Next week President Trump will take his first international state trip as president and, just as in his first term, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will be his first stop. Trump hasn't minced words about why he's heading there: money.

"I said I'll go if you pay $1 trillion to American companies — meaning the purchase over a four-year period of $1 trillion — and they've agreed to do that," Trump told reporters on March 7, when he first announced that he'd visit the Kingdom.

No Saudi official has confirmed that any such agreement was made, and there's reason to be skeptical of the amount given Trump's penchant for exaggeration and the fact that $1 trillion is more than the value of the entire Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

While it's unclear how much money is actually at stake and who will get it, there's one person that is certain to cash in on Saudi Arabia's financial largesse: Donald Trump. For years up until the present day, in fact, billions of dollars in Saudi money have been quietly flowing to companies owned by the president, his family, and others in Trump's orbit. And, U.S. national security might be paying the price.

Saudi Arabia's courtship of Trump began before he even took office in 2017. At a 2015 rally in his run for president, Trump explained that, "Saudi Arabia — and I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much."

After Trump was elected in 2016, his son-in-law Jared Kushner quickly formed a bromance with Mohammed bin-Salman (MBS), then-Saudi Minister of Defense. That bond would ultimately prove extraordinarily profitable for Kushner and politically advantageous for MBS. Kushner was allegedly responsible for convincing Trump to make Saudi Arabia the destination of his first foreign trip abroad as president, where Trump was lavished with all manner of luxury, including "a multimillion-dollar gala in his honor, complete with a throne-like seat for the president," according to the Washington Post.

The Saudis also gave Trump the opportunity to pose as an international deal-maker, agreeing to hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in U.S. companies, including a wildly exaggerated $110 billion arms sale.

A month after Trump's visit, MBS orchestrated a palace coup — including detaining and torturing political rivals — that yielded him the title of Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. When Trump heard the news, he reportedly told Kushner that, "we've put our man on top."

Even after MBS received international condemnation for ordering the brutal murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Turkey, Trump stood right by MBS's side. "I saved his ass," Trump told investigative reporter Bob Woodward, adding, "I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop."