Using a presidential overseas trip — with its sprawling entourage of advisers, White House and support staffers, Secret Service agents and reporters — to help show off Trump-brand golf destinations demonstrates how the president has become increasingly comfortable intermingling his governing pursuits with promoting his family’s business interests.
“We’re at a point where the Trump administration is so intertwined with the Trump business that he doesn’t seem to see much of a difference,” said Jordan Libowitz, vice president for the ethics watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s as if the White House were almost an arm of the Trump Organization.”
Trump’s assets are in a trust run by his children, who are also handling day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization while he’s in the White House. The company has inked many recent, lucrative foreign agreements involving golf courses, including plans to build luxury developments in Qatar and Vietnam, even as the administration negotiates tariff rates for those countries and around the globe.