The Associated Press is reporting that the Chinese government has said yes to nine previously rejected trademarks for Donald Trump.
Publicly available records do not indicate why the nine applications were initially rejected, or why the trademarks were then granted provisional approval eight to 15 weeks later.
“The speed with which these appeals were decided is mind-blowing,” said Matthew Dresden, an intellectual property attorney at Harris Bricken in Seattle. “I have never seen any decisions made that quickly. That suggests special treatment. But that’s just procedural. Substantively, it’s impossible to say whether any of this is unusual.”
The running tally on trademarks China has been speedily granting Trump’s businesses continue to rise. Since he became President, Trump’s businesses are at 39.
The Trump Organization now has at least 125 trademarks in China formally or provisionally approved, according to Chinese public records. Just four were invalidated, back in 2013. Three more have been rejected, with appeals pending, and one application is dead, according to China’s Trademark Office database.
Three applications were subsequently split so the number of individual trademark decisions is slightly higher than the number of applications in Chinese records.
Nothing to see here. America First and all of that.