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Nader’s story is yet another example of the sleaze, greed, and influence-peddling that has come to seem ordinary in Trump-era Washington. But it also offers a view into a more extraordinary and unprecedented problem: a decision by some of America’s closest allies in the Middle East to leverage their financial resources in common cause with a bunch of ganefs to influence U.S. foreign policy. It is a problem that can be traced back, in ways that haven’t generally been understood, to Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner and his mobile phone.

From the perspective of the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel (there is an Israeli angle to the George Nader story, but it isn’t yet entirely clear), and Egypt, there was an entirely rational reason to support Trump’s presidential bid and try to influence his approach to the Middle East: They did not like former President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy. And while they likely understood that presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was more hawkish that the president she served as secretary of state, the Saudis, Emiratis, and Israelis were concerned that she would be tethered to the Iran nuclear deal and thus Obama’s Iran policy.

They also believed that Clinton would be soft on Islamists. It is an article of faith in Egypt that she enabled the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohamed Morsi in 2011 and 2012. For countries in the Persian Gulf, Egypt provides strategic depth, and “losing” it to the Muslim Brotherhood was a major geopolitical blow. The Israelis, for obvious reasons, were deeply concerned about the accumulation of Islamist political power next door and blamed the Obama administration for abandoning Hosni Mubarak, thereby placing Israel’s security in jeopardy.

With Trump, Washington’s allies got a candidate and president who referred to the Iran nuclear agreement as the “worst deal ever,” surrounded himself with people who either make no distinction between al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood or are simply outright Islamophobes, and has forthrightly declared that the United States supports its friends in the fight against terrorism. Full stop. No caveats, buts, or howevers concerning human rights and the need for political reform. To them, this seemed a lot better than the appreciation of nuance and complexity that was a hallmark of the Obama administration.

Of course, even if an American president shares a given ally’s view of the world, diplomacy does not stop. The job of ambassadors, foreign ministers, and other representatives of foreign governments is to keep the United States on their side. Traditionally, this is done through formal discussions with U.S. officials at the State Department, National Security Council, and Department of Defense; meetings with members of Congress; writing op-eds in influential media outlets; and informal channels of influence, notably the Washington social circuit of dinners, embassy garden parties, national day events and the like. No doubt there was a lot of this going on through the first year and half of the Trump administration. But as

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