Fake Trump Tower

The president promised that his company wouldn’t do foreign business deals while in office. But what happens when business associates offer a piece of the action before—or after—he leaves office? Inside a new conflict-of-interest threat the founding fathers never could have envisioned.

 

- Dan Alexander

George Ramishvili strides into a nightclub he owns in Batumi, a seaside city of 150,000 in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. It’s a smoky scene inside, with strobe lights flashing, music pulsing, teenagers sweating. Ramishvili, 50, passes through one room and into another, settling at a dining area in the back, where beats still pump through the walls but it’s bright and quiet enough to talk business.

Taking the seat at the head of a long wooden table with two associates, Ramishvili gazes out the window at a stretch of land alongside the Black Sea where, until December, he was planning to build a 47-story Trump Tower. That deal fell apart as Donald Trump ascended to the White House, leaving Ramishvili with 15 acres of undeveloped land and an unprecedented business challenge: What is a foreign tycoon to do when his partner becomes president of the United States, leaving their project in limbo?

His answer underscores one of the great problems of the Trump presidency, one that gets less attention in the face of so many other great problems. In choosing not to divest his assets, Trump has opened himself to the prospect that foreign tycoons will signal that there’s money for him down the road—while in the short term they enrich themselves.