Excerpt from NYTIMES (or the Onion - not sure which)

Eric Lipton
By Eric Lipton
Reporting from Syria, Qatar and Washington
April 19, 2026
Last summer, Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, sat in his Capitol Hill office in rapt attention as Middle Eastern investors laid out their plans in a video call to develop coastal property in Syria.

A cruise ship port. A polo club. A Bugatti car showroom. A world-class golf course. All in a country that had just recently been torn apart by civil war.

Nor was this everything. While Mohamad Al-Khayyat, a powerful Syrian-born businessman, was pitching the proposal, his brothers were winning more than $12 billion in government-sponsored contracts to rebuild a wide swath of the devastated Syrian economy.

There was a hitch, though. The Khayyats needed a big favor from Congress with the support of President Trump: the permanent lifting of crippling sanctions imposed on Syria before the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in late 2024.
That is when Mr. Wilson, himself a former real estate lawyer and proponent of the sanctions repeal, offered a tactical suggestion.

“I know how to get the president’s attention,” Mr. Wilson said. “Make it a Trump National Golf Course in Syria.”
Image
Mohamad Al-Khayyat, left, and Tarek Naemo, a Syrian American businessman, posing for a photo with Joe Wilson, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, during a video call to pitch a development plan for coastal property in Syria.
Mohamad Al-Khayyat was already a step ahead. He said he had planned to propose a Trump-branded resort.

At the same time, his two older brothers were negotiating an even bigger real estate partnership with Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter, and Jared Kushner, her husband, to help them finance a multibillion-dollar resort in Albania.
Such a mixing of personal and diplomatic affairs has long been the norm in Middle Eastern nations, where a small set of players have historically run, and profited from, their dominant role in society. But it has become the way Washington operates in Mr. Trump’s second term, too.

Business discussions involving the president’s family, be it merely aspirational like the golf course or active like Mr. Kushner’s project, are consistently blurred with important policy decisions or consequential nation-to-nation negotiations.


Link: But it’s okay, it’s republican initiative or Hunter’s laptop, who knows for sure?