Trump venues bank on golf, with help from Saudi Arabia
DORAL, 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 on Friday. 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.
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Behind this surge in business at one of former President Donald Trump’s properties is his deal to host tournaments for LIV Golf, the upstart 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 in funding from the same Saudi sovereign wealth fund that has bankrolled the LIV Golf league, has been accelerating its deal making 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 14-year-old, 462-room Trump hotel in Hawaii left the Trump brand in November. Donald Trump Jr. was asked about the decision at the New York trial, with one lawyer for the state asking him if “this is a reflection that the hotel is abandoning the Trump brand to go with Hilton.” Trump responded: “That is what they are doing, I guess.”The other hotels dropping the Trump name have been in Vancouver, 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.
