Donald Trump Jr looked completely at ease as he strode across the plush carpet of the Waldorf Astoria in Doha one afternoon this May. Thick hair smoothed back, custard-yellow tie on display, smile flashing, he approached a group of men dressed in dark suits and white robes and headscarves.
The eldest son of the US president was in Doha to do business. Earlier that day, he had taken top billing at the Qatar Economic Forum, where he’d met both the Qatari prime minister and the Emir, and given a speech touting the region’s abundant business opportunities.
“Look at the comparison here to what’s perhaps going on in western Europe,” he told the audience, heaping praise on Qatar and the whole Gulf region. “This is the place where there’s rational investment. People are working hard. You’re not dealing with a regulatory climate that’s so oppressive.”
Don Jr was already seeing the benefits of this friendly business environment first hand. His America-focused investment firm, 1789 Capital, had raised millions of dollars in the region, according to his business partner and co-founder Omeed Malik, who declined to give precise amounts. But Don Jr wanted to double down. His family had made “deals in the region for ever”, he said — since before “most people” were finding it “sort of acceptable to be over here”.
He was exaggerating, but not by much. Since the early 2000s, the Trump Organization has attempted to build hotels and completed golf courses in Dubai. But over the past year or so, a string of announcements have been made about new deals across the region. An extended golf course project for Oman was announced in spring 2024, followed by plans for two projects in Saudi Arabia — a Trump Tower in Jeddah and a golf course and residences in Riyadh. This year, sales of apartments began for a Trump International Tower in Dubai.
By the time of his May visit, Don Jr was the third member of the Trump clan to have stayed in Doha in almost as many weeks. First to arrive had been his younger brother Eric, signing a deal for another Trump-branded golf course and club, this time in Qatar. Then their father landed in Air Force One, determined to switch out the ageing American jet for a Boeing 747 jetliner offered by the Qatari state. His meeting with Qatar’s Emir and prime minister, scheduled for 45 minutes, lasted two and a half hours.
President Trump’s stopover was part of the first full foreign tour of his second term, a trip that also took in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. The tour was steeped in goodwill. Trillions of dollars in investment and business deals were promised for American companies. Trump was on a constant charm offensive, flattering and patting people on the arm or shoulder as he made hours of small talk.
For the president, it was familiar. The Trumps have built bonds with Gulf monarchies that are deeper and more personal than those of any US president since George W Bush. As Don Jr pointed out in Doha, these relationships predate the family’s diversification into politics, the media and the cryptoverse. And their existence is largely thanks to a few ambitious businessmen, who brought the Trumps into the oil-rich economies at just the right moment.
Over the past 18 months, as the Trump Organization’s interests have spread across the region, the geopolitical climate has grown ever more volatile. This year, for the Trump administration, Gulf powers have become the answer to a list of seemingly intractable dilemmas: how to tackle the Israel-Iran conflict, how to manage Israel’s war on Gaza or handle early negotiations with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. At home, meanwhile, Trump has enthusiastically pitched the Arab monarchies as a spur for American industry, touting trillions of dollars in promised Middle East investments in the US.
Trump’s critics worry that properties that earn money for his family companies are located in countries where the US has sensitive diplomatic relations (though Trump’s stakes are held in a trust while he’s in office). Oman, for instance, hosts the US-Iran nuclear talks, as a neutral party trusted by both Washington and Tehran. They also accuse him of blurring the lines between official and family business. “Donald Trump’s trip to the Middle East seems less like a presidential visit and more like a personal business venture,” said Chuck Schumer, Senate Democratic leader, in May.
Despite that, it is an oversimplification to view the Trumps’ dealings in the Gulf as a cynical political ploy, according to academics, businesspeople and regional officials. They say the family has a genuine fondness for the region. “There’s a compatibility with Trump that goes beyond transactions that privately benefit him,” said Steffen Hertog, an associate professor at the London School of Economics who studies the Gulf. “He loves the pomp and circumstance and adulation that Gulf governments and leaders can provide, he likes to deal with ‘big men’ who are unconstrained by institutions, opposition or civil society.”
There’s also ideological alignment. For the Trumps, the Gulf’s glittering cities represent a land of untapped real-estate opportunity. They see metropolises raised from the desert sands by strongmen business leaders who slough off the past and focus on the future, taking quick decisions and rejecting the red tape that snarls up democracies like the one at home.
In many ways, Donald Trump’s dealings in the Gulf have mirrored his wider professional career — a series of spectacular booms and busts. His first foray in the Middle East came in 2005. The real-estate developer was then midway through his much-publicised comeback from bankruptcy and close call with financial ruin. During the slump of the early 1990s, his towering debts had caught up with him but, around the turn of the millennium, he staged a revival with his book The Art of the Comeback and TV series The Apprentice. By 2005, with The Apprentice on its way to becoming a hit, Trump was discovering that licensing his famous name was lucrative. It also involved far less risk than real-estate development.
Some 7,000 miles east of Manhattan, the emirate of Dubai was also having a moment, fast becoming a booming commercial centre. Buoyant with confidence, and bolstered by regional oil money, Dubai’s urban planners had an eye for a glitzy headline and were commissioning major infrastructure projects that were variously labelled as visionary or crazy. They dredged up collections of man-made islands just off the shore, designed to look like a palm tree (the Palm) or a blotchy map of the globe (the World) from above.
It was a match made in heaven. Trump signed a deal for a Trump-branded 48-floor luxury hotel to be built right on the Palm’s trunk, partnering with Dubai’s state-backed developer Nakheel. The hotel was designed to include apartments that investors could use as second or third homes while in Dubai on business, or rent out. It would look a bit like a rocket.
Constructing the Palm took time, but in 2008, three years after signing the deal, Trump threw a series of lavish parties in New York and Los Angeles to hype the project. The supermodel Heidi Klum and actors including Demi Moore and Naomi Watts attended the event in New York. Christina Aguilera performed.
At the LA launch in August 2008, Don Jr, then a comparatively doughy-faced 30-year-old, with long hair curling behind his ears, insisted: “This is going to be the best hotel in Dubai, if not the world . . . The condos are already really selling at three to four times what anything else in Dubai has ever sold for.” The hotel would open, he said, “in about 30 months”. Three weeks later, Lehman Brothers collapsed.
The subprime mortgage crash swelled into a global financial crisis. All of a sudden, the property party was over — and not just in New York. Trump’s investment partner Nakheel, whose ambitious projects rested on piles of debt, was at the heart of Dubai’s own meltdown. The developer’s inability to repay a $3.5bn Islamic bond in late 2009 ultimately triggered a $20bn bailout from the Emirates’ oil-rich ruling state of Abu Dhabi. A year later, Nakheel’s chairman, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, who had joined the celebrities at Trump’s New York party, was replaced (later heading logistics behemoth DP World).
Trump’s grand hotel project was over before it had even broken ground. His faith in Dubai was shaken. In 2009, he told a US TV channel: “A lot of people were saying, what is the purpose of Dubai? What’s the purpose of building so much?”
That was when one Emirati real-estate mogul, who had survived the crisis (thanks, he said, to rapid negotiations with his creditors) decided he wanted to build a golf course in the desert. Hussain Sajwani was a self-made real-estate billionaire from outside the state apparatus. When his company made overtures to the Trump Organization to partner in the plan, they found willing listeners. By 2014, Trump was back in Dubai, taking a few practice swings in front of a crowd of cameramen and business associates, before stepping up to the tee to hit the very first drive at the Trump International Golf Club.
The ball sailed through the hazy sky. The course wasn’t actually finished, with construction still edging right up to the green, and Trump’s shot landed somewhere in the desert. But for Trump and his daughter Ivanka, who was working on the project, it marked a big moment: the Trumps were back in the Gulf.
Sajwani is now 72, with a pencil moustache, a soft, slightly hoarse voice and a surprising lack of grey hair for a man with such a large appetite for risk. His development company Damac is Dubai’s biggest non-state-backed developer, and when I met him in early 2025, he was riding the emirate’s third property boom, which had sent profits soaring.
Despite being one of the richest men in Dubai, Sajwani has always been considered something of an outsider among the emirate’s elite. His garish sales tactics, which have included offering luxury cars as deal-sweeteners to prospective buyers, ruffled feathers in a market dominated by genteel state-backed builders.
Unlike the United Arab Emirates’ Sunni Muslim rulers, and almost all of its citizens, Sajwani is Shia. And although he is an Emirati national, rarely seen out of traditional dress while in the UAE, his heritage has frequently been questioned by other businesspeople. While reporting this story, well-connected executives in Dubai told me they believed Sajwani was of Iranian or Pakistani descent, generally with no evidence to support the claim.
He recalls how the tie-up with Trump first came about in the early 2010s. Sajwani needed a centrepiece for his new development, Damac Hills. The location did not seem promising: it was more than 30km south of downtown Dubai and 20km inland, way out into the scrubby desert and, significantly, without any actual hills. But the plot was spacious, and Sajwani’s managing director suggested reaching out to the Trumps with the idea of building a golf course on the site.
At first, Sajwani was reportedly sceptical that the Trump brand had any real power. But eventually, he came around. Trump’s daughter Ivanka travelled to Dubai to inspect the property. To get Trump himself on side, the team built four holes and a sales office.
Sajwani is sometimes called “the Donald of Dubai”, and he soon noticed that he and Trump had more than just real estate in common. “We love to get involved in a lot of details,” said Sajwani in January, when I visited him at his mansion on the Palm. “I remember when he was here, going around the golf course, and he was moving certain trees.”
Both men were also teetotallers, with a penchant for opulent interior decoration. Sajwani’s home features a grand piano made of dark green stone, an enormous, intricate Chinese bone carving, huge glass chandeliers, Grecian-style statues and columns and side tables covered in mock-gold crocodile skin. Along with art bearing Arabic calligraphy, he owns a stained-glass rendering of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”.
After the golf club launched, the Sajwanis hosted Trump for dinner at home, where, Sajwani said, “there were some important people”. Relations started building. Sajwani and his family would later be invited back to the US to party at the Trumps’ New Year’s Eve bashes at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. Trump’s sons came to Sajwani’s daughter’s wedding. “One part is the business, the other part has become a personal, family relationship,” Sajwani told me.
But the alliance was about to get complicated.
A year after he teed off in Dubai, Trump announced a bid for the US presidency. On the campaign trail, running for the Republican party nomination, he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”.
Sajwani declined to comment on what would be known as Trump’s “Muslim ban”. But in the Middle East, Trump’s brand suddenly soured. Sajwani was left trying to sell Trump homes in a country whose official religion is Islam. Initially, he tried removing the Trump mark from the development, but a few days later he relented, restoring the branding. When Trump reached the White House in 2017, he did attempt to ban travellers from six Muslim-majority countries. The UAE was not among them.
Sajwani wanted more Trump deals. In early 2017, he proposed a package of investments worth $2bn. But Trump, who had handed control of his companies to his older children, made a show of rebuffing the deal, telling a press conference that he’d turned down the offer from “Hussain, Damac, friend of mine, great guy”, adding, “I don’t want to take advantage.”
Trump and Sajwani planned another golf development in Dubai, which foundered. But the original Dubai course made good money for the Trump Organization. Originally estimated at a few hundred thousand dollars in 2017 and 2018, the Trump Organization’s income from Dubai was listed at $4.2mn last year, according to recent financial disclosures.
America’s most powerful family has remained close to Sajwani. During a holiday in New York last December, Sajwani told me he’d got in touch with Trump on a whim, without much hope of success. “I honestly never thought I’ll be able to see him,” he said, “because now he’s president-elect.” But as it turned out, for a billionaire friend the president-elect could make time.
A few weeks later, Trump and Sajwani announced in Florida that Damac would invest $20bn in data centres in the US. It was the first in a string of such deals Trump wanted to extract from the Gulf. The gesture won Sajwani new access to America’s most powerful people. He was invited to exclusive pre-inauguration parties at the Trump golf club in Washington DC, where he made a new connection — Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. In April, he breakfasted with Elon Musk at the White House before visiting Trump in the Oval Office.
After Trump’s 2020 election loss and the infamous January 6 insurrection by his enraged followers at the US Capitol, many in Washington wrote the Trump clan off. The president retreated to his stronghold in Mar-a-Lago to regroup.
But the Trumps still had friends in the Gulf. The Sajwanis in Dubai were working with him, and a former Damac employee hooked them up with a golf course development in neighbouring Oman. Saudi Arabia had also stuck by them, agreeing to host its LIV Golf tournament at Trump courses in the US, after the PGA tour moved venues following January 6.
Today, the relationship looks stronger than ever. Although many Gulf officials say they are frustrated that Trump has not done more to curb Israel’s aggressive behaviour in the region, they are sympathetic to a presidential family that continues to pursue its commercial opportunities — after all, royals across the region oversee their own business fiefdoms and there is less squeamishness about conflicts of interest.
Before Trump was re-elected last year, the hedge fund belonging to his son-in-law Jared Kushner — Ivanka’s husband — raised $1.5bn from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and an Abu Dhabi fund linked to a powerful Emirati royal. Kushner has said the timing was to protect against any potential conflict of interest during Trump’s second term.
More controversially, a $2bn investment by an Emirati fund into digital asset exchange Binance used stablecoins issued by World Liberty Financial, a Trump family crypto venture, bringing an indirect windfall. The Emirati fund, MGX, declined to comment on this transaction.
In May last year, Don Jr and Eric Trump travelled to Oman to oversee a new opportunity: the location of the Middle East’s second Trump International Golf Course. In a convoy of SUVs, they drove up the winding dirt roads to a clifftop location about half an hour from the Omani capital of Muscat. The site was desolate — nothing but sharp, barren rock. But if the brothers were dismayed at the lack of lush vegetation, they did a good job of hiding it: the unbroken views over the glinting Arabian Sea more than made up for it.
The Trump brothers were energised: ready for the heat in a preppy sort of way, in chinos and tennis shoes. As they inspected plans for the course and an accompanying club, hotel complex and villas, sweat speckled Don Jr’s polo shirt. In the valley below, life continued much as it had for centuries: goats skipped between date palms and birds of prey circled the villages where young girls walked barefoot.
The Trumps’ ventures in Dubai had been in urban areas or inland. But in Oman there were miles of untouched coastline ripe for development. “I was blown away,” Eric told me later. “Some of the best views you’ll ever see from any hotel, up on this incredible cliff overlooking the sea.”
The Omanis were impressed in return, said Azzan al-Busaidi, under-secretary at the Ministry of Tourism and Heritage and chair of Omran Group. “Nobody was expecting that you could put a golf course actually on top of this location.”
It is an ambitious project. Architectural renderings show the landscape transformed: rows of identikit white villas arranged around green turf, punctuated by kidney-shaped white bunkers. A hotel with fountains — the extra premium villas hanging from the cliffside. A cuboid nightclub lit up in gold, in true Trump fashion. Busaidi said buyers for the Trump-branded villas were already coming from Oman and America, but also from Saudi Arabia, India, Russia, Ukraine and, perhaps least likely of all, Iran, a country the US has wrapped in financial sanctions.
On the cliff with the Trump brothers that day in May 2024 was Ziad el Chaar, a Lebanese real-estate player, who appears to have replaced Sajwani as the Trump family’s main conduit to new deals in the Gulf. Chaar, 56, has known the family for a long time — he is the same managing director who first suggested bringing the Trump name to Sajwani’s Dubai golf course project.
Chaar speaks with a strong Franco-Lebanese accent. He grew up in Beirut with school principal parents. In 1990 he studied for a business administration masters at Beirut’s premier university while Lebanon was finally emerging from civil war. Chaar has turned real estate into a high-octane and profitable career. He likes to say that he started in Dubai property before outsiders could pronounce the city’s name correctly, and compares the fast-paced, high-leverage sector to a game of ice hockey. (His office chair is covered with a red jersey emblazoned with the name of the Canadian ice hockey star Wayne Gretzky.) His infectious enthusiasm for the region’s tower blocks and villas borders on the fanatical. “I’m trying to convince my daughter to get into real estate,” he told the website Entrepreneur Middle East in July. “Every person I meet, I’m trying to get into real estate.”
Chaar worked for Sajwani for over a decade before heading to Saudi Arabia to lead one of its biggest private developers, Dar al Arkan, eventually shifting to head its international development arm, Dar Global. Along the way he became adept at pursuing real-estate tie-ups with luxury names such as Versace and Lamborghini. Trump was another favourite brand.
Dar Global is the company behind the run of Trump real-estate deals in the Gulf over the past year: Trump-branded properties now account for 18 per cent of Dar Global’s entire portfolio. Still, Chaar claims there’s no ill-feeling between him and his old boss, Sajwani. “We spent a good amount of time during the inauguration together,” Chaar said. In the boom and bust Gulf real-estate market, “Sometimes we fight, sometimes we hug, but we’re all players in the same region and we’re all advocating for the same region.”
Looking over the Dubai skyline from Dar Global’s office in June 2024, Eric Trump waxed lyrical about the city’s development. He was telling a story about a piece of construction equipment that had been shipped from Trump Tower in Chicago all the way to Dubai to build the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.
An habitual enthusiast, Eric was effusive in his praise for Dar Global (“we love them to death”), for its parent company’s chairman, Youssef al Shelash (“one of the nicest, greatest human beings you’ll ever meet in your life”), for Dubai’s royal family (“truly, immense respect for what they’ve done”), and for his own spouse, Lara (“incredible mom . . . even better wife . . . a killer”).
At the time, Eric’s father was on the campaign trail ahead of the 2024 election and, according to Eric, business for the Trump Organization was going great. He was confident his father would win the election but while his older brother, Don Jr, had thrown himself into Maga politics, Eric said he preferred taking care of the family business.
“I tend to not like the political side nearly as much . . . I don’t need to go into politics,” he said. “I love our company. I love our employees.”
He wanted to do more projects with Dar Global and expand in the region. But none of this, he insisted, would lead the Trump Organization to deal directly with foreign governments. His brother Don Jr repeated in Qatar that the Trump family business “wouldn’t be doing direct deals with government entities . . . We’re just going to play by those actual rules that are laid out by the government.”
To that end, the Trumps’ real-estate deals are structured to prevent the organisation from signing contracts directly with a state entity. Dar Global signs a purchase or long-term lease agreement with the state body that owns the land they want to build on — in Oman, for example, that’s a lease with state development arm Omran Group. Chaar said this typically happens long before the Trump Organization gets involved, and Dar Global takes on the financial risk of building the properties.
The Trump Organization typically makes branding and management agreements with Dar Global later in the process. The Trump business then earns fees from these branding and management deals. “Usually the branding fee is a lump sum,” explained Chaar. He declined to give precise financial terms, but Trump’s financial disclosures reveal that the Oman venture received $2.5mn in licensing fees last year. This “gateway fee” secures the Trump brand and the organisation’s involvement in designing and marketing the project. The Trump Organization also takes a cut of the property sales, which Chaar said is typically “much, much less than 10 per cent”. The management fees are longer term — 15 to 25 years. The Trump Organization manages the golf course and hotels. “We get paid every time a guest checks in and checks out,” explained Eric.
Launch parties for new projects in Riyadh and Dubai have been thrown this year, all of which Eric has attended. His wife, Lara, joined him in Riyadh, where the couple rubbed shoulders with potential Saudi investors. The brochure calls the forthcoming Trump International Tower “Dubai’s most powerful address”, while promising its Trump members club will connect you “to a global league of elite individuals”. There will be a cigar lounge and a golf simulator. The tower will be topped by the world’s highest outdoor pool, with a view of the Burj Khalifa.
It only took Dubai a month to issue a building permit. Chaar says sales are going well. The two penthouses in the 80-storey Dubai tower are likely to start at Dh73mn (close to $20mn), a salesperson said, although they have yet to go on the market, according to Dar Global.
Trump likes to joke about remaining in office indefinitely, a pastiche of the lifetime rule of the Gulf monarchs he so admires. Yet even if he exits the White House as scheduled by the US constitution, and barring further global financial shocks, he and his family will leave a mark on the Middle East’s petrostates — a Trump tower in almost every major Gulf city, and golf courses shimmering mirage-like in the deserts.
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