Trump venues bank on golf, with help from Saudi Arabia
FLA.>> Amateur golfers lined up on Thursday at the Trump National Doral near Miami, having agreed to pay more than $9,000 apiece to play a friendly round alongside some of the world’s top professionals.
Rooms at the resort hotel will fill up with fans as a pro tournament featuring some of the biggest names in the sport gets underway today. The resort’s restaurants and bars will pull in more business, and the Trump name will be beamed around the world on television and the internet.
Behind this surge in business at one of former President Donald Trump’s properties is his deal to host tournaments for LIV Golf, the league sponsored by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
LIV’S eagerness to pay to have Trump host tournaments at his resorts is just one more example of the ties between the Saudis and the Trump family even as he seeks the presidency again, an arrangement that continues to generate conflicts of a type and scale unique to Trump.
Trump spoke recently with Saudi Arabia’s leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, two people briefed on the discussion said; the Biden administration has been working with Saudi Arabia on a Middle East peace plan. It is not clear what Trump and the Saudi leader discussed. Officials representing Trump did not respond to requests for comment.
At the same time, the investment firm set up by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with $2 billion from the same Saudi sovereign wealth fund that has bankrolled the LIV Golf league, has been accelerating its dealmaking in recent months in the United States and abroad.
The Trump family ties to the Saudi government have raised questions not just because of Trump’s quest to return to the White House but also because of their intersection with the evolving nature of Trump’s business, which was once closely associated with city-center hotels but is now increasingly focused on golf.
As of the end of last year, the Trump Organization had sold or lost branding deals with six hotels around the world, most recently the Trump Waikiki in Hawaii and the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The other hotels dropping the Trump name have been in Vancouver, British Columbia; Toronto; Panama; and the Soho neighborhood of New York City, collectively totaling 1,893 rooms.
This leaves the Trump family with only three city-center hotels, in New York, Chicago and Las Vegas.
The rest of its hospitality industry holdings worldwide, including the Doral in Florida, are almost entirely built around golf courses. In the past three years, they have seen their standing bolstered internationally as a result of the LIV Golf tournaments, funded lavishly by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to lure top stars such as Jon Rahm, Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka.
In an interview, Eric Trump, one of the former president’s sons, said the shift in the company’s hospitality industry holdings reflected the rapid growth of the golf industry since the pandemic, a trend that is benefiting the family’s 11 domestic golf clubs and its four overseas.
“The leisure market has been the hottest market in the hotel world,” he said, referring in particular to golf resorts. “The golf clubs are full.”
But the slump in the city-center hotel business clearly was not something the Trump family had planned. A decade ago the family started a national marketing campaign to push what it was then calling “the Trump Hotel Collection,” a growing chain of boutique hotels in cities around North America and other parts of the world.
Documents prepared for the Trump family and its lenders offer their own explanation for the decline of the city-center hotel brand — pointing at Trump himself. “According to management, the Trump brand has negatively impacted the subject’s performance,” said a 2021 appraisal of the Doral hotel prepared for Deutsche Bank, one of Trump’s lenders.
“Mr. Trump is a polarizing figure who ignites strong feelings from both supporters and supporters of his political opponents,” the appraisal added. “This resulted in many groups canceling events at the property.”
By contrast, Trump golf courses in locations including Jupiter, Fla.; Northern Virginia; West Palm Beach, Fla.; and Charlotte, N.C., among other locations, saw major jumps in net profits in recent years, the court records show. Revenues from golf as well as food and beverage sales at the Doral in Miami also surged.
Initiation fees to join two of the Trump golf clubs in Florida have jumped to as much as $400,000, Eric Trump said, and annual dues are also now higher.