Trump’s business entanglements draw renewed scrutiny over conflicts of interest

The Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. opened in September 2016, only weeks after Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination, and it quickly became the most visible symbol of how politics, branding and property ownership could overlap. The old presidential bargain was simple: keep enough distance from your money that voters can believe public decisions are not being traded for private gain. Donald Trump has broken with that norm more openly than any modern president, keeping his business ties alive through hotels, overseas deals, and a second term that has pushed conflict-of-interest alarms back into the spotlight.

The norm Trump walked away from

For decades, presidents treated the appearance of self-dealing as a danger in itself. Harry Truman refused to lend his name to any business, Richard Nixon was so wary that a brother might profit from family ties that he had his phone tapped, and George W. Bush sold his individual stock holdings before taking office. Since the 1970s, every president except Trump had moved assets other than plain-vanilla holdings into a blind trust or a similar arrangement to keep faith with the public.

Trump rejected that approach when he did not divest from his business interests before taking office, leaving ethics watchdogs to warn that the presidency now sat beside an unusually large web of private gain.

Where the money and access became visible

The Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. made that tension concrete. During his first term, Trump announced that his sons would not do business with foreign governments, but critics said the promise was not fully followed in practice.

House Oversight Democrats later found that Trump retained his financial interest in his businesses while in office, was effectively on both sides of the Trump Hotel lease as both landlord and tenant, and concealed hundreds of millions of dollars in debts from the General Services Administration. Their findings estimated that the hotel received $3.7 million in payments from foreign governments from 2017 through 2020, including spending tied to Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey and China.

The receipts were specific enough to show how the arrangement worked. Bills showed a Malaysian delegation stay in September 2017 cost $259,724, including a $10,000 room and $9,229 in coffee breaks. They showed Saudi officials spent $85,961 during a one-week stay in March 2018, including $10,500 suites. They also showed Qatari officials and connected companies spent at least $307,941 at the hotel from late 2017 through mid-2018. The bills documented government-related spending by Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar at the hotel in 2017 and 2018, including a $10,500-a-night room.

The legal fight over emoluments

The direct challenge came in 2017, when the attorneys general of Washington, D.C. and Maryland sued Trump under the Constitution’s Emoluments Clauses. The case argued that he had refused to separate himself from his businesses and continued to accept money or benefits from foreign and domestic governments through the Trump hotel.

A federal court ruled in July 2018 that the president is prohibited from accepting almost anything of value from foreign or domestic governments.

Why the second term has felt even more exposed

When Trump returned to office in 2025, the conflicts became more open and more numerous. The Brennan Center for Justice said in February 2025 that Trump’s second term could send massive financial windfalls to wealthy campaign backers, political allies, his family and his businesses. The center also said Trump had leaned on ultra-wealthy donors and placed some of them in positions that could affect their own bottom lines.

The business expansion keeping the questions alive

By April 2026, the Trump Organization was accelerating its foreign expansion, with new deals in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam and eight foreign deals in a little over a year of Trump’s second term.

The White House and the Trump Organization denied ethical problems, and Donald Trump Jr. dismissed the criticism as stale, saying, “Frankly, it’s gotten old.”