Republican presidential nominee and former US President Donald Trump speaks during an election rally in Atlanta, Georgia, US.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Days before Donald Trump became president in 2017, he promised to rein in his company's freewheeling ways, assuring the American people that his family business would not "take advantage of" his presidency.
Nearly eight years later, he is making no such promises.
The former and possibly future president is cashing in on a variety of new ventures as he seeks a second term, without offering to reinstate the guardrails from his first, according to financial filings and interviews with people familiar with his finances.
The ethics plan Trump imposed on himself when he was in the White House had limitations and its share of critics, but would prohibit much of this current deal-making.
Even if Trump eventually agrees to forgo future foreign business -- the centerpiece of that earlier plan -- the recent deals will most likely be grandfathered in, because his company moved swiftly to announce them well ahead of any potential new constraints, one of the people said.
This year alone, the Trump Organization struck real estate deals in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, countries that are central to American foreign policy interests.
Trump also turned his social media platform into a publicly traded company whose shares could be bought by foreigners. And he recently unveiled a cryptocurrency venture that might face oversight from federal regulators who are appointed by the president.
The convergence of Trump's business and political interests poses a series of looming conflicts even greater than those he encountered as president. Since Trump left office, his family company and a son-in-law have gone into business with foreign governments that a second Trump administration would engage with, including Oman, Serbia and Saudi Arabia.
Doing business overseas with government entities, not just traditional corporations, creates an ethical minefield where both those governments and Trump family business interests could benefit from U.S. foreign policy, experts said.
"It is really worrisome," said Mark K. Updegrove, a presidential historian who heads the LBJ Foundation in Austin, Texas. He said he knew of no historical precedent for an American president to be tied to a foreign government entity through a family business. "It could prompt him to make policy decisions that he would not otherwise make."
Such concerns about Trump's decision-making are not entirely new. A top adviser questioned whether Trump had adopted a friendlier approach to Turkey as president because he had business there. But even those kinds of traditional business conflicts are more numerous now, and if Trump were to win, there would be little ability to curb them, legal and ethics experts said.
A landmark Supreme Court ruling in July, for instance, granted presidents broad immunity for official acts taken in office -- a sweeping protection that could prevent prosecutors from bringing future charges against Trump.
To curb potential conflicts, Trump's critics would likely rely on the so-called foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits federal officials from accepting gifts or payments from other governments but proved difficult to invoke during Trump's tenure in the White House.
"The whole purpose of this clause in the Constitution is to make sure that the president does not have divided loyalties," said Deepak Gupta, a lawyer who represented Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal nonprofit group, when it sued Trump over emoluments during his presidency. The legal questions raised by such lawsuits were never resolved, as Trump's term ended before a final court ruling, leading the Supreme Court to dismiss the matter in January 2021 as moot.
In the event of a second term, Gupta said, there would be "direct profit-sharing relations with a foreign sovereign." He added, "It would be a clearer case."
When Trump took office in 2017, his company began a four-year hiatus from new international deals and vowed to donate to the U.S. Treasury any profits earned from foreign governments at his existing properties.
Trump also shook up the ranks of the company. He handed over the reins to his eldest sons, hired an outside ethics adviser empowered to block certain domestic transactions and appointed a chief compliance counsel. The compliance job, one of Trump's lawyers said at the time, was to ensure that the company operated "at the highest levels of integrity."
Asked whether Trump would adhere to those terms if reelected, Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for his campaign, did not address the question but said he had lost money as president.
"President Trump removed himself from his multibillion-dollar real estate empire to run for office and forwent his government salary, becoming the first president to actually lose net worth while serving in the White House," Leavitt said -- a claim disputed by presidential historians who cited six presidents going back as far as Thomas Jefferson.
Trump, the campaign spokesperson added, "didn't get into politics for profit; he's fighting because he loves the people of this country."
Eric Trump, who oversees the day-to-day operations of the family business, has not indicated whether he would impose ethical constraints on the company. "The first term, we did everything imaginable to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and frankly, we got crushed anyway," he said in an interview. "We can't just sit out in perpetuity, and I won't."
Even with the company's self-imposed restrictions during Trump's presidency, the Trump Organization remained very much open for business. Lobbyists, lawmakers and favor-seekers of all types spent lavishly at Trump's private club in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, and at the Trump hotel in Washington, which he later sold. Foreign officials and executives stayed at his hotels and joined his clubs.
Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in government ethics, said that the measures Trump put in place in 2017 were "weak and riddled with holes" and mainly for optics. Going forward, she said, "it is telling and ominous" if Trump refuses to reinstate even those restrictions.
"He will feel even less constrained by ethical or public relations concerns than he was in his first administration," she said.
At its core, the Trump Organization is a New York-based real estate business with a portfolio of American hotels, golf courses, residential buildings and office towers -- some that Trump owns, others that he is paid to put his name on and operate.
But after Trump's 2020 election loss and the violence at the end of his term on Jan. 6, 2021, the company looked abroad for more partners as some mainstream American businesses cut ties with Trump properties.
It started in 2022, when Trump clubs began hosting a series of tournaments run by LIV Golf, the upstart professional league financed by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The arrangement generated large payments to the Trump Organization, while also driving customers to Trump National Doral Miami, which held another LIV tournament this past April, and other Trump properties.
The Trump Organization struck its biggest Saudi partnership with Dar Al Arkan, a Saudi-based real estate company. Over the last two years, the companies signed deals to build luxury hotels or golf courses in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Dubai; and Oman.
Dar Al Arkan is privately owned, but has close financial ties with the Saudi government. And it is building one of the projects on land owned by the government of Oman, effectively putting the former president's family in business with the monarchy there.
Oman would be an important partner to a Trump administration as well. It has close economic ties with Iran, so it continues to play a vital diplomatic role in a volatile region.
Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and former White House adviser, has also teamed up with the Saudi government, which put $2 billion into a private equity fund Kushner set up after leaving the White House. One of Kushner's deals involves building a luxury hotel on a government-owned site in Serbia, with profits being shared with the government landlord.
Kushner has said he won't return to government if his father-in-law wins. But even so, his entanglements in Saudi Arabia and Serbia could pose a conflict for Trump, ethics lawyers said.
As the former president campaigns for reelection, Trump continues to praise the government of Saudi Arabia, and has suggested that he would work to include the country in normalization accords that other Middle Eastern nations made with Israel.
"If I win, that will be an absolute priority," he said in a recent interview with a Saudi state-owned television channel, in which he also praised the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, as "really a visionary."
Before the Hamas attack on Israel last year, the Trump Organization also sought to open a luxury hotel in Israel, the Times recently reported. One of the company's partners on the prospective deal said the Trumps backed away because of "an ethical issue that had to do with Donald J. Trump as he was getting closer to being considered the Republican nominee."
The former president has also pursued business opportunities in the United States since leaving the White House, capitalizing on his popularity with a sizable segment of the American electorate.
He has marketed Trump-branded books, trinkets and even candy. "Letters to Trump," a coffee-table compendium of personal notes he has received from celebrities, brought in $4.5 million, a recent filing shows. He also reaped a $300,000 royalty payment for "the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!"
His social media platform, Truth Social, stands to make the most money for Trump. Although the company has yet to turn a profit and has struggled to attract new users and advertisers, it went public this year and share prices have surged in recent days, giving Trump, the largest shareholder, a stake valued at $5 billion.
Ethics watchdogs have complained that foreign governments and others looking to score points with Trump could buy shares in Truth Social, while U.S. companies seeking government favors could buy ads on the platform. As a public company, the social platform is also subject to some oversight from the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose chair is appointed by the president.
An even greater conflict might arise from Trump's new cryptocurrency venture: The SEC has sought to crack down on the crypto industry, championing new regulations and filing actions against some of its biggest players.
But if Trump is to be believed, that would change in a second Trump term. At a bitcoin conference this summer, he vowed to fire the current SEC chair, Gary Gensler, a skeptic of the industry, and replace him with a friendly regulator.
"We will have regulations, but from now on the rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry," Trump said, adding that he would make the United States the "crypto capital of the planet."