A Trump family push for profit on three continents breaks historical norms

Washington: A contest of sorts has played out across Europe, the United States and the Middle East in recent days as President Donald Trump's two older sons have pursued a blitz of family moneymaking ventures capitalizing on their father's name and power, each seemingly trying to outdo the other.

It is a rush to cash in that involves billions of dollars with few precedents in US history.

A luxury hotel in Dubai. A second high-end residential tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Two cryptocurrency ventures based in the United States. A new golf course and villa complex in Qatar. And a new private club in Washington. In many cases these new deals promoted over the last week will personally benefit not only Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr, but also the president himself.

"Challenge everything," said the brochure for the new $1 billion, 80-story Trump International Hotel and Tower planned for Dubai, where units went on sale for the first time at prices reaching $20 million apiece, after a giant party held in Dubai this past week to honor Eric Trump and the new project. "Stop at nothing."

The marathon of dealmaking has been so rapid that many elements have drawn limited public attention in the United States, despite most of it being out in the open. That is in part because the sons appeared before mostly fawning crowds but also because the president, his appointees and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk were making headlines with their own steady stream of norm-breaking controversies.

"There's nothing like it," said Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University historian who has written books on Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, addressing the financial conflicts of interest that have emerged in Donald Trump's second term.

Both Trump sons are involved in a wide range of family business ventures. Eric Trump, the president's middle son, runs the Trump Organization, the main family business, which specializes in real estate. He also serves on the board of a holding company that oversees World Liberty Financial, the family's cryptocurrency firm, and recently joined forces with his older brother, Donald Trump Jr, to start a bitcoin mining operation, American Bitcoin.

The White House has said there are no ethics issues because Donald Trump's sons run the businesses. "The president's assets are in a trust managed by his children," Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said. "There are no conflicts of interest."

But Trump's financial disclosure report, which he is legally required to file, shows that he still personally benefits financially from most of these ventures.

Eric Trump noted that many of the ventures they are promoting -- from crypto to real estate -- were underway before their father was reelected.

"We are building the most iconic projects on earth and leading the way in the digital revolution," Eric Trump said in a statement to The New York Times.

Donald Trump Jr rejected any suggestion that he was trading on his father's name, saying he has been a businessperson his entire adult life.

He then took a swipe at Hunter Biden, who sold paintings while his father, Joe Biden, served as president.

"It's laughable that the left-wing media thinks that I should lock myself in a padded room while my father is president and cease doing what I've been doing for over 25 years to earn a living and provide for my five children," Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement to the Times. "However, if I did do that, I guess I could always take up painting, which I hear can be quite lucrative."

Indeed, relatives of other presidents -- including Billy Carter (brother of President Jimmy Carter) and Neil Bush (brother of President George W. Bush), along with Hunter Biden -- have had business dealings that have created questions about potential conflicts of interest.

What distinguishes the work of the two Trump sons is that several of these ventures, including the real estate deals and crypto efforts, bring revenues that benefit the president himself as well.

Just in the past 10 days, Donald Trump Jr made stops in Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria on a paid-speech tour he has called "Trump Business Vision 2025." During roughly the same time, Eric Trump was shuttling among Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and other Middle East spots to push the family's real estate and crypto plans.

These pitches played out even as some of Donald Trump Jr.'s business partners were simultaneously rolling out yet another business in Washington that will cash in on his father's return to the White House: a club called Executive Branch.

At $500,000 a person, the private membership club is slated to open by this summer in Georgetown in a sprawling, but defunct, restaurant called Clubhouse. It will feature two bars, a lounge, a restaurant and boardroom -- re-creating the role previously served by the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where donors and acolytes of the president gathered until the family sold it off after Trump's first term.

The club soon will most likely be jammed with Trump family friends, business executives and members of the Trump administration, but will be off limits to members of the public and most members of the news media.

An A-list party was held late last month to celebrate the launch of Executive Branch -- while Donald Trump Jr. was in Europe -- at a hotel a block from the White House. Attendees included Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Paul Atkins, the new chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The founding members of the club, which has already sold all of its membership slots according to organizers, include Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, cryptocurrency executives whose company, Gemini Trust, had been targeted by the SEC until the president named new agency leaders, who in April put a hold on the federal lawsuit.

Jeff Miller, a lobbyist and top Trump fundraiser, is another founding member. In the first quarter of this year, he has registered to represent 39 new corporate clients, including the crypto firm Tether, an overseas operation that was a longtime target of US regulators until recently, when it began to establish itself as major force in Washington and explore opening a U.S. office.

The other owners at the new club, besides Donald Trump Jr., include Zach and Alex Witkoff -- the sons of the president's Middle East envoy -- and Omeed Malik, who leads 1789 Capital, a Florida-based venture capital firm that recently hired Donald Trump Jr. as a senior executive. Investments for 1789 Capital have included companies such as Plaid, a digital finance firm that had lobbied the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau related to a new set of banking rules -- until Donald Trump's team effectively shut down the agency and stalled enforcement of the regulation.

David Sacks, who is a crypto adviser to the president and another founding member, said the goal is not to create a venue for access. Rather, he said in a recent podcast, "we want a place to hang out in D.C." for the "younger, hipper, Trump-aligned Republican."

Even as these real-life ventures were playing out, another push for profit was underway in the virtual world. Investors in the $Trump meme coin are bidding to become the top 220 owners of the collectible coin and win a dinner with the president later this month. A meme coin is a type of cryptocurrency based on an online joke or celebrity mascot that has no practical function other than speculation.

The $Trump meme coin is controlled by a company run by the Trump sons and their business partners, but the president has actively encouraged his supporters to buy it.

Javier Selgas, CEO at Fr8Tech, a shipping company, announced this past week -- while Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were abroad -- that his Monterrey, Mexico-based company would spend $20 million to buy $Trump meme coin tokens.

Buying the tokens -- in essence, giving money to the Trump family -- is "an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced and free trade between Mexico and the US," Selgas said in a statement, which was also filed with the SEC, as his company is publicly traded.

In some cases, the Trump-family announcements over the past week have involved foreign governments, including those of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Eric Trump flew to Doha, the capital of the tiny Middle East nation of Qatar, on Wednesday as a top government official there signed a deal with a Saudi-based real estate company to build a new Trump golf course and luxury villa complex, a partnership that will bring millions of dollars in branding and management fees to the Trump family.

This is one of six real estate projects now planned in the Middle East, sponsored by Dar Global, the international subsidiary of a Saudi-based real estate firm with close ties to the Saudi royal family. The other projects are in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Dubai.

"They always arrive at the word 'yes,' which is a beautiful thing," Eric Trump said while in Dubai this past week, saying that it took only a month to get the required real estate permits from the government there. "They do it quickly."

On a crypto conference panel in Dubai, Eric Trump sat next to Zach Witkoff, one of the founders of the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, who announced that a venture capital firm backed by the government of Abu Dhabi would invest $2 billion using a form of digital currency offered by World Liberty. This deal alone could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the Trump family and its partners.

Donald Trump Jr. had gotten a head start on his brother, arriving April 25 in Budapest, where he had a brief meeting with Hungary's foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, and then was paid to appear at a dinner gathering among business leaders.

"I'm just here as a business guy, but as someone who understands how the world works," Donald Trump Jr. told an executive from Portfolio Hungary, the organization that sponsored the event, adding that while he was in Eastern Europe and the Balkans he was looking for possible new deals. "You never know if there is going to be a Trump real estate deal."

His next stop was Serbia, where the Trump family is planning a new hotel on land owned by the government there. He met with President Aleksandar Vucic, whose administration approved the hotel project, which also includes Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, as the developer.

Donald Trump Jr. then moved on to Bulgaria, where he appeared on a stage along with Antoni Trenchev, co-founder of a cryptocurrency firm called Nexo that was fined $45 million by the SEC in 2023 and agreed to leave the U.S. marketplace.

With Donald Trump Jr. on the stage at his side, Trenchev announced that Nexo had already talked to United States regulators and it was reentering the U.S. market. "America is back -- and so is Nexo," Trenchev said, celebrating his meeting where he paid to be with the son of the president of the United States, as well as the company's pending return to the market there.

Donald Trump is doing his part as well to help drive business to the family.

He attended a fundraising event at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida this past weekend. That makes his 10th visit to the club since he returned to the White House in January, with many of the weekend visits featuring political gatherings that pay bills to his family.