests.
Manafort was hardly the only foreign lobbyist operating in America. But because he succeeded in helping his foreign dictator clients and proved that foreign despots could find allies in Washington, he reignited the industry. When Manafort first began working as a foreign lobbyist in the 1980s, the industry was small, almost negligible. Now it’s worth billions of dollars and growing every year.
Manafort, though, hasn’t been around for much of that growth. After Trump’s election in 2016, the former campaign manager found himself targeted by the Department of Justice. Accused of multiple crimes, including fraud and failing to report an offshore bank account, Manafort was soon sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison, stemming largely from his work on behalf of Yanukovych. It was the most spectacular foreign-lobbying case since the days of Lee. It was also a sign that, perhaps for the first time, investigators in Washington were finally taking the threat of foreign lobbying seriously.
But it wasn’t meant to be. Soon after his jailing, Trump pardoned Manafort. Given that he was now in his 70s, Manafort didn’t seem to have much of a future. The foreign-lobbying industry lived on, but with Biden ascendant, no one—no domestic campaigns, no foreign autocrats—seemed eager to hire Manafort again.
Appearances, however, can be deceiving. In July, The New York Times reported that Manafort had found some post-imprisonment work. In 2024, Manafort had begun “advising crypto interests on how to navigate” Trump’s orbit. Manafort nestled once more into Trump’s orbit, and he became one of the “key players” who helped “sway Trump on crypto,” as the Times reported—and, in the process, created a new way for foreign government to directly pay off a sitting president.
It didn’t take long for foreign regimes to take full advantage. A few months after turning Trump toward crypto, Manafort traveled to the UAE to be one of the featured speakers at the “world’s largest gathering” of Bitcoin enthusiasts. The destination made sense; as Politico reported, the UAE had “spent years going all-in on crypto.” Perhaps there was a way to use crypto to influence the president? Perhaps there was a way the industry—in addition to all the Trump hotels, resorts, golf courses, and other investments—could help line the president’s pockets, while getting the regime what they wanted?
They soon had their answer. As the Times report uncovered, the UAE launched a multibillion-dollar deal, using a range of crypto exchanges and so-called “stablecoins” to help “the Trumps make money.” In exchange, the UAE gained access to high-end American chips. Given the scope of the funds—and given the clear national-security concerns, with even Trump officials worried that the UAE would immediately share the chips with the UAE’s partners in China—it was a scandal that dwarfed anything Lee, Manafort, or any other foreign lobbyist had ever been involved in. For the Trump White House, it was just another day—and it demonstrates that the foreign-lobbying industry, which Lee and Manafort helped introduce, shows no signs of slowing down.
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