Former President Donald Trump has a complex new real estate deal in Oman — and it could compromise how he approaches U.S. interests if he becomes president once again, reported The New York Times on Tuesday.
"Mr. Trump’s name is plastered on signs at the entrance of the project and in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel in Muscat, the nearby capital of Oman, where a team of sales agents is invoking Mr. Trump’s name to help sell luxury villas at prices of up to $13 million, mostly targeting superrich buyers from around the world, including from Russia, Iran and India," reported Eric Lipton. "Mr. Trump has been selling his name to global real estate developers for more than a decade. But the Oman deal has taken his financial stake in one of the world’s most strategically important and volatile regions to a new level, underscoring how his business and his politics intersect as he runs for president again amid intensifying legal and ethical troubles."
The Times interviewed people familiar with the project who describe it as unlike any Trump has done in a foreign country.
According to the report, the Omani government, a controversial ally of the United States with whom Jared Kushner cultivated ties while Trump was last in office, is providing the land for the project. In addition to this potential foreign policy conflict, the project is also under scrutiny for the treatment of migrant workers, who are being paid less than $400 a month and housed in cramped trailers in the desert.
"Mr. Trump’s business ties in the Middle East have already been under intense scrutiny," noted the report. "Federal prosecutors who brought criminal charges against him in the case stemming from his mishandling of classified documents issued subpoenas for information about his foreign deals and the agreements with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour" — an arrangement that triggered outrage even before the embattled proposed merger with PGA, because of the Saudi government's ties to 9/11 and the brutal murder of a Washington Post journalist.
Furthermore, Trump constantly raised the appearance of financial conflict in office because at the time he owned a hotel in Washington, D.C., where foreign dignitaries looking to curry favor constantly stayed and spent money.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington's lead ethics counsel, Virginia Canter, told The Times, “This is as blatant as it comes. How and when is he going to sell out U.S. interests? That is the question this creates. It is the kind of corruption our founding fathers most worried about.”
When Trump was in office, he bragged extensively about his Middle East policy, which among other things thawed relations between Israel and its neighbors, but did next to nothing to hold despots in the region accountable for human rights abuses; at one point even joking about Khashoggi's murder in calls with the Saudi crown prince.
