Donald Trump’s property company is in negotiations to re-purchase his Washington hotel, which opponents say was a venue for illicit influence peddling during his first presidency.
The Trump International hotel, housed in the city’s old post office building a short walk from the White House, was sold in 2022 and is now the Waldorf Astoria.
The president-elect’s son, Eric Trump, who is an executive vice-president at his father’s company, met a senior executive from BDT & MSD Partners, the merchant bank that controls its long term lease, at the family’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida this week to discuss buying it back, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Talks are said to be at an early stage.
Trump opened the hotel in 2016, the same year he was first elected president, four years after winning a fierce bidding competition to buy the lease against other hotel operators, including Marriott and Hilton.
He spent about $200m turning it into an “ultra-luxury” hotel, according to Forbes.
But while it became a magnet during his presidency for Trump admirers, lobbyists and Republican Congress members, it generated less annual revenue than anticipated, the website reported, dropping to $20m – well short of the $100m-plus expected – after the Covid-19 pandemic struck.
He sold the leasing rights for $375m about 18 months after his 2020 election defeat at the hands of Joe Biden.
He is now interested in reacquiring it as the family seeks a new hotel in the capital as he prepares to return as president on 20 January, according to the Journal.
That news is likely to alarm Democratics, who accused him of using the hotel as his “personal government ATM” by over-charging for rooms during his first spell in the White House. They also alleged that he was violating the foreign emoluments clause of the US constitution – which prohibits a president receiving anything of value from governments – by having official overseas dignitaries stay there.
A Democratic-led report published by the House of Representatives oversight committee last October accused Eric and his brother, Don Jr, of charging Secret Service agents that were part of his official security detail far above the going rate for staying there.
“On November 8, 2017, when Donald Trump Jr. stayed at former President Trump’s DC hotel, the Secret Service under President Trump approved a room rate of $1,185—more than five times the approved government per diem rate of $201,” the report stated.
“That same night, the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, rented out more than 200 rooms to private parties at just $125 or $170 each.”
On another occasion, a Secret Service agent detailed to Eric was charged a higher room rate at the taxpayer’s expense than members of the Qatari royal ruling family, who were on an “extended stay”.
The report also said that eight US ambassadors appointed by Trump stayed at the hotel, often while on official business. This meant that “any payments they made using taxpayer funds directly violated the constitutional prohibition on domestic emoluments”.
It identified four judges who were guests at the hotel before being nominated to positions as federal judges, while five people who paid for rooms and services were subsequently granted presidential pardons.
In a statement marking the report’s publication, Jamie Raskin – then chair of the oversight committee – urged Congress to “put legal barriers in place now to prevent the kind of rip-off corruption our Founding Fathers so strongly opposed”.
The Trump Organisation has previously denied marketing the hotel to foreign dignitaries and said it wrote a cheque to US Treasury Department for money earned from foreign government guests.
