The White House heralded $2 trillion in investments secured by President Donald Trump this week during his Middle East trip, but a new analysis found that at least a half dozen of those contracts were announced before he took office in January.
The administration released daily lists of the agreements reached by “the dealmaker in chief" during his visits to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but the Washington Post reviewed those contracts and found several of them had been announced while Joe Biden was president.
"In Doha, the administration announced $8.5 billion in projects involving the Texas energy company McDermott, including one focused on Qatar’s liquefied natural gas expansion," the Post reported, noting those contracts were announced in 2023 and 2024.
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"When Trump was in Abu Dhabi on Thursday, the White House announced $200 billion in 'new' commercial deals with the UAE," the report added. "Much of the corporate funding came from a cloud computing deal between Amazon and UAE state-owned telecommunications company e&, which the White House claimed would contribute $181 billion for the local economy by 2033. But Amazon had already announced that contract in October, and the company had only committed about $1 billion over six years. The $181 billion estimate came from an Amazon-sponsored study, and it was a broad calculation of how much the UAE could increase its gross domestic product if it started using more cloud services."
The Post found the sum of all the deals announced by the White House – including those that predate Trump's presidency – fell just short of $1 trillion, slightly less than half the claimed total, but the administration also included a vague plan for the UAE to invest up to $1.4 trillion in the U.S. over the next decade that had been previously announced in March.
“The Washington Post is trying and failing to discredit the trillions of dollars in good deals secured by President Trump on his Middle East trip,” said White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly.
The White House did not explain why agreements predating Trump's presidency were included in the totals, but Kelly said the listed deals included “reaffirmed investments” from companies that had agreements in the region before Trump returned to office.
Trump made similar proclamations in 2017 following a trip to the region during his first presidency, Middle East experts said, but some of those agreements never came to fruition.
“[Trump complied] list of real deals that he has struck [during that previous trip], aspirational deals that may or may not have been struck, phony deals that won’t be struck, and deals struck by his Democratic predecessor that will be credited to himself, and he comes up with a gigantic number close to a trillion,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
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