Recently, a contest of sorts has been held in Europe, the US and the Middle East as President Trump's two sons pursue a blitz of ventures that use his father's name and power to make money for his family.
That's a rush to cash, as there's no precedent of billions of dollars in American history.
A luxury hotel in Dubai. The second high-end home in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Two US-based cryptocurrency ventures. Qatar's new golf course and villa complex. New private club in Washington. Often these new deals, which were promoted over the past week, will benefit not only Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., but President Trump himself as well.
“Try everything,” said the brochure for the new $1 billion, 80-storey Trump International Hotel and Tower, where units were sold for the first time at a price that reached $20 million after a huge party in Dubai to honor Eric Trump and new projects in Dubai last week. “Don't do anything.”
The trading marathon is so fast that many elements have attracted the public attention in the US, but most of them are publicly available. That's part of what most of his sons appeared before the crowd, and President Trump, his appointee and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk made headlines in a steady stream of normative controversy.
“There's nothing like that,” says Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University who wrote a book on Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald R. Ford, who tackles the financial conflict that emerged during Trump's second term.
Both Trump's sons are involved in a wide range of family-owned ventures. The president's middle son, Eric Trump, runs the Trump organization, a major family-run business specializing in real estate. He also worked on the board of the holding company that oversees the family's crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and recently collaborated with his older brother Donald Trump Jr. to launch Bitcoin in America, a Bitcoin mining operation.
The White House says there are no ethics issues as Trump's sons run the business. “The president's assets lie in the trust that his children manage,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson. “There is no conflict of interest.”
But Trump's financial disclosure report, which he must legally file, shows that he is personally profiting financially from most of these ventures.
Eric Trump noted that before his father was re-elected, many of the ventures they promoted were ongoing, from code to real estate. “We are building the most iconic projects on the planet and leading the way in the digital revolution,” Eric Trump said in a statement in The New York Times.
Donald Trump Jr. rejected the suggestion that he was trading his father's name, saying he was a businessman throughout his adult life. He then swiped Hunter Biden. He sold paintings while his father, Joseph R. Biden Jr., was president.
“It's hilarious that the left-wing media thinks they should be locked up in a padded room while my father is president. I'm going to stop what I've done to provide five children for more than 25 years of living,” Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement to the Times. “But if I did that, I think I could always draw.
Certainly, other presidential parents, including Billy Carter (the brother of President Jimmy Carter) and Neil Bush (the brother of President George W. Bush), have business deals, along with Hunter Biden, who have doubts about potential conflicts of interest.
What sets the job apart by Trump's two sons is that some of these ventures, including real estate transactions and cryptocurrency efforts, bring in revenues that also benefit the president himself.
Over the past 10 days, Donald Trump Jr. has stopped in Hungary, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria on a paid speech tour called “Trump Business Vision 2025.” At about the same time, Eric Trump was pushing for family real estate and cryptography plans among Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and other Middle Eastern spots.
These pitches have even been rolled out with some of Donald Trump Jr. The business partners are simultaneously running yet another business in Washington, cashing in on his father's return to the White House.
At $500,000 per person, the private membership club is set to open by this summer at a restaurant called Clubhouse in Georgetown. It will feature two bars, lounges, restaurants and boardrooms, recreating the role previously served by the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. There, presidential donors and acolite gathered until after Trump's first term, his family sold it.
The club will soon be stuck with Trump's family friends, executives and members of the Trump administration, but it will be off limits to public and most news media members.
The A-list Party took place late last month to celebrate the launch of the administrative division of the hotel, a block away from the White House, when Donald Trump Jr. was in Europe. Participants included Attorney General Pam Bondy and Paul Atkins, the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The founding members of the club, which already sells many membership slots, include Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Cameron and Tyler Winclevoss were targeted by the SEC until April when Trump appointed leaders for the new agency that had decided to file a federal lawsuit in April.
Lobbyist and top Trump fundraiser Jeff Miller is another founding member. In the first quarter of this year, he registered to represent 39 new corporate clients, including Crypto Firm Tether, an international business that has recently established himself as a major force in Washington and began exploring opening US offices.
Other owners of the new club besides Donald Trump Jr. include Zach and Alex Witcoff, the sons of Trump's Middle Eastern envoy, and Omedi Malik, who recently led the Florida-based venture capital firm 1789 Capital, and hired Donald Trump Jr. as a senior executive. The 1789 capital investment includes companies such as Plaid, a digital finance company that lobbyed the Consumer Financial Protection Agency related to the new banking regulations until Trump's team effectively shut down the institution and stopped enforcing regulations.
David Sachs, a code advisor to Trump and another founding member, said the goal was not to create an access venue. Rather, he said on a recent podcast, “We want a place to hang out in DC.”
Even if these real-life ventures were being deployed, there was another commercial purpose underway in the virtual world. $Trump Memecoin investors will become the owner of the top 220 of collectable coins and bid to win dinner with the president later this month. Memecoin is a type of cryptocurrency based on online jokes or celebrity mascots that have no practical features other than speculation.
$Trump's Memo Coin is managed by a company run by Trump's son and his business partners, but President Trump is actively encouraging his supporters to buy it.
Javier Selgas, chief executive of shipping company FR8Tech, announced last week that Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were abroad.
Buying tokens essentially means giving the Trump family money “an effective way to defend fair and balanced free trade between Mexico and the United States,” Selgus said in a statement.
In some cases, last week's announcement of the Trump family involves foreign governments, including that of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Eric Trump flew to Doha, Qatar's small Middle Eastern nation's capital, and on Wednesday signed a contract with the Saudi-based real estate company to build a new Trump golf course and luxury villa complex.
It is one of six real estate projects currently planned in the Middle East and is sponsored by Dar Global, an international subsidiary of a Saudi Arabian real estate company. Other projects are in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Dubai.
“They always arrive at the word 'yes.' This is beautiful,” Eric Trump said while in Dubai last week it only took a month to get the necessary real estate permit from the government. “They'll do that right away.”
On a Dubai crypto panel, Eric Trump was sitting next to Zach Witkoff, one of the founders of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's crypto company, whose government-backed Abu Dhabi government-backed venture capital firm, will invest $2 billion using the form of digital currency provided by the world's Liberty. This deal alone could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for Trump's family and his partners.
Donald Trump Jr. got a head start for his brothers, and arrived in Budapest on April 25, where he held a brief meeting with Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Syjart, and was later paid to appear at a dinner gathering among business leaders.
“I'm here as a business guy, but as someone who understands how the world works,” Donald Trump Jr. told executives at Portfolio Hungary, the organisation that sponsored the event, adding that while he was in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, he was looking for possible new deals. “We will never know if there is a Trump real estate transaction.”
His next destination was Serbia. There, the Trump family is planning a new hotel on government-owned land. He met President Alexander Vic. His administration approved the hotel project. This includes Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a developer. “No one ever said we were difficult to live in. We prepared this pig for Donald JR Trump,” Vucic boasted on his Facebook page about his meal with Trump.
Donald Trump Jr. then moved to Bulgaria and appeared on stage with Antoni Trenchev, co-founder of a cryptocurrency company called Nexo, who was fined $45 million by the SEC in 2023 and agreed to leave the US market.
With Donald Trump Jr. on his side, Trenchev announced that Nexo has already spoken with US regulators and has re-entered the US market. “America is back – and so are Nexo,” Trenchev said.
President Trump has also recently played his role in promoting business for his families.
He attended a fundraising event at the Mar-a-Lago club in Florida last weekend. It will be his 10th visit since he returned to the White House in January. Many of the weekend visits feature political gatherings that pay bills to his family.
