Donald Trump’s family business is breaking ground on an accelerated project in Vietnam as the country’s government seeks an updated trade agreement with the United States.
The U.S. president’s tariff threats have driven Vietnam to seek a new arrangement with America, potentially including efforts to combat trade fraud, as the White House inches closer to a July deadline when Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariff measures will snap back into place.
He previously ordered a 90-day pause of his order imposing sky-high tariff rates on many countries, including Vietnam, which is set to face a 46 percent tariff on all exports to the United States on top of the Trump administration’s 10 percent across-the-board import measures.
Now, The New York Times reports that a $1.5 billion Trump Organization development project outside of Hanoi has seemingly blown through the typical approval process, leaving locals enraged at the government and the president adding another layer to the onion of alleged self-dealing and kickbacks that has defined all four years and four months of Trump’s presidential tenure.
According to documents published by the Times on the Trump Organization’s Hanoi development, the project skipped typical environmental reviews and cut short a local public comment period — one that had been dotted by fired-up local residents who’ve been informed that their land will be sold for less than half the value of what the parcels would have been worth prior to the alleged land grab.
The area set to be developed for the project includes farms and nearly four square miles of riverbank property, all together totaling “hundreds” of residences.
One local, Le Van Truong, 54, was quoted byThe New York Times as saying he could lose farmland as well as the local cemetery holding five generations of his ancestors.
“Trump says it’s separate — the presidency and his business. But he has the power to do whatever he wants,” he said.
Wednesday’s groundbreaking for the project took place just three months after the initial documents were filed, a process which experts told the Times usually takes at least two years. Some steps were reportedly skipped entirely, while others were still underway.
But even as the project reportedly endangers the livelihoods and homes of hundreds of people, experts in Vietnamese law who spoke to the newspaper said that the project was blowing through the typical process for approval and safe development at an alarming rate of speed.
In one anecdote, the paper even noted that “the province is dotted with unexploded ordnance from the Vietnam War” and saw a 200-pound bomb recovered recently.
And the cause seems to be apparent: one letter published by the Times states, according to a translation, that the project was “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally.”
White House officials continue to deny this. At a press conference this past week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the president placed his businesses in a blind trust upon taking office in 2017, where they remain, controlled by his family including his adult children, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
The press secretary also repeated an insistence common among Trump officials: that the president is too personally wealthy and patriotic to take advantage of such an obvious financial opportunity.
In an emailed statement to the Times regarding the Vietnam project, a White House spokesperson said: “All of the president’s trade discussions are totally unrelated to the Trump Organization.”
The White House also insisted there was no conflict of interest because the president’s sons run the business.
Yet the second Trump administration has brazenly defied ethical standards, in reality. Trump last week hosted purchasers of his “memecoin” — a “digital currency” which critics say seems to serve no other purpose beyond trading, either for private financial gain or, in the case of those who visited the president’s Bedminster property for a depressing-looking meal on Thursday, to funnel money to the Trump family’s pockets in exchange for direct access to the president.
Some attendees told reporters after the event that they attended with the explicit hopes of appealing to the president about specific issues.
The Trump Organization’s Vietnam development is set to feature a riverside resort with golf courses and private villas for guests. It’s valued at around $1.5 billion and estimated to be completed in two years.
Erasing all doubt about the project’s ties to official relations between the U.S. government and his own, Vietnam’s prime minister Pham Minh Chinh said at the groundbreaking ceremony on Wednesday that the project would “receive maximum support” to “further strengthen the relationship between Vietnam and the U.S.”
The Independent has contacted the White House, the Trump Organization and the Vietnamese Embassy for comment.
