Trump Organization Announces New Foreign Real Estate Deals In Five Countries During Sitting President's Second Term, Resolves Long-Standing Concern That Family Business Was Letting Reelection Pass Without Fresh Foreign Government Partners
DUBAI. The Trump Organization on Wednesday unveiled an 80-story Trump International Hotel and Tower here, the latest in a series of foreign real estate deals announced by the sitting president's family business during the opening 100 days of the sitting president's second term, an arrangement officials described as fully compliant with the ethics framework the Trump Organization had itself drafted, allowed to lapse, and was now interpreting.
Eric Trump, who runs the company alongside his brother while their father conducts foreign policy from the White House, traveled to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Oman, and Serbia over a six-week stretch to inaugurate Trump-branded residential towers, golf resorts, and luxury developments in jurisdictions whose leaders his father had this year met with, telephoned, threatened with tariffs, or selected as the destination of his first major overseas trip as president. The Dubai project, developed in partnership with DAR Global, a London-listed firm whose largest shareholder is Saudi-based Dar Al-Arkan, will be the company's tallest building outside the United States and the fourth Trump-branded Persian Gulf tower announced during the President's second term.
"This is going to be the most beautiful tower in Dubai, possibly the world," Eric Trump told reporters in remarks that did not address whether sitting American presidents' families had historically incorporated foreign sovereign-adjacent real estate ventures while the president was in office, or the historical record on that question, or whether the historical record was relevant at all. The Trump Organization referred follow-up questions to a voluntary ethics agreement the company had put in place during the first term to bar new foreign deals, an agreement the company permitted to lapse upon the President's second inauguration, and a question the company subsequently declined to answer.
Foreign policy analysts noted that the President was scheduled, three weeks after the Dubai announcement, to depart on his first major foreign trip of the second term, with stops in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, a sequence administration officials clarified was unrelated to the fact that the Trump Organization was actively developing properties in all three countries. A senior White House aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the family had "drawn a bright line" between the President's public duties and the Trump Organization's private interests, before declining to specify where the line was, who had drawn it, or what marker had been used to draw it.
The Trump Vietnam project, a $1.5 billion golf course and luxury residential complex in Hung Yen province, was announced two weeks after the U.S. paused reciprocal tariffs on Vietnam. The Serbia tower, slated for the site of the former Yugoslav military headquarters in Belgrade, is a joint venture with the President's son-in-law's investment firm, which is itself capitalized substantially by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The Oman resort partner is DAR Global, the same firm developing the Dubai tower, the Riyadh tower, and an additional Trump-branded project in Jeddah, an arrangement under which a single Saudi-affiliated entity now holds long-term licensing rights to the Trump name across the entire Persian Gulf at the precise moment American Gulf policy is being set by the licensor's father.
At press time, Eric Trump had departed for a sixth country to evaluate sites for a seventh deal, a development sources within the family business described as evidence that the Trump Organization, unlike most other parts of the federal government, was running smoothly.