Trump Congratulates Disney’s Bob Iger On Abu Dhabi Theme Park

President Donald Trump has praised Disney’s plans for its upcoming theme park in Abu Dhabi which he says were personally presented to him in the Oval Office by the media giant’s chief executive Bob Iger.

Talking earlier today in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Trump named a number of American companies which are deepening their ties to the region and said “Disney – I see their new theme park is going to be incredible. Bob Iger was in my office the other day and he was showing it to me and it’s going to be incredible.”

Trump is famous for his close ties to Middle East and has made the most of them. His comments about Disney come at the end of a week-long trade mission to the Middle East which has seen him secure $200 billion of deals in the UAE alone. They include a $14.5 billion commitment for local flag-carrier Etihad Airways to buy 28 Boeing aircraft and a $60 billion partnership between the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and American energy companies including ExxonMobil.

Trump’s admiration for the region has managed to cool tensions that have been boiling with Disney for a number of years. Since his first term in office began in 2017 Trump has repeatedly described Disney’s ABC network as a “fake news” outlet and is famously close to self-made billionaire Ike Perlmutter who unsuccessfully led a stockholder revolt at Disney last year before selling his shares in the company.

“He got out of Disney because they went woke. He didn’t want woke Donald Duck,” Trump said at an event in December last year at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Trump was referring to dark clouds which gathered over Disney’s Magic Kingdom whilst he was out of office. They were driven by Disney’s vocal opposition to an education bill passed by the Florida legislature in March 2022. Nicknamed the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, it prohibits teachers of younger students from discussing sexual orientation and sexual identity. With roughly 80,000 staff at its Walt Disney World theme park complex in Orlando and a famously liberal leaning, it is no surprise that Disney opposed it.

This led to it becoming locked in a battle with Trump loyalist, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who seized control of the special taxing district which allowed Disney to self-govern its Florida theme park complex. It triggered claims and counterclaims from both sides, at a state and federal level, and at the height of the conflict, in March 2023, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that “Disney has become a Woke and Disgusting shadow of its former self, with people actually hating it. Must go back to what it once was, or the ‘market’ will do irreparable damage.”

Later that year, Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, told Iger to “go f*** himself” for pulling advertisements from his platform after they appeared alongside antisemitic content and hate speech. Disney resumed advertising on X around a year later and finally agreed to put its differences with DeSantis aside too.

It took more than the wave of a wand for Trump to praise Disney. Its decision to open a theme park in Abu Dhabi was the driving force behind the rapprochement and the wizards who helped that happen work for Miral, the leading leisure operator in the Middle East.

As this report explained, Miral runs a collection of the most-visited theme parks in the region which are all worldwide flagships in their fields. Disney was attracted by Miral’s consistent curation of the highest quality attractions based on blue chip brands including Ferrari, SeaWorld and Warner Bros. However, that’s not all as Miral has also turned Abu Dhabi into a cultural powerhouse by bringing the Louvre and the Guggenheim to its Saadiyat Island cultural district. Elsewhere in the city Miral also operates the Qasr Al Watan Royal palace where Trump was talking today.

Miral’s visionary chief executive Mohamed Al Zaabi posted a video of Trump’s comments about Disneyland Abu Dhabi on his Instagram Stories with the caption “what a theme park, even presidents talk about it”. For Disney, Trump words really are a whole new world.