In a whirlwind of political drama and business maneuvering, Serbia’s skyline is set for a dramatic transformation. In early November 2025, Serbia’s National Assembly—dominated by President Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party—fast-tracked a special law, known locally as a lex specialis, specifically to pave the way for the demolition of the General Staff Building in Belgrade. This move, which circumvents existing Serbian law, is designed to clear the site for a new Trump Tower, a $500 million hotel and residential project spearheaded by Jared Kushner’s company, according to The Guardian.
The General Staff complex, heavily scarred by the 1999 NATO bombing, has long stood as a symbol of Serbia’s turbulent recent history. Its sudden fall from protected cultural status to demolition target has sparked controversy, raising questions about the intersection of political power and international business interests.
On November 5, 2024, Donald Trump was re-elected president of the United States. Since then, the Trump family’s global business activities have accelerated at a remarkable pace. According to calculations published by Reuters and cited by The Guardian, the family’s income in the first half of 2025 soared seventeen-fold—from $51 million to $864 million—with more than 90 percent of these gains coming not from their traditional real estate empire, but from ventures in cryptocurrencies. This financial surge has fueled a wave of new projects from Vietnam to Serbia, and even further afield.
The Belgrade project, however, is at the heart of growing concerns. Two weeks after Trump’s election victory, Estela Radonjic Zivkov, then deputy director of Serbia’s Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, was paid a visit by two officers from Serbia’s Security and Intelligence Agency (BIA). According to The Guardian, they introduced themselves politely but delivered a clear warning: she should not challenge the demolition of the General Staff complex to make way for the Trump Tower. The officers reportedly made it plain that there was a “state interest” in the project.
Despite the pressure, Radonjic Zivkov went public with her concerns, describing the intervention of the security service in matters of cultural heritage as “unusual and worrying.” Nevertheless, her efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. The protected status of the General Staff complex was revoked, and the path was cleared for demolition. In a further twist, the director of the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments was arrested for forging documents related to the revocation of the building’s protected status. The investigation soon implicated close allies of President Vučić, but on November 7, 2025, the National Assembly passed a law explicitly designed to facilitate the Trump Tower construction project, as reported by The Guardian.
The deal itself, to which The Guardian claims to have access, is described as a project of “special significance.” It is no ordinary investment: the Trump Tower is billed as bringing “unsurpassed luxury” to the Serbian capital. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a frequent diplomatic envoy, had visited Belgrade months earlier to launch the project. All that was needed was official approval—and that, it appears, was swiftly delivered.
President Vučić, described by The Guardian as “the propagandist of the authoritarian Milosevic who has ruled Serbia since 2017,” faced mounting mass protests over corruption and found himself increasingly isolated from Western allies due to his close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Trump Tower project, therefore, was seen as an opportunity to forge new alliances and attract international investment.
In March 2025, Donald Trump Jr. visited Serbia for what Vučić described as a “cordial conversation” about bilateral relations between Serbia and the United States. The visit was highlighted on Trump Jr.’s podcast, underscoring the close ties between the Trump family and the Serbian leadership.
But the controversy does not end at Serbia’s borders. The Trump family’s business ambitions have expanded into other fragile democracies, including Romania and Albania, where new real estate investments were announced in 2025. In May, Eric Trump attended the groundbreaking ceremony for a $1.5 billion Trump golf resort in Vietnam—a project that was approved with unusual speed, taking just three months to clear regulatory hurdles that typically take years. According to The Guardian, a month before the ceremony, President Trump had imposed 46 percent tariffs on Vietnamese goods, among the highest in the world. Yet by July, Vietnam and the US reached a customs agreement that reduced tariffs to 20 percent. While there’s no direct evidence that these tariff cuts were an explicit reward for greenlighting the golf complex, the timing has raised eyebrows among analysts and anti-corruption advocates.
Elsewhere, the Trump family’s business ties have extended to the Persian Gulf, where longstanding relationships with the region’s rulers have led to a flurry of new projects. In Saudi Arabia, news broke in November of yet another potential venture, just days before Trump agreed to sell F-35 fighter jets to the kingdom. In Qatar, after the Trumps signed a deal for a golf resort with a state-owned company, President Trump received a “flying palace” as a gift, which he will use as a presidential plane. US troops were then sent to protect the small Gulf state in October, according to The Guardian.
Critics have not been silent. Christopher Harrison, a senior US foreign policy official under President George W. Bush and now head of the anti-corruption group Project Dekleptocracy, accused the Trump family of operating a “pay-to-play” system. “If any of this gives the impression of abuse of public office for private gain – known as corruption – ethics experts fear it invites other rulers to do the same,” The Guardian reported. Despite these allegations, Eric Trump has insisted to CNN that “nothing I do has anything to do with the White House.” Jared Kushner, for his part, recently told the press, “What people call a conflict of interest, I call it experience and the trusted relationships we have around the world.”
Serbian Finance Minister Sinisa Mali, a key Vučić ally, has denied that the Trump real estate project influenced recent political decisions. “It is obvious that the project had no influence on recent political decisions,” Mali told The Guardian. Yet, the optics remain troubling: the US imposed new sanctions on the Serbian oil industry in October 2025 due to its majority Russian ownership, while US tariffs on Serbia remain among the highest in the world.
For now, the Trump Tower project in Belgrade stands as a symbol of the complex, sometimes murky interplay between business, politics, and international relations in the post-2024 world. Whether it will deliver on its promise of “unsurpassed luxury” or simply fuel further controversy remains to be seen. But one thing is certain—the eyes of both Serbia and the world will be watching as the skyline changes and questions of influence, ethics, and power continue to swirl.