A week after he mused in a social-media post about a name-branded tower on the surface of the moon, President Donald Trump’s family business has joined a venture to build a high-rise on the other side of planet Earth.
The Palm Beach County-based Trump Organization announced that it is collaborating with five other entities to build the 70-story Trump Tower Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia. The country of roughly 4 million people is at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Asia, and is partly bordered by Russia, Turkey and the Black Sea.
The tower will be mixed-use with “luxury” residences, retail and dining.
“The Trump name is synonymous with some of the most luxurious real estate developments in the world, and Trump Tower Tbilisi stands as a continuation of that legacy,” Eric Trump, executive vice president of The Trump Organization, said in a prepared statement.
European expert Liana Fix said the announcement comes as the ruling party in the Georgia republic, led by Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, has enacted more repressive and authoritarian policies in concert with a pro-Russia foreign posture.
As a result, Fix said, the small, rural country has become increasingly isolated.
“So they’re trying to break that isolation with good ties with Trump,” said Fix, a senior fellow for Europe at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. “From my perspective, it’s not only a business or development deal, but it has very deep political connotations.”
That said, Fix notes that Georgia is a small country without an industrial base, and which doesn’t stand out apart from its exported wines and growing tourism draw in Tbilisi. And the country is in a region of the world where there is significant competition for Washington’s interest.
“It’s more of an attention-grabbing device for the Georgia government than that Georgia is necessarily strategically important or interesting to the U.S. administration,” Fix said of the Trump tower plan.
A partner in the venture is New York-based developer The Sapir Organization. Sapir built the Arte luxury residences in Surfside where Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner reportedly rented after the first Trump administration ended in 2021.
The president has not commented on the project in the Caucus region, but on April 13, Trump posted an AI-generated image of a Trump high-rise on the surface of the moon, just days after the Artemis II mission astronauts splashed down off the coast of San Diego.
Even closer to their base in the Palm Beaches, Eric Trump, the president’s second-eldest son, in late March issued images of a proposed potential presidential library marking his father’s two terms in the White House.
That project is slated for a parcel in downtown Miami.
Speaking of the project days later, the president said he envisioned that high-rise to be part library, part museum with a 747 Air Force One and a “hotel.”
The land for the presidential library was formerly owned by Miami-Dade College but was procured by Gov. Ron DeSantis and transferred to the Trump Organization.
The process was controversial, and challenged by lawsuits, as the 2.6-acre parcel of land next to Miami’s Freedom Tower was valued at tens of millions of dollars.
Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at [email protected]. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: After musing about moon, Trump Org plans tower on planet’s far side
Reporting by Antonio Fins, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post; USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
