Op-Ed

Towers of Conflict: Eric Trump's Gulf Building Spree Is the Emoluments Clause on Fire

While his father conducts Middle East diplomacy, Eric Trump is stamping the family name on Gulf skyscrapers and golf courses worth billions.

By Nadia Okonkwo, Editor at Large

Published

In his first term, Donald Trump promised no new foreign deals while in office. In his second, that promise is rubble — and Eric Trump is the one laying the bricks.

Since the president returned to power, the Trump Organization, where Eric serves as executive vice president, has stacked up branded real-estate deals across the Gulf. Per the Times of Israel, the company has been tied to a massive Saudi-owned development, adding to a growing regional footprint. MarketBeat reported a $1 billion Dar Global project in Saudi Arabia. And per Yahoo News, the family struck a deal for a Trump golf development in Qatar involving a company owned by the Qatari government.

Read that last part again. A business owned by the president's son is partnering with an entity owned by a foreign government — while that son's father sets American policy toward that same government. This is the precise scenario the Constitution's foreign emoluments clause was written to forbid: a federal officeholder taking things of value from foreign states. Trump defenders wave it away, but the framers were not worried about hypotheticals. They were worried about exactly this.

Mother Jones laid out the broken pledge plainly: the "no new foreign deals" commitment collapsed almost immediately, replaced by a deal-a-month cadence across Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. The Trump Organization's answer — that these are private licensing arrangements, not government transactions — is a distinction without a difference when the counterparties are sovereign wealth funds and state-linked developers courting favor.

Eric has framed all of this as ordinary international business, the family simply building where the demand is. But there is nothing ordinary about the timing. The deals cluster in exactly the countries where his father is conducting high-stakes diplomacy, arms sales, and technology negotiations. When a Gulf monarchy can enrich the first family by approving a tower or greenlighting a golf resort, every diplomatic ask from Washington carries an invisible price tag, and every Gulf favor carries an invisible IOU.

The public sees it. Polling cited in reporting on the family's ventures shows more than six in ten Americans oppose Trump's foreign business dealings. That is not a partisan sliver. That is a national gut-check registering something obvious: you cannot serve the country and shop your surname to its negotiating partners at the same time.

The defense that "the towers were coming anyway" misses the point entirely. The scandal isn't that Trump-branded buildings exist. It's that the branding revenue now flows to the sitting president's family from governments with active business before the United States, with Eric personally cutting the deals. Every crane rising over Jeddah or Doha with TRUMP on the hoarding is a monument to a conflict the family refuses to even pretend to manage.

Eric Trump calls it building a legacy. The rest of us should call it what the founders feared: a president's household on the payroll of foreign kings.

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