Photo: President Donald Trump delivers delivers remarks to troops at Al Udeid Air Base, Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Doha, Qatar. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

Thinking about getting into the influence-peddling game in Washington? It’s hard to imagine a better time than right now. We’re nine months into the second Trump regime, and already, as the journalist and author Casey Michel put it recently in The Atlantic, “America has never seen corruption like this.”

Michel’s argument rings true no matter what kind of unsavory influence you’re interested in. Bribing foreign officials on behalf of American corporations? One of Trump’s first actions was an executive order stoping enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Former politician or White House official looking to leverage your connections on behalf of foreign regimes — particularly the authoritarian ones as committed to oil extraction as they are disinterested in human rights and political freedoms? Recognizing, alas, that that characterization increasingly applies to the United States as well, the volume of fossil fuel money seeking an investment home is seemingly limitless.

Or, perhaps you’d rather shape U.S. domestic policy. In that case, you might follow the lead of the oil and gas industry, which, by one measure, poured some $450 million into the 2024 election cycle to support Trump and Republican politicians. The payoff came quickly: Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” gives the industry $80 billion in subsidies over the next ten years.

Michel’s most recent book, Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, was published during the innocent days (joking!) of the Biden administration. The book explored the web of lobbyists, PR gurus, and former politicians who are paid to influence the U.S. government on behalf of foreign regimes. It’s a slimy world — but also a prestigious, a lucrative, and an enthusiastically bipartisan one. (For a deeper dive into Foreign Agents and foreign lobbying’s lengthy legacy, you can read or listen to my conversation with Michel from last October.)

In mid-July I spoke with Michel about the unsettling proportion of authoritarian influence peddling that is funded by oil, how petrostates are seeking to buy influence among the White House and its tech oligarch backers, and whether the sheer shamelessness and clumsiness of Trump-era corruption might prove to be a silver lining in spurring future reforms.

The conversation below has been condensed and edited significantly for clarity and accuracy.

Want to listen to the whole thing? Adam’s extended interview with Casey Michel is available on the Drilled podcast here (or wherever you get your podcasts).

Your recent piece in The Atlantic, “America Has Never Seen Corruption Like This,” pretty much sums it up. Let’s start with some of the arguments you make.

The article was trying to survey the field of the last six months or so — how historic the scope and the scale of the corruption emanating from and running through the White House and the world of Trump affiliates and the Trump family and, of course, the Trump Organization, truly is.

Donald Trump is by no means the first president or administration embroiled in corruption scandals. Go back to the days of Ulysses S. Grant and his family members and inner circles. Warren Harding and Teapot Dome. Richard Nixon and Watergate. Even though [Watergate] is predominantly remembered as a political story, which it absolutely was, it was also a story of rank corruption, especially corporate corruption, regarding linkages with the White House. Those are all scandals unto themselves.

But what we have seen over the last six months blows all of that out of the water. There really is no historic comparison for the scope, the scale, and the speed with which all of this has happened. You can talk about the Qatari jet, the $400 million luxury liner gifted from a foreign dictatorship directly to a sitting president. You can talk about the crypto and the meme coins. You could talk about the Trump Organization itself. That’s all beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.

You could also talk about the policy developments and how the administration has taken an absolute sledgehammer to whatever kind of anti-corruption bonafides the U.S. once had. Almost all of those have been completely decimated, either unenforced, completely dissolved, [or had resources slashed] for investigations themselves.

Your book, Foreign Agents, focuses on governments, authoritarian regimes around the world, hiring [former] U.S. officials, politicians, influencers of various kinds who have access to the U.S. government and can shape American policy. What is the state of the corrupt union when it comes to foreign influence on the United States?

The state of affairs right now is, I don’t know, terrible? Terrifying? Unsettling?

I guess it depends if you’re making money or not.

Well, sure. It depends on what kind of line of work you’re in, I suppose. What kind of scruples [you have] about working with some of the most heinous regimes around the world.

Just as a bit of context, in the United States of America it’s perfectly legal for you or I or any other American to go lobby on behalf of not only any cause that we want, but any regime that we want. You and I can, right now, go talk to our legislators about how wonderful the regime in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates or Gabon or Venezuela might be.

That’s predominantly because in the First Amendment we have the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, which is just an old-timey way of saying lobbying. If [people are] being paid to do that by these foreign governments, they just have to register with the Department of Justice and declare what they’re doing and disclose how much they’re making.

And you and I can go online to the Department of Justice website and look through that database of all of these American lobbyists who are selling themselves to regime after regime around the world. It’s not just traditional lobbyists in DC. It’s PR specialists, consultants, many former members of Congress or previous administrations. A whole constellation of American industries are now congealing within the one broader umbrella industry of foreign lobbying.

This is now a multi-billion-dollar industry. These are extremely effective networks at implementing policies that these foreign regimes want to see implemented. It’s things like arms sales, things like the lifting or prevention of sanctions. It’s even things like fast-tracking energy policies that benefit hydrocarbon producers. Pushing off or gutting green or clean tech reforms that places like China or Azerbaijan or Saudi Arabia — major oil producers — do not want to see pursued.

It’s not just that they’re lobbying officials. These lobbyists [are] really enmeshing themselves in the highest levels of American policymaking. In many ways, crafting American foreign policy that should have been crafted by American legislators or those in the White House.

It very much seems like we’re in a golden age of these foreign lobbying networks being able to operate in the shadows without the rest of us having any idea what they’re doing.

I wanted to ask you about the state of the influence industry in Washington right now. On one hand, there’s tons of money to be made from foreign governments seeking access to the Trump administration. On the other hand, [there] is the fact that the administration is so shameless — or the fact that Trump himself makes decisions based on who talks to him most recently, who flatters him the most, whatever. Does that make it harder for some of the traditional levers of influence in Washington to sell themselves as having access that the average person doesn’t have?

Far be it from me to feel bad about any of these figures, but yes. Through Trump’s first term and certainly well into the Biden era, there was a playbook that they had followed for decades. It was an outgrowth of what traditional lobbying for domestic causes looked like: back-room conversations, one-on-one meetings, in some cases donating directly to election or reelection campaigns. There was no secret sauce. It was about who you knew and who you could access and what kind of doors you could open.

Now what we see with Trump’s second term is that that playbook certainly still exists. And of course much of it does come down to, at the end of the day, who these figures know and what doors they can open. But the range of tactics and tools now available has just been blown out of the water.

I never thought I would see a world in which a sitting president has direct access to not only the so-called meme coins, but is more than happy to host effective pay-to-play dinners for those who have given or invested the most amount of money in a specific crypto venture. I should have had an idea with Trump’s first term, but I never thought I would actually see the day where a sitting president has his real estate company gallivanting around the world and signing up deals in dictatorship after dictatorship, foreign country after foreign country.

I don’t know how traditional lobbying firms are adapting, but I think it is indicative that one of the key figures that has opened up Trump to the world of crypto and crypto-related investments is someone who emerged from that traditional lobbying world, our old friend Paul Manafort, who was jailed on foreign lobbying charges, then pardoned by Trump, and in the last year or two has emerged as this key player in the crypto space. Manafort is many things, but there is a certain skill set that he brings to bear in terms of opening up avenues of influence.

What are the currencies of influence these days? You mentioned crypto. There’s been reporting about the Saudi government, among others, going all-in on AI and data centers to woo the administration and its tech oligarch backers. But what are they trafficking in these days?

The barest explanation is money, right? It’s whatever means of financing directly into the American president’s pocket, his family’s pockets, his businesses’ pockets, his allies’ pockets. It’s whatever the vehicle of value is. If that’s opening up a new Trump resort in Vietnam, so be it. If that is investing $300 million on a Trump meme coin so you can have dinner with the president, so be it. If that is an investment fund in the United Arab Emirates agreeing that it will participate in exchanges using that Trump meme coin or whatever the other crypto venture is, so be it.

You mentioned AI. This is a space I don’t think has gotten nearly enough attention. It’s a very clear direction that especially the Saudis and the Emiratis have gone in. The most recent agreement between President Trump and Gulf partners is hundreds of millions of dollars in Gulf investment in artificial intelligence, opening up of data centers, and, of course, providing leverage from these regimes over American AI companies themselves or American AI policy writ large.

You do have to comment on the relative savvy, I suppose, of figures like MBS [Mohammed bin Salman] in Saudi Arabia or MBZ [Mohammed bin Zayed] in the United Arab Emirates realizing which way the wind is blowing: that there are all manner of tech oligarchs surrounding Donald Trump and his presidency, and more than willing to back him come hell or high water, and then opening up these new streams of investment from these dictatorships elsewhere. It’s one investment vehicle after another.

It is remarkable how much money these regimes have access to and how desperate they seem to be to find anywhere to invest it. And most of it comes from oil. Some are maintaining the facade of participating in global climate negotiations, transitioning their economies away from oil. But this money is related to the extraction and production of fossil fuels. And it finally has somewhere to go.

It seems like any reason for which a Western investor or fund manager might have had for not accepting that money, any compunction, no longer exists. Is that a fair way to put it, [that] there’s really no shame associated with taking that money anymore?

There’s no shame. There’s no compunction. There’s no reason and no structural incentive to say no. Not only because you should have extremely minimal concern about any kind of investigation or prosecution so long as you remain in the current administration’s good graces. But also because if you do say no [to this type of foreign investment], then your competitor down the street will say yes.

This is a dynamic we have seen elsewhere. It’s a dynamic that does predate the current president. It’s something that we saw in the lobbying industry writ large [and] in the consulting industry, in particular, working with regimes like Saudi Arabia. You can look at oil-producing regime after oil-producing regime around the world — Russia, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan. It is breathtaking to see the scope and breadth of opportunities that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has opened up for the regime. Almost all of that money, if not all of it, [comes] from the production of oil and the broader climate destruction therein.

If you go back to 2018, 2019, after the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia and MBS weren’t exactly persona non grata, but they were having lobbying clients, consulting clients, even investors in Silicon Valley and elsewhere turn them away and turn them down, and say, We will not be seen doing any business with this regime. That was only six, seven years ago. I can’t even fathom getting to that point again. I have no idea what the Saudi regime would have to do to get to that point where American lobbying shops, American investors are turning down Saudi money.

You can cast around the American economy, whether it’s in Hollywood [or] the sports industry, especially things like golf or tennis or boxing. I’m sure at some point down the line the NBA and the NFL will be opening themselves up to Saudi money. I hope it’s not my beloved Portland Trailblazers, who are currently for sale. I live in dread that the Saudis will be the one to purchase them. Or, again, all of the image management shops or even things like Twitter or X. It’s a bottomless list of industries that have opened themselves up to investments from the regime, or opened themselves up to the private equity, hedge fund, and venture capital firms that have opened themselves to Saudi financing.

It’s not just [Trump son-in-law Jared] Kushner. It’s the [venture capital firm] Andreessen-Horowitzes of the world. It really is the biggest names across industry after industry that are now being bankrolled directly by, or at least indirectly via these private investment funds, Saudi wealth. That oil money that the Saudis now have — I think they’re [the Saudi Public Investment Fund] going to pass the $1 trillion mark, if they haven’t already. This is just one regime of many that are realizing, Oh, in the United States of America, it is now the golden era of white-collar crime. And it’s not going to end anytime soon.

There’s obviously the scale of the literal corruption, as we’ve talked about. But there’s also the sense of shame that used to be associated with it. You mentioned the years following the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, [when] there was at least a pretense that companies were turning away from doing business with a regime that would murder journalists.

There was always an element of performance because they were clearly hungry for that money and got back in as soon as they could. But what feels different about the last six months, even the last couple of years, is just how quickly that pretense has faded, or at least the sense that they need to keep up that performance. There’s been sort of a collective shrug, in some ways, because it’s just too much [money].

Again, charitably, if you pull back and examine the incentive structures that these firms, these industries, are engaging in — there is a reality that if they have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, or if they just have any kind of general profit-driven motive, yes, morals are great, but if you’re not committing any crime and don’t have to be concerned about prosecution, then all you’re doing [by taking a moral stand] is ceding ground to your competitors who have fewer scruples than you. Or, who knows — maybe they have just as many scruples as you but also can read the landscape and realize that if they don't do this, someone else will.

You can look at this from the perspective of people who are hired as representatives of these regimes saying, I’m actually a good guy. I’m going to put this money to good use. If I’m inside the tent rather than outside it, I can make more of a difference. You can look at it geopolitically. I remember [presidential] candidate Joe Biden saying we’re going to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” And [then as president] he’s there fist bumping MBS himself —

And asking for more oil production.

The American-Saudi partnership has decades and decades behind it at this point.

There’s a chapter of Foreign Agents which quotes one of these lobbyists from back in the early 1990s. [He] was working for people like Saddam Hussein or the then dictator in places like Liberia. I mean, truly the world’s worst. Someone asked him about it. He said, Look, at the end of the day, it’s just money, and shame is for sissies. That was his quote.

I think that is an ethos that was maybe a little ahead of its time because that is certainly something that we see every single day. There is no, if there ever was, space for or consideration of something like shame. Every day, it appears an outdated phenomenon and term. And that’s too bad because shame can be a wonderful tool in the right hands.

Sometimes the only tool we have.

The ethos of the first foreign lobbying regulations was, Look, we’re not going to ban this. This is all the way back in the 1930s, when they [U.S. lobbyists] were exposed as working for the Nazis and the Soviets and Mussolini. We can’t ban this, but if we bring it to light, bring some transparency, we can shame these Americans into no longer working with these regimes. Rarely has that worked. It’s very nice in theory, but when you talk about the kind of money involved in practice, it is very rare.

The Wall Street Journal has [reported] over the last couple of months about the General Services Administration [GSA] — which, tellingly, is now run by a former KKR private equity executive — demanding consulting giants like McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, my former employer EY, and others, justify their huge federal contracts. I wonder what you make of that effort, whether it’s just an anti-“woke,” anti-DEI effort, or if there’s some substance to telling consulting firms to justify billions of dollars’ worth of contracts.

I would think that if anyone is well placed to justify billions of dollars of contracts, it would be these consulting firms.

Yeah, they’ll find a way.

It’s like DOGE, right? In theory, yes, we should root out fraud and waste and abuse. And yes, American taxpayer dollars should be used to the furthest extent they can. Maybe they [the GSA requests] stem from DEI considerations and anti-“woke” considerations. Maybe there was just someone at BCG or McKinsey or whomever that caught the ire of someone who has Trump’s ear. I don’t know what is actually leading this push itself.

I will say, of course, I have no love lost for any of these firms. Maybe a few of them. Something you and I have talked about in the past is how many of these firms — McKinsey, Teneo, Boston Consulting Group — have worked for regimes like Saudi Arabia and opened up the U.S. to all manner of Saudi influence, as well as plenty of other regimes around the world.

The one that comes to mind recently — the Financial Times did this great reporting on how Boston Consulting Group had been involved, or at least a number of senior partners had been involved, in, euphemistically, creating “exit packages” for Palestinians from Gaza to effectively whitewash Israeli ethnic cleansing campaigns. So, no, when it comes to the Trump administration and some of these consulting firms, please don’t ask me who I’m rooting for.

I suspect they’ll all find a way to win at everyone else’s expense, as they typically do.

Yes, I think that’s right.

I wanted to ask how you’re personally, as a human being, covering this stuff [and] processing this time in history.

On my most optimistic days, it is trying to convince myself that this is a period similar to what we saw in the 1880s, 1890s, and what we saw in the late 1960s, early 1970s in terms of not only things like wealth inequality or corporate sway and lording over American politics, but abuse of power, especially out of the executive office itself. No historic parallel is exactly parallel. This era is completely different in so many ways. But trying to find a historic resonance gives me reason to believe that there is, to use an overused image, a pendulum swing coming in the near future. On my most optimistic days, that is what I like to consider.

Now, on my most pessimistic days, it is simply the reality and the notion that all empires fall and the United States of America has always been and continues to be an empire — in some cases in the most literal sense, with any number of territories that we still have not yet elevated to statehood.

So I swing between those, depending on the day. One thing that gets me through this — [there is] a stack of Batman comics behind me. That always helps. But also just reading widely on things that have nothing to do with American history or, in some cases, nothing to do with history whatsoever.

You’ve got to have those mental health breaks. You can’t just be following the news all day long or you’d probably die.

I too am finding a lot of solace in books — analog, print book[s], where there are no links, no ads, no breaking news. I know it wasn’t written by an algorithm. There’s sort of a hard separation from the reality of the world. And I will, actually, say: The version of the world that comes through the media is not the whole reality. This is not [me] raging against the “fake news media” or whatever. There is an algorithmic bias toward outrage, and there is a rebalancing, whether it’s a graphic novel or a comic or a print book, that helps me reset.

I’m going to put my old man hat on —

That’s my favorite hat.

I have to read analog books. I don’t have a Kindle. I have a pen and I have my book.

One of the benefits of reading history is realizing that the sky has been falling for every nation for centuries, for millennia, so on and so on. Who knows, maybe we’ll get through this or maybe we won’t, but much of it is beyond our control.

And you try to do your good work where you can. You try to make a difference where you can. And you try to spend time with people that you care about and who care about you in turn.

I’m glad you’ve kept the faith and the strength to keep doing this [work] because it is important. Even when it feels like the stuff that you and I talk about — human rights, democracy, corruption — [are] not at the top of the Project 2025 [agenda], let’s say.

Well, to quote one of my favorite Batman movies, “the night is darkest just before the dawn.” Maybe things will get darker yet. I suspect they probably will. I certainly hope that there is a dawn coming.

You’ve got to look for those silver linings where you can and try to have conversations that are worthwhile.