With dad in office, family business takes it down a notch
CLEVELAND, Miss. — Storage trailers, an idle dump truck and portable toilets surround the hotel construction site. A sign announces “opening fall 2017,” but residents say they haven’t seen significant activity for months.
It does not look like much, but the unfinished development in this small Mississippi Delta town stands as the only major new deal by the Trump family business since President Donald Trump took office in January.
When the president turned over daily operations of the Trump Organization to his eldest sons, Eric and Donald Jr., they spoke excitedly about picking up where their father left off.
But the crawl toward completing the hotel here reflects how difficult it has been for the company to expand its footprint with Trump in the White House. The Trump Organization has taken on a distinctly un-trumplike feel this year: Its ambition for new development is subdued, and the signature showmanship for announcing deals is largely absent.
Six months before his election, Trump told The New York Times that his business had about 120 deals in the works worldwide. The company had just undergone a decade of significant growth, opening five-star hotels in Chicago, Las Vegas and Washington, and snatching up golf courses across the country. It had also signed marketing deals that attached the Trump name to luxury towers in global destinations like Istanbul, Manila and Panama City.
Today, the pipeline of potential deals sits around 30, all in the United States, according to the company.
In an interview, Eric Trump said the company decided to focus primarily on its existing properties, which consist of 16 golf courses, a winery, seven stand-alone hotels and a portfolio of commercial real estate properties.
As a private, family-run business, the Trump Organization need not answer to shareholders, he said, so it had the freedom to slow new development. That also means the company does not have to disclose how well, or not well, it is performing financially, nor are the identities of partners in the pipeline publicly known.
“We have the best properties in the world; they’re doing extraordinarily well,” he said, without providing details on the company’s financial perfor-