Since Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024, his family’s business empire has embarked on a rapid and controversial global expansion, igniting fierce debate about the intersection of presidential power and private profit. According to an extensive investigation by The Guardian, the Trump Organization—now led by Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump—has broken ground on new golf courses, skyscrapers, and cryptocurrency ventures across countries as diverse as Vietnam, the former Yugoslav states, and Gulf monarchies. The family insists there is a strict wall between the presidency and their business, but critics and ethics watchdogs argue that the overlap is too glaring to ignore.
Eric Trump, in a recent interview with CNN, was adamant: “Nothing I do has anything to do with the White House.” He described a “huge wall” separating their business activities from his father’s presidency. Yet, the pace and scale of the Trump family’s dealmaking since the 2024 election have raised alarms among anti-corruption experts, foreign policy analysts, and political opponents alike. Kristofer Harrison, a senior foreign policy official under President George W. Bush and now head of the Dekleptocracy Project, accused the Trumps of operating a “pay to play” system. “Trump has made authoritarians’ wildest dreams come true,” Harrison told The Guardian, warning that such a system could be manipulated by rival powers, including China.
One of the most striking examples of this new era of Trump business is a $1.5-billion golf resort project near Hanoi, Vietnam. Local documents obtained by The New York Times and The Guardian revealed that the development received “personal attention” from the Trump administration and was approved in just three months—a process that typically takes years. Vietnamese officials wrote that making the Trumps wait by sticking to the usual planning rules could “negatively affect Vietnam’s … relations with the US, especially with President Donald Trump’s administration.” The environmental review and other legal scrutiny were cut short, and Trump himself was set to receive an immediate $5 million from a local developer to license his name.
The human cost of this deal has been acutely felt by villagers near Hanoi, who learned their farmland would be seized for the resort. Compensation was meager—sometimes as little as $12 per square meter and a bit of rice. “We have no right to negotiate,” a local farmer said, reflecting the powerlessness of ordinary citizens in the face of such high-level dealings.
The timing of the Vietnam deal has only added to suspicions. In April 2025, President Trump’s administration imposed a steep 46% import tariff on Vietnamese goods. By July, after a series of high-level meetings and the groundbreaking of the golf resort attended by Eric Trump, the US agreed to reduce tariffs to 20%. No direct evidence has emerged of a quid pro quo, but the sequence of events has fueled speculation that political and business leverage are being traded behind the scenes. Kimberly Kay Hoang, a Vietnam expert at the University of Chicago, told The Guardian that Vietnam’s rulers were “using the same playbook with Trump that they do with China: ‘You scratch my back, I scratch yours, we are going to do these deals and there are going to be a small number of people who are going to benefit.’”
The Trump Organization’s expansion is not limited to Southeast Asia. In the Balkans, a $500 million Trump Tower Belgrade project sparked controversy when Serbian officials annulled the protected status of a historic site to make way for the development. Estela Radonjic Zivkov, deputy head of Serbia’s historical sites institute, described the intervention of state security agents warning her not to oppose the project as “unusual and worrying.” Despite mass protests and the exposure of forged paperwork, the site’s protection was ultimately revoked. Don Jr. visited Serbia in March 2025 for what Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić described as a “cordial conversation” about bilateral relations. Yet, when the chief organized crime prosecutor arrested the head of the heritage institute, implicating senior government allies, the regime responded with a media campaign against the prosecutor and legislative moves to smooth the project’s progress.
Elsewhere in the Gulf, Trump family business has accelerated. A new golf course in Oman, luxury apartments in Dubai, and a golf resort in Qatar have all materialized since the reelection. In Qatar, a state company’s golf resort deal in April 2025 was followed by the gift of a “flying palace” for Trump’s use as Air Force One and, in October, a commitment of US troops to defend the Gulf state. In Saudi Arabia, new golf and hotel projects—overseen by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—were announced just days before Trump agreed to sell F-35 fighter jets to the kingdom in November 2025. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, dismissed concerns about conflicts of interest, saying, “What people call conflicts of interests … I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world.” The Saudis have invested billions in Kushner’s fund.
The Trump family’s financial fortunes have soared in tandem with their global ventures. According to public financial filings and calculations by Reuters, the family’s income jumped nearly 17-fold in the past year—from about $51 million to $864 million. More than 90% of that windfall came not from real estate, but from cryptocurrency, particularly through the Trump-backed enterprise World Liberty Financial. Launched two months before Trump’s reelection, World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin was used in a $2 billion transaction involving Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, and a UAE state-owned fund. The deal could net the Trumps tens of millions annually. Around the same time, Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, who had served a prison sentence in the US for violating anti-money laundering laws, was granted a presidential pardon. Zhao publicly thanked President Trump, posting on X: “Deeply grateful for today’s pardon and to President Trump for upholding America’s commitment to fairness, innovation, and justice.” Trump, for his part, claimed, “I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of good people,” and insisted he had “no idea who he is.”
These developments have set off alarm bells among ethics experts and democracy advocates, who warn that the appearance of “pay-to-play” politics is eroding US democratic norms and emboldening autocratic rulers worldwide. Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security adviser to President Obama, described the situation as “nothing more than an old-fashioned grift tethered to a superpower.” He added, “Corruption is now the norm in geopolitics.”
Despite mounting criticism, White House officials have consistently denied any wrongdoing. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed media reports as “irresponsible” and reaffirmed that “neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.” Siniša Mali, Serbia’s finance minister, likewise told The Guardian that allegations of “undue influence” were unsupported by evidence, insisting that the Trump real estate project had “no bearing on recent policy decisions.”
As the Trump family’s global footprint grows, so too does the debate over whether the presidency can—or should—be separated from private business interests. For now, the world is watching, and the story is far from over.
