The family business of President-elect Donald J. Trump is expected to announce some restrictions on transactions but is not likely to accept as many limitations as it did eight years ago.
When Eric Trump takes the stage at a cryptocurrency conference in Abu Dhabi next week, he will join a lineup of speakers celebrating “the golden age of Bitcoin.” His headlining performance will also represent a golden opportunity to signal that the Trump Organization is wide open for business.
In the wake of Donald J. Trump’s election victory, his family business is poised to capitalize on his presidency with a variety of new ventures, according to a New York Times review of financial records and interviews with people knowledgeable about his finances. And unlike in his first term, the people said, the Trump Organization aims to issue a more limited ethics plan that is unlikely to significantly curb its growth.
As the inauguration approaches, Eric Trump, Mr. Trump’s second son and the company’s de facto leader, is expected to forgo deals directly with foreign governments. But he is not planning to revive the promise the company made eight years ago to swear off all other foreign deals while his father occupies the White House.
Without that guardrail — the centerpiece of the Trump Organization’s 2017 ethics plan — the company would be free to profit from an array of business in countries essential to American foreign policy interests. In the months leading up to Election Day, Eric Trump struck real estate deals in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and he has shown interest in new hotel projects in Israel and other countries across the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.
The Trump family is also branching out to forge foreign ties beyond the real estate business.
World Liberty Financial, a new cryptocurrency platform that the Trumps helped create, recently received a lucrative investment from a Chinese entrepreneur, a deal that could ultimately pay the family about $22 million. The president-elect’s publicly traded social media company, which represents his single greatest source of wealth, is also open to foreign investment.
The new ventures — both of which will face oversight from federal regulators appointed by the president — underscore how the company’s recent expansion created an even more complicated web of conflicts than in Mr. Trump’s first term. And much like the Trump administration, the Trump Organization will be unleashed in the second term, free to pursue new deals that could blur the lines between the presidency and the business.
The company’s existing properties will also continue to mix business and politics like they did in Mr. Trump’s first term, when his supporters spent lavishly at his private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago. Later this month, a Trump-aligned SuperPAC will hold a $1 million-a-plate “candlelight dinner” at Mar-a-Lago.
As president, Mr. Trump is exempt from civil and criminal conflict of interest laws that would otherwise require a senior federal official to sell holdings in companies that might benefit from his or her actions. Historically, it has been up to individual presidents to voluntarily take action to avoid conflicts, like when Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm into a blind trust.
Mr. Trump put his assets into a trust at the start of his first term, but his older sons remained in control of the company. And Mr. Trump still profits from family business operations.
“I fear that Americans will look at public office as a job that is no longer about public service — it is a family business,” said Kedric Payne, senior director for ethics at Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that has filed ethics complaints against Democratic and Republican lawmakers and candidates.
While the Trump Organization is not planning to restore its ban on all foreign deals, it is considering other ethical safeguards it adopted during the first Trump presidency, the people familiar said, as it seeks to blunt public outrage and potential lawsuits.
The company is working on what it will call an ethics “white paper” that will detail those steps, including the prohibition on deals directly with foreign governments. The Trump Organization is also considering naming an outside ethics adviser — who might allow or restrict some of the company’s deal-making — and donating to the U.S. Treasury any profits collected at hotels or golf clubs from foreign government officials.
The precise details of the white paper are subject to change until they are announced in the coming weeks.
“I take it very seriously,” Eric Trump said in a statement to The Times. “Over the past 40 years, we’ve built one of the finest real estate portfolios in the world. I have a responsibility to thousands of employees, and at the same time, I understand the responsibility of being part of the First Family again.”
For years, the Trump Organization was a domestic real estate business with a portfolio of American hotels, golf courses, residential buildings and office towers — some that Mr. Trump owns, others that he was paid to put his name on. While the company still operates large hotels in New York, Chicago and Las Vegas, as well as nearly a dozen U.S. golf resorts or clubs, the company’s domestic footprint has receded as it looks abroad for growth.
Eric Trump is currently working on Trump-branded projects in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, India, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates. He is also expected to negotiate additional deals with the Saudi Arabia-based real estate company Dar Al Arkan, which has become his most frequent new business partner and has close ties to the royal family there.
But his keynote speech to the Bitcoin conference on Tuesday will, more than any other recent move, encapsulate the complicated ethical environment the family is embracing this time around.
In a late October filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the founders of World Liberty Financial listed Eric Trump, along with his brother, Donald J. Trump Jr., as “promoters” of the crypto platform. President-elect Trump is named, on a separate document, as the company’s “chief crypto advocate.”
World Liberty Financial was created, in part, by Mr. Trump’s close friend, Steven Witkoff, a New York City real-estate executive who Mr. Trump has said he intends to appoint as his new Middle East envoy.
It’s not clear what the platform will ultimately look like. The president-elect and his business partners have marketed it as a portal for traders to invest in cryptocurrencies and use those assets for borrowing and lending. Though the platform hasn’t officially launched, the company this fall began selling a digital currency called WLFI.
One outside investment has already come to World Liberty Financial from Justin Sun, a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur.
“This investment reflects our commitment to supporting blockchain innovation and fostering growth worldwide,” Mr. Sun’s company, Tron, said of the investment in World Liberty.
The S.E.C. sued Mr. Sun last year, claiming that he fraudulently manipulated the price of his own cryptocurrency by rapidly buying and selling it to make it appear as if it was being actively traded. The company has disputed those accusations, asserting the government is overstepping its authority.
Recently, Mr. Sun grabbed headlines when he spent $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s art auction to buy an artwork that consisted of a banana taped to the wall, which he then proceeded to eat.
Mr. Sun will also be speaking in Abu Dhabi next week. Representatives for World Liberty Financial did not respond to requests for comment.
The venture had been off to a slow start, raising only a fraction of the $300 million it had sought when its cryptocurrency was first put on the market in October.
But the $30 million investment by Mr. Sun means that the Trump family will apparently get its first payout from the new venture. According to a document released by the company, the Trump family entity, DT Marks DEFI, is entitled to get 75 percent of net token revenues, suggesting this investment alone could generate a windfall worth up to $22.5 million for the Trump family.
The entanglements between the Trump family and the crypto industry create an obvious conflict of interest, said Timothy Massad, the former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which helps regulate cryptocurrency, along with the S.E.C.
In September, World Liberty Financial announced that its tokens would be available only to accredited investors in the United States, citing the S.E.C.’s crackdown on crypto businesses. Now Mr. Trump’s administration could pave the way for the company to market its coins to a wider swath of the public.
“This is terrible,” Mr. Massad said. “I fear the Trump family’s interest in World Liberty Financial will influence Trump’s choices of financial regulators and the choices these people make in how they regulate crypto.”
Mr. Trump this week announced he intended to nominate Paul Atkins to lead the S.E.C. Mr. Atkins is a pro-business conservative, who has served as a chairman of a cryptocurrency industry alliance that has called for a set of rules that would allow the industry’s growth to accelerate.
The Biden administration has been “very hostile toward crypto,” Mr. Trump said in September, as he was announcing World Liberty Financial, adding “my attitude is different.”
Mr. Trump’s social media company also stands to gain from his presidency as its leadership considers starting a cryptocurrency payment service, according to a trademark application filed last month. The company is not run directly by the Trump family, but Donald Trump Jr. serves on the board of directors and President-elect Trump owns about $4 billion of its stock, making it his most valuable asset.
The company itself, in a recent filing with the S.E.C., conceded that its stock value would rise or fall based on Mr. Trump’s public standing.
“TMTG’s success depends in part on the popularity of our brand and the reputation and popularity of President Donald J. Trump,” the filing says, referring to the company by its initials.
Any new real estate deals, particularly when they involve overseas locations, will also raise questions as the Trump Organization continues to form partnerships around the world, including in Saudi Arabia and Oman, which play vital roles in a politically volatile region.
A project with Dar Al Arkan, the real estate company, that is underway in Oman involves profit sharing with the government, which owns the land where the golf course, hotel and villas are selling for as much as $10 million.
Although the opening of the resort destination is still at least three years off, the Trump Organization has already raked in at least $7.5 million from the Oman deal, financial reports from the last two years show. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. visited Oman this summer to check the project’s progress, visiting the site with Yousef Al Shelash, the chairman of Dar Al-Arkan.
A separate development deal — including hotels, golf courses and residential communities — was announced in October for Vietnam.
During the presidency, the Trump Organization will not seek to do deals in certain nations that would raise obvious geopolitical concerns, such as Russia, China, Taiwan or Ukraine, one of the people with knowledge of the company’s plans said.
The Trump family examined a potential deal in Israel before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and remains interested in doing a project there, The Times previously reported. Eric Trump has said he intends to wait until the war ends before moving ahead.
Whether any contentious transaction moves forward in the next four years might depend on the details of the Trump Organization’s ethics white paper, including the plan to abstain from deals directly with foreign governments. If adopted, that prohibition could help the company contend with lawsuits based on the so-called foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits federal officials from accepting gifts or payments from other governments.
At the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, several emoluments lawsuits were rendered moot, since he had left office, and were dismissed by the Supreme Court. But it is likely that new similar lawsuits will be filed again, lawyers involved in the effort said.
“It looks like Trump is planning to flagrantly violate key anti-corruption provisions of the Constitution again,” said Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham Law School, who served on the legal team for one of the emoluments lawsuits filed in 2017. “It would be untenable if there is not a significant challenge to that.”
