What Guilfoyle was asking for was $100,000, which she needed to pay off a credit card bill, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express.” In the next message she just wrote “Please.”

Eric was Eric Deters, a Trump donor who made his money as co-owner of a pizza chain called Snappy Tomato and had become a right-wing talk radio host (he denies sending her the money). Guilfoyle was the former Fox News host and ex-fiancée of Donald Jr, the president’s eldest son. The pair had broken up in 2024, but Guilfoyle remained close to the family; at the time of the text messages Guilfoyle (who had previously been married to Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom, make of that what you will) was preparing for her confirmation hearing to become the US ambassador to Greece.

Deters, a long-time Trump donor, had already promised to pay Guilfoyle $300,000 in “speaking fees.” If the messages are authentic, and Guilfoyle has disputed their accuracy, they paint a remarkable picture of the cash-for-access culture surrounding the Trump administration. Indeed, this is practically the dictionary definition of corruption: Guilfoyle was allegedly directly offering access for cash. “I will be your Trump ride or die, forever and ever,” Guilfoyle told Deters, by Deters’ account, as she begged for cash.

And Guilfoyle is really just the tip of the fatberg of profiteering that Trump has enabled and even encouraged through his second term; indeed by the standards of Trump’s inner circle, a mere six-figure sum counts as a fairly contemptible return. It is Trump and his family who are truly raking it in — and the numbers and methods they’re using are extraordinary.

***

At the core of the schemes is often the president himself. Take the case of Nvidia. On April 15th, 2025, Trump posted “big and exciting news” on his social media platform, TruthSocial. The technology company had committed “500 BILLION DOLLARS” to build  “A.I. SUPERCOMPUTERS” in the United States, “EXCLUSIVELY”. The White House later added in an official statement that this was the “Trump Effect in action”. Trump had employed a signature mixture of hospitality — he had invited Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang to dine at Mar-a-Lago earlier in the month — and hostility, waving the threat of tariffs if Nvidia continued to make its graphic processing units in Taiwan. And it had apparently worked.

It wouldn’t be the only time he took an intense interest in Nvidia over the course of the year. In August, Trump overruled US Government security restrictions to allow Nvidia to sell its chips in China. There followed more posts, more closed-door meetings, multiple calls and surprise public appearances with Huang, whose business was meanwhile flourishing. By the end of 2025 Nvidia’s stock price had more than doubled, from $94-a-share in April to $188. Today, it is $225.

It is surely pure coincidence, then, that Donald Trump owned up to $58 million of Nvidia shares at the start of 2025 and bought up to $68 million more according to an UnHerd analysis of his financial documents. The purchases were made through investment accounts that the Trump Organization says are independently managed by third-party financial institutions, with neither Trump, his family nor the organisation involved in selecting individual investments. (The disclosure documents present a range rather than exact figures, and the above figures are based on the maximum; if we take the absolute minimum end of the range, according to our analysis, Trump entered the year owning $12.5 million of Nvidia shares and bought just over $17 million more. So the actual number is somewhere between these two.)

Similarly, Trump purchased up to $11 million of Tesla stock in 2025, and promoted the company on many occasions, even calling its cars “beautiful” — quite the endorsement. Indeed, the list of companies Trump has bought stock in, and which Trump has also posted about and/or given government contracts to includes: Intel, the clothing company American Eagle, Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, Comcast, Meta, Apple, US Steel, and Dell, among dozens of others. Except the President’s representiatives insist there is no conflict of interest here. All the investments are managed without the president’s input or knowledge — and when have they ever lied to us?

Further reading

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By Sohrab Ahmari

Trump’s disclosure documents reveal that he made more than 21,000 stock trades in 2025 — so separating the signal from the noise is practically impossible. But unlike presidents who have placed their assets in blind trusts or other arrangements to manage potential conflicts of interest — Jimmy Carter, for instance, placed his peanut farm in a blind trust — Trump has retained ownership of his investments while allowing his sons to continue running the family business. As he told the New York Times in January: “I let my kids, you know, do business.” They retain their own business interests and access to their father and members of his administration, while operating in sectors affected by government policy. The question is whether the family’s overlapping financial and political interests create conflicts that existing safeguards are ill-equipped to address.

Then there’s the Trump Organization, which Eric and Don Jr run. This is the part of the president’s tangled business empire that does things like license the Trump name to products, meaning the presidency itself provides a useful extra source of revenue. There are Trump sneakers ($299), Trump watches (ranging from $499 to $100,000), Trump guitars ($1,250 or $10,000 for the optional “autographed” model). There is even a Trump Bible. These licensing deals are hugely profitable. Trump’s “Save America” coffee-table book alone netted the then-candidate $3 million in royalties. Putting his name on all these shoes, perfumes, watches, books and so on has netted Trump more than $10 million.

All of this activity has made many of those within Trump’s inner circle extremely wealthy in the last couple of years. Trump has learned from his first spell in office, when he dropped significantly down the Forbes 400 rich list. The financial disclosure document for the year before Trump became president for the second time ran to 234 pages and showed $622 million in earnings. The equivalent document for his first year in office runs to 927 pages. It shows that the president reported more than $2.2 billion in his first year in office.

In December last year, Forbes published an admiring article about how Don Jr’s fortune had increased sixfold to $300 million in just one year, “the kind of fortune that would make his father proud.” Eric fared even better: he had “supersized” his fortune ten times to $400 million (again, according to Forbes), supplementing his stock trades with investments in cryptocurrencies. “Donald Trump has offered a masterclass in turning political fame into personal fortune,” ran the glowing report.

All of this is “on a scale that has never happened before in American history,” says Claire Finkelstein, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Something quite similar has, however, happened in the Russian Federation in recent years, where Vladimir Putin has used his presidency to accumulate vast personal wealth — and has meanwhile buttressed his political power by ensuring the oligarchs around him are larded with cash too. “Trump has basically hung a for sale sign outside of the Oval Office and said: ‘You can have dealings with me, and I will give you attention if you pay me in some fashion, or allow me to establish a golf course in your country, or otherwise benefit my interests’,” says Finkelstein. “And that means that American diplomacy is basically for sale.”

As if to underscore the growing convergence between the Russian and American modes of government, a ProPublica investigation recently revealed that Don Jr’s wedding, held across two private islands in the Bahamas this May, had been part-funded by a Russian oligarch called Umar Kremlev to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Kremlev is a close member of Putin’s inner circle with a wide range of business interests. He runs the Russian boxing governing body IBA, and is involved with companies that have a near-monopoly on the Russian gambling industry, including the national lottery. And there he is, peeping out of the wedding photos, directly behind the son of the President of the United States — along with a group of other Russians whose presence reportedly mystified the other guests.

And as we have seen this week with Don Jr’s former fiancée Guilfoyle, behind closed doors the relationship between Trump family members and their friends is often explicit in its bare-faced cash-for-access stance. One term for this is kleptocracy — a mode of government in which the prime motivation of those in power is personal enrichment. Another term is state capture. This is when a narrow interest group takes control, dictates the rules and the way they’re implemented, neuters the institutions that are supposed to hold them to account —  and use all of these diverse mechanisms to award themselves privileges and advantages.

“ In some ways it’s a very familiar pattern,” says Elizabeth David-Barrett, professor of governance and integrity at the University of Sussex. “It’s something that we’ve seen in quite a few countries around the world.” The advance of state capture in the US is more shocking, however: “Because it’s the US, because it is faster than anywhere else, and because it is more blatant and open than anywhere else.”

Trump appears to be placing the enrichment of his family as high on his priority list as making America great again. Asked in January why he is allowing all this conflict of interest, Trump straight-out said: “because I found out that nobody cared.”

***

For those who do care, Don Jr, Trump’s eldest son – Kimberly Guilfoyle’s ex-fiance – is a good place to start. In addition to the work he performs with the Trump Organization, Don Jr is works with a firm called 1789 Capital Management, which was founded by Omeed Malik in 2022 to specialize in “anti-woke” investments. Don Jr joined as a partner two years later.

“ 1789 Capital has made remarkable investments in companies that then suddenly get beautiful contracts,” says Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, the CEO of grassroots government accountability group RepresentUs. She points to August 2025, when 1789 made a big investment in Vulcan, a small North Carolina-based startup that manufactures advanced magnets. Three months later, Vulcan received a $620 million loan from the Pentagon.

According to the Financial Times, other companies owned by 1789 Capital that benefited from large government contracts have included BlinkRX, a pharmaceutical distributor in which 1789 has a stake (Don Jr also sits on its board). BlinkRX benefited directly from Trump’s October “TrumpRX” executive order opening up prescription drug direct-to-consumer sales.

In August 2025, 1789 invested in the online betting platform Polymarket, with Don Jr once again also joining the company as an advisor. It was an odd choice, given that Polymarket had been barred from operating in the US in 2022 by the Commodity Future Trading Commission (CFTC) — and that Don Jr was already operating as an advisor to Kalshi, Polymarket’s main competitor. Just eight days after his appointment was announced, CFTC staff issued a no-action letter that helped clear the way for Polymarket’s return to the US market, via an exchange it had acquired. With the rules on political betting loosened, both Polymarket and Kalshi duly exploded in value. In August 2026, 1789 Capital led a $1 billion funding round for Polymarket which valued the company at $21 billion.

Don Jr holds other personal investments too, though he is not required to release details about them so we have no idea of their total scale. We only see it in glimpses, like when a small drone company called Unusual Machines revealed in a securities disclosure that Don Jr held a $4m stake.

Meanwhile, Don Jr was brought into Unusual Machines as a paid advisor, a couple of weeks after Trump’s election victory in November 2024. Less than a year later, in October 2025, the company announced it had won its biggest contract yet with the Department of Defense. Though the exact amount hasn’t been made public, “ there is a pattern of Don Jr getting very wealthy off regulatory decisions and contracting that is in his father’s control, right?” Sanchez-Moreno says.

Then there’s Eric Trump. Like his older brother, Eric has never had any notable successes independent of his father, preferring to operate either within the Trump Organization or close to the US Government when his father happens to be in charge. In this, however, he has demonstrated astonishing acumen. In April 2026, Eric was telling Fox News that Foundation Industries, for which he is an investor and chief strategic advisor, had just signed $24 million worth of contracts with the Department of Defense to build humanoid war-robots.

Otherwise Eric and Don Jr have a lot of ventures in common. Following Trump’s reelection, Don Jr and Eric were both involved in signing real estate deals on behalf of the Trump Organization. One of these involved licensing a Saudi real-estate company called Dar Al Arkan to build half a dozen Trump-branded hotels, residences, golf courses, and more across the Gulf and other places like the Maldives, netting tens of millions of dollars. (Dar Al Arkan is linked to crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, a close professional associate of Don Jr and Eric’s brother-in-law, Jared Kushner).

In February 2025, it was announced that Eric and Don Jr had bought stakes in a private equity firm called Dominari Capital which they were also advising. Dominari helped set up the cryptocurrency mining company American Bitcoin, which went public in September 2025 at a valuation that made Eric’s stake worth almost half a billion dollars (Don Jr’s stake isn’t known).

Because of the nature of cryptocurrencies, the true amount that the Trump family has made from them will likely never be known. The Center for American Progress tracks Trump’s total crypto earnings to the present day at around $2.4 billion, including $636 million from the Trump memecoin $TRUMP. Melania Trump also made $6 million from the sale of NFTs — “non-fungible tokens,” essentially individualized memes linked to a cryptocurrency unit — in her husband’s first year in office.

The Trump family also has a large stake in World Liberty Financial, Inc, the company behind a “stablecoin” pegged to the US dollar, from which they earn interest, estimated at $59 million. In January 2025, an Emirati company backed by a senior royal and government figure (Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of UAE president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the country’s national security chief) signed a deal with Eric Trump to purchase a 49% stake in World Liberty for half a billion dollars. This netted a reported $187 million for Trump family entities. A few weeks later, the Wall Street Journal noted, the Trump administration approved a controversial deal to export AI chips to the UAE. In October 2025 Trump also pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, a large partner in World Liberty Financial.

Like stocks, cryptocurrencies are a confidence business. When one of the Trumps boosts it, confidence — and therefore the price – goes up. An investment firm based in Abu Dhabi has bought $2 billion in World Liberty stablecoins. And cryptocurrency companies have rewarded Trump’s support of the industry by donating tens of millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign super-PAC.

***

And what of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner? Finkelstein points to the $400 million Boeing 747 that Qatar gifted Trump in 2025 as an example of the sorts of dividends that his selfless work in the Middle East is reaping. (Albeit the luxury jet would be “a counterintelligence nightmare”.)

Kushner, who served in Trump’s first term as Middle East adviser, founded a private equity firm called Affinity Partners in 2021. Kushner had never worked in private equity before, but so confident was the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in Kushner’s talents, he immediately invested $2 billion in the company via Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund. Qatar and the UAE soon followed suit with $1.5 billion more. Kushner had stoutly supported MBS’s regime, even after its agents murdered the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Kushner has been closely involved in Trump’s second administration, too, and while the specifics of his job remain murky he has served in an unofficial diplomatic role in talks with Russia, Israel, and Ukraine, as well as Saudi Arabia — while still controlling Affinity.

It hasn’t always gone well. Backed by Affinity, Kushner and Ivanka, have also been attempting to build a $1.4 billion luxury resort in Albania. But after the Albanian prime minister passed a law changing regulations to allow the gargantuan project to go ahead, local protests began. These spiraled into a national movement, known as the “Flamingo Revolution,” which seems like it might even be on the brink of bringing about the downfall of the Albanian government.

Meanwhile, as Trump’s madcap war with Iran continues to spiral out of control, some of Kushner’s Gulf backers have reportedly started to question whether they are getting a good return on their investment — which shows just how explicitly they saw the deal in terms of cash for access and influence.

***

How did we get here? Throughout his presidency of 1977-81, Jimmy Carter was dogged by questions relating to his family peanut farm in Georgia — an operation worth a fraction of most of the Trump family’s business interests. Carter’s attempts to place the company in a blind trust did little to quell suspicions about a potential conflict of interest; and nor did a special counsel ruling that no irregularities had taken place. In part, the enhanced suspicion was due to Carter’s own promises to raise ethical standards following the Watergate scandal.  

Finkelstein argues that the rot set in with President Ford’s pardoning of President Nixon over the Watergate scandal in 1974, which set a precedent that presidents are beyond accountability. The rule of law was then further eroded after 9/11, when President Bush’s Department of Justice allowed the use of torture in CIA blacksites. But in her view, the real turning point came under President Obama.

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By Daniel Kalder

When Obama came into office, he had to make a decision about what to do about the Bush administration’s torture program — and particularly the legal memos that had been used to authorize it. Obama banned the interrogation techniques and released the memos, but also promised that CIA officers who had relied in good faith on the Justice Department’s legal advice would not be prosecuted. For Finkelstein, this was a failure of accountability. “That set the stage for a kind of lack of transitional justice from one administration to the next,” she tells me. “Rather than robustly investigating and prosecuting those who violated the law during the Bush administration, he really decided to give everybody a pass.” In her view, President Biden’s attorney-general, Merrick Garland, similarly “majorly failed” when he didn’t appoint a special prosecutor for two years after the election, which “made it impossible for the Justice Department to meet the timeline required to prosecute Trump.

But Biden further blundered, laying an avoidable trap for any future Democrat or indeed Republican who might hope to hold the Trumps to account. “ Let’s remember that Biden pardoned his own son, Hunter Biden,” she says. “That was a colossal mistake from the standpoint of containing presidential authority and containing corruption, because it set a precedent that will be very difficult for Democrats to object to when it’s used on the other side”.

All of this means that those working to bring values such as honesty, transparency and probity to American democracy are not optimistic. “ In the US, anti-corruption laws are quite weak and have become weaker over time,” says Sanchez-Moreno. ” A lot of things that are corrupt and that other countries would criminalize and treat quite seriously are just allowed to proceed here.” The system of checks and balances that was once the pride of American democracy has not proved much help either. “You have a Supreme Court that ruled that the president has pretty broad immunity, and that has set the stage for an administration that is using its office for the family’s enrichment.”

Things may change, however, if the Democrats take the House back in next month’s midterm elections. The administration is certain to ignore any legal subpoenas — but the private sector companies will not be able to do so without risking prosecution. “So they’re gonna start subpoenaing all these companies,” says Sanchez-Moreno.

The president can issue pardons, but those don’t protect against Securities and Exchange Commission investigations or civil suits. If they start to feel pressure, maybe these companies will also start to reevaluate the value of their investment.

Guilfoyle seems, at least, to be facing consequences. She has been forced to resign her ambassadorship, and there are calls for her to be investigated by members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The Trump family has thrown her under the bus, with the President distancing himself from her on Tuesday.

But the Guilfoyle case was just a glimpse of the raw inside workings of how truly shameless the corruption can be. She has resigned in disgrace – but Trump family themselves will continue to make out like bandits, and there’s not much that can be done to stop them.

Aris Roussinos visited the fraught country at the height of what is now being called the Flamingo Revolution, speaking to activists, opposition leaders, and even the country’s embattled PM himself — who believes that his people have never had it so good. 

* * * * *

“Why am I living in England?” Avni, an Albanian in his 40s working in London as a builder, asked me angrily, as we walked to the lines of riot police separating Albania’s Flamingo Revolution protesters from the country’s parliament. “Albania is a very good country, there is no war here. We shouldn’t be immigrants. We should come back home,” he added, telling me that his home village in northern Albania was now entirely depopulated, as everyone who could had already decamped to Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe.

“Because the government [in Albania] is very corrupted, people doesn’t get no rights, but if you know anybody from government, you’ll be a millionaire in two days. All the MPs from Albania, they become billionaires, they’ve got massive houses, massive cash, hidden everywhere. All their cousins, they got massive, massive cash. It’s a really, really corrupted government, and we’ve had enough of this. They push us all [to] Europe, but we need to come back.”

It was the 54th and most violent day so far of the street protests that have overshadowed Albania’s summer, to the chagrin of Edi Rama’s Socialist Party government, which has run the country for 13 consecutive years. “Everyone thinks that this is a democratic state,” Bora Mitrovica, an Albanian-Canadian activist, told me at the police barriers where I had found her, shouting “Down with communism!” and cursing the police with elaborate Balkan oaths. “It is not. Edi Rama is a dictator. This is a dictatorship.” Bora had just been pepper-sprayed by police, after attempting to push through the barriers towards Albania’s parliament. Protestors had hurled eggs and water bottles at police lines, and at the cars of politicians making their way to the voting chamber. When the police pushed them back with tear gas, water cannon and pepper spray, the protestors howled in fury, some breaking aloe leaves from the decorative street planting and squeezing the soothing juice into their eyes. “Dictatorship does not end with a chant, You need to fight. We need our Albanian men to stand up and not just say ‘fuck you’, because that’s not how you change the country,” Bora told me. “I advise all tourists to get the fuck out as soon as they can, because they’re not going to be able to handle what we can handle as Albanians.”

The protests had begun in the southern seaside village of Zvërnec back in May. Villagers had discovered access to their fishing boats and coastal olive groves suddenly closed off by security fencing, and construction vehicles apparently starting work on a luxury resort project backed by Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, and strongly supported by Rama’s government. In violent scenes, security guards and villagers clashed, before local protesters broke down the fencing and reclaimed possession of what they say is their land. Who the land in question actually belongs to remains a matter of dispute. Because of the many land reforms and disbursements marking the country’s shifts from Ottoman rule to independence and Italian occupation, and then from Enver Hoxha’s isolationist regime to the chaotic transition to democracy, claims in Albania often overlap. Frequently, more than one party can claim legal title to any given plot.

The ostensible owner of the Zvërnec coastline at the center of the Kushner project, a Miami-based businessman called Artur Shehu, has been accused by lawyers working for local villagers of forging Ottoman title deeds to seize control of their valuable property. In June, he was also announced to be under investigation by SPAK, an anti-corruption body set up by Rama’s government, for money laundering and international cocaine trafficking. Shehu, for his part, denies any wrongdoing, insisting he is a legitimate businessman who inherited the land from his medieval forebears. Complicating the story are hints, in SPAK proceedings, of government officials’ attendance at meetings with Shehu and other alleged cocaine traffickers. And SPAK files leaked to international journalists suggest that Belgian investigators noted that “these meetings appear to be related to real estate projects in Albania, potentially financed with illicit funds, with the support of political authorities”.
At the same time, SPAK stresses that “at this stage no evidence is presented that identifies the officials involved or proves their participation in illegal activities”. The gap between these two claims is now, in Albania, filled with feverish and dramatic political speculation, used by the opposition Democratic Party to claim high-level political corruption.

* * * * *

Because the salt lagoon at Zvërnec is a rare European breeding ground for flamingos, the initial protests in Tirana were environmental ones, with festive protesters carrying giant styrofoam flamingos as their emblem. But over the course of the following weeks, the protests escalated from halting construction on the project and reinstating Albania’s recently quashed environmental protection laws, to demanding what is in effect a full revolution against the entire political system. The protesters now insist that Rama must resign and face trial for corruption, along with the leader of the opposition, Sali Berisha, while Albania must install a 12-month technocratic government before new elections. Naturally, Rama is not inclined to agree, hence the current standoff.

Though the nightly protests along Tirana’s leafy boulevards are good-natured family affairs, those in the morning are rowdier, bringing along a more committed core of activists who declare themselves to be revolutionaries. While there are young masked men to be seen throwing missiles, and older working-class men wearing the traditional Albanian felt cap or waving the flag of Greater Albania, the majority are from the young, highly-educated and socially liberal Tirana bourgeoisie, as well as the diaspora — ordinarily a reliable vote bank for Rama’s reformist and pro-EU government. Conservative young women in hijabs stand alongside heavily-tattooed hipsters, chanting “Rama, hand in your resignation,” in Albanian at the police lines, to the tune of The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army”, or “Rama, Rama, Fuck You,” to the tune of “We Will Rock You”.

Over the days and nights of protests I attended, long and passionate speeches condemned the government as terrorists, as a dictatorship, and bemoaned the claimed sell-out of Albanian land to Israeli interests. The latter, rather conspiratorial, claim transpired to be a regular theme when talking to Albanians. Even stickers observed on lampposts in central Tirana depicted Rama as a stooge of George Soros or as a Hasidic Jew. Xhoana, a fashionably dressed marketing executive, told me: “Our government is selling our land to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and the oligarchs in our place. They don’t work for the people. We want a revolution because everything is a mess.”

“Albania right now doesn’t need a revolution,” said a government spokesperson, who insisted on anonymity, drawing on a cigarette at a pavement cafe. “People have been saying for 50 days we need a revolution, but they have no plan for what comes next. A revolution at this stage, when we are so close to going into the EU, is a dangerous thing.” Rama’s Socialist Party government has pledged EU entry for Albania by 2030, but negotiations have dragged on since 2009, delayed by rule of law concerns, the country’s relative poverty, and worries over organized crime — particularly the domination of international cocaine trafficking by Albanian clans. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reignited the accession process, as EU officials felt compelled to exert the bloc’s agency in the new age of geopolitical competition. But the window for accession may be narrow and short-lived. For both the ruling Socialist Party and the EU, this summer’s mass protests are an unwanted complication.

“Europe, chiefly the European Commission, they wanted to see all progress,” Genc Pollo, a prominent Albanian conservative intellectual and former Deputy Prime Minister told me. “They didn’t want to see the democratic backslide, and in their annual reports, they omitted all the problems, for whatever reasons.” A skeptic of Albania’s progress under Rama’s government, which he termed a “narco-state,” ruled by a “klepto-regime”, Pollo told me that “Rama has allowed for the Albanian rings, which bring coke from Latin America to central and northern Europe, to launder their proceeds in construction. And then, I mean, when elections come, they, with their money and their muscle, they help him get the vote.” But, in his telling, European diplomats are deaf to the opposition’s concerns. “Edi Rama is a master in staging things, and organizing, in having summits in Tirana, and having the leaders in some restaurant presenting a pizza, with his face on the pizza box, and then you have the President of the European Commission, saying ‘Oh, this is wonderful, this is wonderful, oh, dear Edi’.”

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On the face of it, though, the protests, supported by every single Albanian I spoke to who wasn’t a member of the government, seem strangely timed. Under Rama’s rule, Albania’s GDP has almost tripled in a decade, a growth rate Western Europeans can only envy. New tower blocks, exuberantly designed in the flush of new wealth, loom over Tirana’s handsome Mussolini-era civic architecture and the few surviving Ottoman mosques and coaching inns. Until recently seen as rather outré destinations, both Tirana and the country’s many fast-developing beach resorts are now filled with tourists, both northern Europeans seeking summer sun and Turks and Gulf Arabs escaping it. The bustling cafes, bars and restaurants are as stylish and comfortable as anything elsewhere in the Mediterranean, if no longer significantly cheaper. Albanian wages have not kept up with the rapid inflation of prices, particularly of food and property, introduced by the influx of money, legitimate or otherwise. In some ways, Edi Rama appears a victim of his own success.

The protesters are “an urban group of people, predominantly highly educated”, says Pirro Vengu, a Socialist Party MP for Vlorë, including Zvërnec, over coffee at one of those stylish restaurants. “The paradox is that this is the youth that has come to age during this government. So, apparently we’ve done something right, right?” Young, smartly suited and charismatic, Vengo is a rising star in Albanian politics, who even government critics in Zvërnec ruefully admitted liking. “It’s also totally legitimate that Albanians are not comparing the country now to its tragic past of the Nineties. We’re not the poorest country in Europe anymore. We’re comparing ourselves to Western Europe, where all Albanians have traveled several times.”

For all the country’s economic success, Albanian political discourse is riven by eyebrow-raising claims of impropriety, emanating most strongly from the opposition. In his office in Democratic Party headquarters, Sali Berisha, the 81-year old leader of the conservative opposition, came out from behind a desk piled high with papers to shake my hand. Behind him, on the cluttered bookshelves, a MAGA baseball cap and framed photograph of Mother Theresa vied for space. Albania’s first democratically elected leader, and the architect of the country’s Western orientation, Berisha is as central a figure in shaping the country’s modern course as his arch-rival, Edi Rama. Just a few weeks earlier, the Trump administration, citing national security grounds, had lifted the Biden-era entry sanctions placed against Berisha for corruption in office, which he denies. British sanctions remain in place — unjustly, Berisha told me, handing me a printout of an FCO document relating to his case, and accusing the previous British ambassador of being “corrupted” by Edi Rama. The influx of money from criminal proceeds, Berisha told me, had distorted the country’s economy, wrecking Albanian exports to Europe while being laundered in high-value construction projects. “If you look to this country,” Berisha asked me rhetorically, “What you will find? You’ll find an extraordinary power in the hands of Edi Rama and his government, which is the power of drugs. The power of drugs is many, many billions of euros. The power of drugs, of Albanian drug cartels, controls everything in this country.”

Recently returned to frontline politics after defeating internal rivals within the Democratic Party, Berisha eyes the protests as a route back to office, or at very least as weakening his bitter rival Rama’s grip on power. He concedes that “maybe 20%” of the slogans demanded his jailing, but assures me that these demands were made only by “Left-wing extremist groups”. For the most part, he said, the protesters were against the government, “and their cause is just. [It] is our cause. That’s why we fully support it. We fully respect it, we do not try to take the leadership of it.” As for his rival himself, “Edi Rama treats Albania like his personal fiefdom, in which he could do everything,” Berisha told me. “Like being a sultan, in a sultanate of centuries ago, where the air, the land, and the water, are considered property of the sultan.”

* * * * *

The Prime Minister’s Office is in a handsome Rationalist building opened in 1941, designed to house the Italian colonial governor. Attendants there ushered me through long corridors, lined with classical Greek and Ottoman ceramics and into Edi Rama’s office, where he pointedly ignored me for some time, busy scrolling on his mobile phone. Rama had been an artist and writer before entering politics as the reformist Mayor of Tirana, whose policy of beautifying the capital had turned it into an Instagrammable tourist destination, and himself into Albania’s second longest-serving ruler since independence in 1912, surpassed only by the communist dictatorship. A big and powerful-looking man, today dressed all in loose, black clothing, apart from spotless white trainers, the fiercely intelligent Rama is as charismatic as he is intimidating. But recent international interviews had been fraught, making the mood in the office tense. When Rama finally sat down beside me, leaning into his chair, I asked him his opinion of the protests.

“The protests today are not the protests of June, so the people who spoke today are different. They are engaged in political parties. They are engaged in opposition parties, small parties of opposition, Leftists from the extreme and Rightists from the extreme,” he claimed, “While the June protests were different, were bigger, a lot of people that voted for us were there.” In any case, “I am very, very proud that we have had such a big protest for days in a most peaceful manner, and that nobody was hurt, nobody was stopped to do what he or she wanted,” he added, “The bottom line is that this protest shows a country that is like a normal European country where you have protests.” Repeating his government’s claim that the protests were being stoked by foreign actors, he suggested that “the algorithm did a lot to bring them to bring them in the boulevard, you know? Listen, I’m telling you, one of the things that we have seen from the back of the mirror, the social media, is that a very high percentage of the content is produced outside the building. It’s not Albanian.” Indeed, Rama added, “If this would not have been about Jared Kushner and Trump and Ivanka and all type of fantasies, this would not have been so good for the algorithm,” but the Kushner link “brought all the anti-Trump people on steroids.” When I demurred, he added, “You are an exception in this if you are not looking for an angle to say how terrible Trump is and how he’s killed flamingos in Albania.”

* * * * *

But neither Trump nor flamingos seem the prime source of discontent down in Zvërnec. “Albania is not a democracy,” an older man told me in the village’s heavily-accented Greek. “They are thieves, all of them, Edi Rama and Sali Berisha are the same,” he said, rubbing his forefingers together for emphasis. “We have had no water here for two months. I have to use my little well, but then they take everything we own here for themselves.” A local woman agreed. “They have taken my elderly father’s olive groves. We have had these plots from generation to generation but they won’t give us the papers saying they belong to us, not even for the house we live in.”

For the birthplace of Albania’s political crisis, Zvërnec is a sleepy place, a village of a few hundred people, mostly ethnic Greeks or Hellenized Vlach pastoralists. Close to the southern city of Vlorë, whose thudding beach bars stretch along the sandy shoreline to the village boundaries, Zvërnec reflects an older, unspoiled Mediterranean, increasingly a nostalgic memory even in Albania. Wading birds hoot and croak in the coastal marshes of the Vjosa delta, cicadas rasp in the olive groves, shaded from the ferocious summer sun: it is all reminiscent of the Greece of maybe 30 or 40 years ago. “We want investment, but not this investment,” one woman told me. “This is our land, and we have never got our family land back since 1991. We also don’t want Israelites here — this is Albanian land, and if they come here we will kill them.”

On Zvërnec’s wild sandy beach of Portonovo, empty save for a handful of local families, happily ignoring the notices forbidding them to swim, I met Kosta Xhaho, the local project coordinator for PPNEA, Albania’s largest environmental NGO. This is, he told me, one of the most important, turtle nesting areas, and Ground Zero for the protests that had long migrated to central Tirana. “We started to protest here. Then we started to fight with those bulldozers that started to construct a road and the trucks in the protected area. And then we started to fight with the security that they put on the fences, and now we are fighting with the government to change the law, so this area is to stay protected forever.”

PPNEA’s wish is for the beach and the rest of the coastline to remain public land, as was all the way back to King Zog’s Kingdom of Albania. But it is a highly marketable commodity, just as much for those who have farmed it for generations as for the Kushners. And it is not clear that the villagers themselves wish the site to remain undeveloped, rather than profiting from the tourism boom they believe Shehu has stolen from them. In nearby Vlorë, local opinion is distinctly more in favor of the Kushner project. “These people [in Zvërnec] are stupid,” a Vlorë taxi driver told me. “They don’t want to go forward, but it’s one of the biggest investments in Europe. It’ll be so good for our city. I just hope it’s like they say it is, and Israel doesn’t build a base there,” he added. Even so, he told me that he supports the Tirana protests “because they’re about high prices. Albania is a very poor country still, and very corrupt.” I asked him who he voted for. “Rama, of course,” he said, looking at me as if I’d asked a stupid question, “Every time Edi Rama.”

For Rama himself, re-elected just over a year ago for a fourth term, the protests have come as a jolt of shock. In the recently released “Besa” strategic document, whose name alludes to the unbreakable oath-making central to traditional Albanian culture, Rama’s government declared that “the flamingo boulevard” presented “a mirror that society held up before us”, and proof that “ever more Albanians, including older ones, no longer compare the Albania we have with the one we had in 2013, but only with the one they themselves believe Albania can and must be”. Much of the Besa document seems to draw from de Tocqueville’s observation that the most dangerous moment for any regime is when the rising expectations derived from reforms already undertaken make any residual injustices seem intolerable. “The citizen who has more than yesterday,” the strategy’s authors write, “is a more dissatisfied citizen. Precisely because they live better today than yesterday, they likewise believe that their country is capable of doing far more than it does today.” In a recent open letter, the former Socialist Party insider and Rama loyalist Elisa Spiropali, recently removed from her role as Europe Minister, declared that the protests represent a “political and social mobilization, especially among the younger generation, that cannot be ignored without consequences.” In what can only be read as a critique of Rama’s governance style, Spiropali asserted that Albania requires “not more personalization of power, but institutions stronger than individuals”, “more humility, less arrogance”, “more representation and less concentration of decision-making”, to build “a state where the law stands above power and where power is not identified with any one person”.

When I asked Edi Rama whether Spiropali’s open letter highlighted inner disputes within the Socialist Party, he shut down the question. “This is a very internal, domestic thing,” he said. “And we have to keep it for our own because I don’t think we have to export our internal things outside for the audience, because then it becomes like feeding with curiosity, feeding with curious things, an audience that is not at all inside the story, not informed or nothing.” But the opposition had no such qualms, I replied, adding that Berisha had made very specific allegations that political figures within Rama’s inner circle had attended the Aruba meeting with the alleged drug trafficker Artur Shehu, and that the government had uncomfortable links with organized crime bosses. “Where is it? Who, where? Where is the picture? Where is the document? Where are the tickets? Where, where?” he responded. “So how would you answer,” he added, pointing at me, “for example, an allegation that you were yesterday with some drug dealers in the hotel where you are sleeping. How do you answer that?”

He went on, “Yeah, the opposition figures may tell you many things, but it’s not for me to say to you, if we are linked or not, it’s for them to prove that we are linked or not, because I’m really disgusted from years now that in this country… that the burden of proof has passed to them who were accused.” Asked about the opposition’s characterization of Albania as a narco-state, Rama dismissed the idea entirely. “You can say whatever you want. But ‘narco-state’, a narco-state that started to close negotiating chapters with the EU? It doesn’t match in any shape or form. If Albania has problems with corruption, Albania has never fought corruption like these years. If Albania has problems with crime, Albania has never fought crime like these years. And when it comes to crime, I’m telling you, we pay a big price in the Balkans, to the fact that people from the Balkans are very active in organized crime. Outside. But the industry of the crime is not here. It’s there.”

Referring to my being a journalist, he added, “You know narco-states, I guess, how they feel like, you know corrupt poor countries, how they feel like, you know middle-income countries, how they feel like. I don’t think you need me or whomever else to tell you in which type of country you are, with all the goods and the downsides… It doesn’t feel unsafe, it doesn’t feel like a poor country, you don’t feel all these things.”

I asked Rama if, having secured his place as one of the most significant figures in Albania’s history, he worried that an escalation of the protests might harm his legacy. “No, how protests can threaten the legacy?” he said, “I like the pressure.” He had ridden out two previous waves of protests, he told me, maybe bigger than today’s, in 2013, just after entering power, and also in 2018. “When it came to the first one, I pulled back because they were right. They had a very strong point. I said, you are right, we’ll stop. And it ended, they got what they wanted. Second time, I didn’t pull back. But I started a conversation with them and we did good things. This time, I learned things, so we are not going to pull back from the [Zvërnec] project, for sure. But we’re gonna make a [consultation] process.” In the end, he added, “I strongly believe the project will close this chapter completely because it will be beautiful.”

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Many Albanians I spoke to, including those otherwise supportive of Rama, likened his current situation to that of Serbia’s strongman Aleksandar Vučić — not, in Albania, a flattering comparison — who has also won the EU’s favor while facing down months-long street protests. While it is unlikely that the protests alone will unseat Rama, they clearly highlight a growing disaffection with the two-party system, and the current politics of patronage. Mostly young, liberal and highly-educated, the protestors are, to a large degree, Edi Rama’s children. For nearly a generation, Rama’s brand of developmentalist, benevolent paternalism has transformed the country into a genuinely dynamic boom economy, at a dizzying pace. But like the villagers in Zvërnec, Tirana’s middle classes feel poorer, not richer, for the visible growth and wealth sprouting around them. For Western observers, now accustomed to stagnant wages and the limitations of two-party systems, Albania’s political crisis shows, ironically, how European the country has become, even while stuck in the EU’s Balkan waiting-room.

With the protests continuing, contrary to early expectations, through August, the likelihood of their escalation in the cooler weather of autumn, when holidaymakers have returned home and students have returned to classes, appears to be growing. But juggling his attempts to secure the simultaneous approval of EU observers, of the mercurial and acquisitive Trump administration, of the party shaped in his own image and of his increasingly restive voters, Rama projected only calmness. Leaning back into his armchair at the end of our meeting, he told me, “Listen, I am 13 years here now. So I have three more years. I have nothing to prove to myself. Because in the beginning, you know, there are many things to prove to yourself. As you said, I have my place in the history of this country, then, in which light this will be decided by the people.”

But navigating the vagaries of the second Trump administration has increased the pressure on Edi Rama, whose attempts to court favor with the American president, whether by signing up Albania to Trump’s dubious Board of Peace scheme or by pushing through the Kushner family’s contentious real estate project, has revealed previously hidden fractures within his own voter base. Rama’s only reward, so far, has been Washington’s sudden rehabilitation of his bitterest political rival, Sali Berisha, in what can only be read as a means to exert American pressure. What happens over autumn will now decide everything, Sali Berisha told me. “Very much will depend on September. Will they re-energize, remobilize? Will opposition parties succeed to get united in a large front? To persist for a caretaker government for new elections, or not, I could not predict. It’s difficult, but I think it’s vital.” But the Democratic Party’s chances of riding popular dissatisfaction to power seems doubtful, given the broad, anti-systemic nature of the protests. In the street directly outside Berisha’s office, pausing to check my phone, I noticed a slogan prominently scrawled on a large metal bin. “Revolucion, Rama Burg, Berisha Burg,” it said, Rama to jail, Berisha to jail. It is, by far, the most popular slogan shouted on Tirana’s streets.

The second was that they were utterly, totally wrong. This was only discovered by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, when he learned from his Arab friends — wealthy young men like himself, who were sons of princely potentates — that some Arab rulers would be interested in opening diplomatic relations with Israel if the US President were to ask them.

Trump handed the suggestion to his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, the former head of Exxon-Mobil, who had two decades of experience in negotiating with oil-country dictators and kings. (I once sat next to him in Astana in a small meeting with Kazakhstan’s then-dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, which should have been a clash because of a hugely costly production failure by Exxon’s Italian partner, but instead became a contest in amiability.)

Tillerson had already criticized Kushner’s intrusions in US diplomacy, but nevertheless passed on the idea to his Near East Bureau. Its response was prompt and categorical: no Arab state would follow Egypt and Jordan in establishing diplomatic relations with Israel — or even discuss that possibility — until a “process” was solidly underway to implement the “two-state solution” with the establishment of a Palestinian state.

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The experts further warned that any attempt to push this non-starter would greatly damage US prestige in the region. So Trump sent Tillerson on the path to his resignation by telling young Kushner to go ahead and try his best. He was met with striking success. The Saudis readily agreed to open their airspace to Israeli civilian overflights, and permitted business travel from Israel, though they delayed a response on diplomatic relations. So did Oman, which had already received Netanyahu in 2018, and which also allowed over-flights.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, for their part, swiftly agreed to normalize diplomatic relations, as did Morocco. Israeli embassies were quickly established in each of those countries, while travel and commerce surged.

Kushner’s success was quite enough to convince Trump that the government’s Middle East experts were best kept out of any serious US diplomacy in the Middle East. And so Trump promptly gave the Gaza negotiation to his son-in-law and Steve Witkoff, a successful property developer uncontaminated by any faux diplomatic expertise.

In their negotiation over Gaza, Kushner and Witkoff had a determined ally in Egypt’s dictator, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who had come to power in 2013 by removing the elected Muslim Brotherhood President, Mohamed Morsi. When Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Gaza offshoot, celebrated their victory on October 7 two years ago, el-Sisi was directly called upon to join the fight. But that threat vanished as soon as Israel started demolishing Gaza’s high-rises and fancy condominiums. Nobody in Egypt wanted to share that fate.

It was enough for Witkoff and Kushner to negotiate a prisoner/hostage swap accompanied by a final ceasefire, which Hamas’s surviving leaders had no choice but to accept when Qatar made it clear that it would not pay for more hopeless resistance. In endorsing Trump’s plan, as negotiated by Witkoff, Qatar promised to rebuild Gaza; Israel promised to release prisoners and to withdraw in stages; Hamas promised to release the hostages and hostage corpses; but nobody promised to send an army to protect the hapless people of Gaza from Hamas and clan gunmen.

As for that Palestinian state much in demand from Berkeley, California to Rome, Italy, neither Egypt, nor Israel, nor Qatar, is likely to put much effort into it, after the one so carefully planned in Oslo, in the Nineties, self-detonated.

Trump, Kushner and Witkoff have been vindicated, for now, by the currently holding and the return of the hostages. Can we assume, then, that all the governments which have recognized “Palestine” as a state will immediately drop any lesser priorities, such as helping Ukraine, to actually construct this Palestine, complete, of course, with a freely elected parliament?

Investing as the head of the Witkoff Group, he has been updating classic Manhattan office buildings like the Woolworth tower and creating luxury condominium high-rises like 111 Murray Street. Even today, his son Alex is rescuing One High Line — the pair of angular Bjarke Ingels-designed waterfront towers in West Chelsea — from an ignominious fate as the misbegotten condo development of a collapsed investing group.

Along the way, Witkoff has built a reputation for a high risk tolerance that suits Trump as the two of them seek to settle the ultimate real-estate dispute: namely, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The prize is unquestionably attractive. Yet given the stakes and the sensitivity of the region, Gotham-style real-estate wrangling could also prove disastrous.

Witkoff’s journey to the world of high diplomacy began, of course, in his friendship with fellow developer Trump. Indeed, so close are the two men that Witkoff was on the golf course at Mar-a-Lago last year when a second failed assassination attempt was made on Trump. According to a New York real-estate source, who declined to be identified because he didn’t want to get involved in Trumpian affairs, Witkoff’s grandson was named Donald after his grandfather’s friend, the president. And Trump attended Alex’s bar mitzvah reception, the person said.

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Trump rewarded Witkoff’s personal loyalty by naming the latter his envoy to the Middle East. When it comes to the bedeviling region, Trump has from the beginning thought outside the box. Witkoff’s position is roughly the same as that of Jared Kushner — Trump’s son-in-law, also a major figure in New York real estate — in the first term. Despite just about no previous experience as a mediator, Jared, son of real-estate mogul Charles Kushner, produced the Abraham Accords that opened diplomatic relations between the Jewish state and four Arab states: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

Kushner sees the Middle East as a real-estate opportunity — albeit, one in which the main hazards aren’t so much New York regulators withholding construction permits as Islamist groups and states that periodically go boom. Kushner parlayed his position in the first Trump administration into the leadership of Miami-based Affinity Partners, an investment firm which he founded and which has been raising investment capital largely from Middle Eastern companies — $3.1 billion as of October, to be exact, according to a Wall Street Journal story.

Witkoff brings a similar mentality to the region. Although Witkoff, like Kushner, lacks previous diplomatic experience, he does have an international cast of friends and contacts, in the Middle East and around the world. A longtime associate in New York’s real-estate industry calls him an “excellent negotiator”.

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Despite nominally serving as the president’s ears and mouth in the Middle East, Witkoff was also dispatched to Moscow to negotiate the release of Marc Fogel, a teacher who had been held in prison for three years on marijuana charges. Witkoff is also part of the negotiating team seeking to end the Russia-Ukraine war, over and against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s objections and others who warn that the Trumpians are ignoring Kyiv. Witkoff is unperturbed by such talk. In a news conference shortly after Fogel’s release, he described his role this way: “He [Trump] asks, and we say yes.”

Witkoff, in his light brown overcoat and perfectly starched collar, has become a fixture of television news as he represents the Trump administration globally. It’s a long way from the days in the early Nineties, when he used to personally collect rent, while carrying a gun, from his tenants in The Bronx, and where he got his start in the business.

Born in 1957 in The Bronx, he graduated from Hofstra Law School on Long Island in 1983. Afterwards, he landed a job with the real-estate law firm Dreyer & Traub, where one of his clients was none other than … Donald Trump. He then formed a partnership with the late Laurence Gluck that was known as Stellar Management (the “Ste” in Stellar stood for Steve, and the “Lar” part stood for Larry).

Although their business and political paths have long overlapped and even converged, Witkoff’s approach to real estate differs from Trump’s. While Trump built his brand around showy towers, resorts, and golf courses, Witkoff followed a more tried-and-true path through commercial and residential real estate, keeping a low profile and letting his bank accounts do the talking.

Even so, Witkoff would gain a measure of notoriety that few real-estate investors achieve. He moved fast in the business, blowing his way past the stodgy families headed by scions three or four generations removed from the enterprising paterfamilias. He was a scrappy hustler determined to build on his early successes. It helped that this was the Nineties, when commercial real estate had been beaten down by the savings-and-loan scandal, which led to the bankruptcy of several small banks that had a large number of failing new properties on their books. Those who bought low were richly rewarded. Witkoff was one of them.

He was fortunate, too, to have in his corner a financier named Andrew Stone of Credit Suisse First Boston. Stone — who viewed himself as the “Star Trek lender”, boldly lending where others on Wall Street wouldn’t — made bets on up-and-coming real-estate entrepreneurs who showed the ability to spot properties with the potential to bring in enough money to achieve well over their debt service. Besides Witkoff, Stone backed Trump, the developer Harry Macklowe, hotelier Ian Schrager, and the post-Soviet fertilizer king-turned-development mogul Tamir Sapir, among others.

What set Stone apart from most financiers in his position was his willingness to underwrite as much as 97% of a commercial real-estate purchase. That can be deadly if the property doesn’t lease up — if it fails to find enough tenants willing to pay a premium for the quality and location. But if it does lease up, the owner can amass untold riches. Hence, Witkoff’s reputation for high-risk, high-reward deals.

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Besides the famed Woolworth Building, designed by celebrated architect Cass Gilbert, Witkoff’s portfolio at one time included the Daily News Building on East 42nd Street, which the tabloid long ago abandoned, and 33 Maiden Lane downtown.

“He can be tough when he needs to be tough, and he can be charming when he needs to be charming,” said Jonathan Mechanic, chairman of the real-estate department at the law firm Fried Frank and a key figure in New York commercial real estate. “Although I’m not sure I would have seen this coming 20 years ago. I have no doubt that he can feel comfortable talking to anybody at any time.”

Mechanic recalled joining Witkoff at a meeting with Goldman Sachs on the financing of the Daily News building. Witkoff “had been up in The Bronx, and he had his gun attached to his ankle. When he leaned forward, and the gun could be seen”. Aware of the impression he’d made, Witkoff vowed to “come a little lighter afoot” next time.

Whether this combination of gun-toting gumption and charm can bring peace to the Middle East’s warring factions is a different question. As it is, America’s Arab allies have been left unnerved by Trump’s brainstorm for removing Gaza’s population to develop the territory into a sort of Middle East riviera. At stake is nothing less than the expansion of the Abraham Accords to include what once was unthinkable: formal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

High risk, high reward, indeed.