Donald Trump is involved in over 500 companies. It’s an absurd number, one that is generated by Trump’s tendency to encapsulate every business deal behind a new entity. It makes Trump’s relationships—both within the United States and beyond—intentionally difficult to track. Though Trump puts himself forward as a developer, he hasn’t actually been behind a new building in the US in well over a decade. Instead Trump has been involved in what might seem a laughable number of licensing deals and off-the-wall promotional connections, from failed Trump Steaks to failed Trump Air to a string of failed Trump magazines. While these deals are written so that Trump gets some up front cash and rarely has any downside to failure, there is definitely an upside—streams of revenue in the case of the rare success. It’s a system that has left Donald Trump with tip jars scattered around the planet.
… the developers of Trump Towers Pune, an elegant pair of 23-story black-glass pillars, have an extraordinary new marketing tool they are moving quickly to exploit: the president-elect of the United States.
Those developers have already visited the United States since the election to meet with the President-elect and plan how they can best take advantage of Trump’s increased brand-visibility. And those towers are just a fraction of the deals Trump has in India—deals that give Trump a monetary incentive that may be in conflict with national policies.
In just under nine weeks, Mr. Trump will take control of a portfolio of public business between the United States and India, the world’s two largest democracies, supervising debates over issues including climate change, maritime shadowboxing with China and the nuclear standoff with Pakistan.
It’s just one example of how Trump’s web of business entanglements threatens to push, pull or twist American policy and international agreements. That includes the potential to support autocrats who are tearing down democracies.
Turkey is a nation in crisis, scarred by government crackdowns following a failed coup attempt and on a potential collision course with the West. It is also home to a valuable revenue stream for the president-elect’s business empire: Trump Towers Istanbul.
Donald Trump’s company has been paid up to $10 million by the tower’s developers since 2014 to affix the Trump name atop the luxury complex, whose owner, one of Turkey’s biggest oil and media conglomerates, has become an influential megaphone for the country’s increasingly repressive regime.
Trump has business deals and business partners not just in India and Turkey, but in Azerbaijan, UAE, Indonesia, Panama and many, many more.
Some companies reflect long-established deals while others were launched as recently as Trump’s campaign, including eight that appear tied to a potential hotel project in Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich Arab kingdom that Trump has said he “would want to protect.”
Previous America presidents have sought to project power as an instrument of national policy and, however misguided, many have attempted to use that power as a means of protecting nascent democracies and to push back against forces seen as representing both short and long-term dangers.
But for Donald Trump, the armed forces of the United States, the negotiating power of the State Department, and the leverage of the entire nation in international agreements, has just become available as a tool to drive revenue to his accounts.
Trump has refused calls to sell or give his business interests to an independent manager or “blind trust,” a long-held presidential tradition designed to combat conflicts of interest. Now, policy and ethics experts are scrambling to assess the potential dangers of public rule by a leader with a vast web of private business deals.
In addition to his investments, Trump has another huge international involvement: debts. He has loans from banks in China and South Korea.
Deutsche Bank, Trump’s biggest lender, is negotiating what could be a multibillion-dollar settlement over housing-crisis-era abuses with the Justice Department, whose leaders will be Trump appointees.
And that’s only the debts that we know about. It doesn’t include the sources of cash that are a little more hidden.
There is strong evidence that Trump’s businesses have received significant funding from Russian investors. Most notably, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. made that very claim at a real estate conference in New York in 2008, saying “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” Donald Trump Jr. added, “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
America faces the very real prospect that US forces might be ordered into a war—or to set one out—simply because of Trump’s bottom line.
