One of the odd things about the Trump brand is for a man who lives in a golden palace with golden ceilings and golden plumbing fixtures, the stuff he actually hawks is often pretty lowbrow.
Three weeks before Donald Trump officially accepted the Republican nomination last year, the Trump Organization renewed licenses on hundreds of new domain names for business ventures at home and around the world—including CelebrityApprenticePoker.com, TrumpForeclosureInvesting.com and TrumpTowerMoscow.com.
But alongside such gems as TrumpOnIce.com and TrumpForeclosureInvesting.com, Politico notes that the organization built to serve Donald Trump has been busily registering new business ideas both weird and not since their boss was installed into the Oval Office.
The re-registration of domain names continued after Trump’s inauguration, with hundreds of sites kept for potential new businesses in Ireland, the United Arab Emirates, China, India and Indonesia once he was already in the Oval Office.
This may be as close as we're going to get to a Trump foreign policy stance, so enjoy it. Expect closer relations with the United Arab Emirates, Moscow, and China, even as Trump tires of interminable phone calls with more hostile nations like, er, Australia. And for those asking what Trump might gain personally from moving so many functions of state to his own priorities, the answer is branding, baby!
Trump’s company also renewed 59 other site names to potentially extend the Mar-a-Lago brand beyond Palm Beach, most first registered in 2012, from Chicago to Las Vegas to Panama and Toronto.
Politico notes that while many corporations gobble up hundreds or thousands of domain names to preempt detractors or "squatters" from using them, these requests "can be traced back directly to [the Trump Organization's] general counsel." That means somebody at the company is hand-picking which to register, which at the very least gives good insight into what's on the company's mind right now.
And what's on their mind is, as usual, expansion of the Trump brand. Oh, and Mar-a-Lago Toronto.