Trumps plot big hotel expansion, but political problems loom
REAL ESTATE
NEW YORK • The Trump family is launching a new hotel chain in a bold expansion of a company that critics say is already too big and opaque f or an enterprise whose owner sits in the Oval Office.
The chain, called Scion, will feature the first Trumprun hotels not to bear the family’s name. The hotels will feature modern, sleek interiors and communal areas, and offer rooms at US$ 200 to US$300 a night, about half what it costs at some hotels in Trump’s luxury chain.
And they’ll be dozens of them, possibly a hundred, opening across the country in just three years. Or at least that’s the plan.
“It’s full steam ahead. It’s in our DNA. It’s in the Trump boys’ DNA,” said Trump Hotels CEO Eric Danziger. The “boys” are Eric and Donald Jr., who are running their father’s company while he is president.
The bold expansion plan raises some thorny ethical questions.
The Trump family won’t be putting up any money to build the hotels. Instead, their company, the Trump Organization, plans to get local real estate developers and their investors to foot the bill, as do most major hotel chains.
One of the first going up could be in Dallas. A development company there originally planned to raise money from unnamed investors in Kazakhstan, Turkey and Qatar, but recently told the Dallas Morning News that it now will tap only the com- pany’s U.S. partners.
Government ethics experts say turning to outside money, whether foreign or American, raises the spectre of people trying to use their investment to gain favour with the new administration — like contributing to a political campaign, but with no dollar limits or public disclosure.
“This is the new version of pay-to-play, ‘Get in there and do business with the Trump Organization,’ ” said Richard Painter, who was the chief White House ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush.
The Trump family will have to overcome some political obstacles, too. Already, politicians in a few cities mentioned as possible sites have vowed to fight the first family, raising the prospect of a struggle to get zoning and other permits to start building.