[The Trump brand “spells glamour more than luxury,” said Kalyani Chawla, a brand consultant and former executive at Christian Dior in India who attended the event. “I think it’s all about Donald Trump, honestly,” she said, “any idea of Donald Trump in general, regardless of the fact that even he’s surprised he’s the president of the United States.”]
By
Maria Abi-Habib, Kai Schultz and Suhasini Raj
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Donald Trump Jr. in front
of Trump Towers after the project’s inauguration in Pune,
India, on Wednesday.
Credit Associated Press
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NEW
DELHI — Donald Trump Jr.,
who has spent the week in India pitching new luxury high-rises that bear his
family’s name, took the stage before a crowd of about 200 on Thursday.
“Building a Better Mumbai,” the banner behind him proclaimed.
“We’re actually delivering true luxury,” Mr.
Trump told the guests, who were greeted by a red carpet, lit candles and a jazz
band. “We’re actually delivering buildings in the Indian marketplace that you
can take out of that marketplace, put in any cosmopolitan of the world and say,
‘This is on par with some of the best.’”
The Trump Organization is reaping the
windfall from India’s admiration for President Trump. He may have low approval
ratings at home, but he appears well liked in a country with one of the
fastest-growing populations of millionaires in the world.
The Trump brand “spells glamour more than
luxury,” said Kalyani Chawla, a brand consultant and former executive at
Christian Dior in India who attended the event. “I think it’s all about Donald
Trump, honestly,” she said, “any idea of Donald Trump in general, regardless of
the fact that even he’s surprised he’s the president of the United States.”
But even before the president’s son arrived
in India to press the flesh and do the deals, his trip was creating controversy
over its potential for blurring the lines between the Trump White House and the
Trump Organization.
As Mr. Trump hopped from city to city,
Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, sought assurances from the
United States Embassy in Delhi that it was not helping Mr. Trump. And ethics
experts seemed unable to overstate the incongruity of a sitting president’s son
drumming up business overseas.
“Nothing like this — no, never,” said Marilyn
L. Glynn, who served as general counsel at the Office of Government Ethics
during parts of the Clinton and Bush administrations. “Unprecedented,
unheard-of.”
The controversy only grew as word spread that
Mr. Trump planned to give a speech in New Delhi on Friday, taking the podium
before Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks. The topic: “Reshaping Indo-Pacific
Ties: The New Era of Cooperation.”
“The title sure sounds like something you
would hear from a diplomat,” said Joshua White, who worked in the Obama White
House as director for South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council. “It
is not illegal, but it would muddy the waters and I think make life rather
difficult for those in the United States government who are being measured
about how they articulate what the administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy is
and will become.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Menendez said in a letter
to the embassy in New Delhi, “Given the potential to confuse Mr. Trump’s
private business visit with having an official governmental purpose, I write to
ensure that the U.S. Embassy presence in India will have no role in supporting
Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization during his time in India, other than that
necessary to provide any security support for the U.S. Secret Service.”
The embassy said it had no role in the visit
other than helping with his security.
In his comments on the stage in Mumbai on
Thursday, Mr. Trump defended his actions, and said his father’s job had
actually been bad for business.
“We don’t want any kind of conflict of
interest,” he said. “We don’t want anyone to say that we’re taking advantage.
From a business perspective, it’s clearly a negative. There will be a time
after politics where we will be able to get back into that market.”
After the talk was done, many in the audience
excitedly rushed the stage to shake his hand before he disappeared.
If India loves the president’s son, he
appears to love it back.
“I think there is something about the spirit
of the Indian people that is unique here to other parts of the emerging world,”
Mr. Trump said in a local television interview earlier in the week. He said, “I
don’t want to be glib but you can see the poorest of the poor and there is
still a smile on a face.”
“I know some of the most successful people in
the world and some of them are the most miserable people in the world,” he
added.
Before speaking at the reception in Mumbai on
Thursday evening, Mr. Trump made a renewed pitch for one of his company’s
developments in the city, meeting with dozens of buyers in the tower
overlooking the Arabian Sea.
After paying 80 million Indian rupees, or
$1.2 million, for a three-bedroom apartment, Sumeet Arora, one of the buyers,
expected the developer to be prompt for the meeting. Instead, they waited for
an hour and a half for Mr. Trump to show up.
When he finally arrived at noon, Mr. Trump
gave the well-heeled audience members a sales pitch on the virtues of the
building, even though they had already collectively pledged millions of dollars
on the units, which are to open by June 2019.
“They’ve got some units left — they wanted us
to suggest people as leads,” Mr. Arora said.
Under the Trump administration, New Delhi is
enjoying some of the warmest relations it has ever had with Washington. For
Indian officials, part of the appeal is the hard line the administration has
taken on Pakistan, India’s chief rival. But for many other Indians, it is
simply that the Trump family name seems to them to be synonymous with success.
In New Delhi over the weekend, several of the
country’s leading newspapers carried full front-page ads with the younger Mr.
Trump’s face, arms crossed over his chest with the question: “Trump is here.
Are you invited?”
The ad promised a meeting with the
president’s son if prospective buyers put down a booking fee of about $38,000
for a Trump Organization project in Gurgaon, just south of New Delhi.
The promise of a meeting with the younger Mr.
Trump was apparently enough to spur sales, said Kalpesh Mehta of Tribeca
Developers, the Trump Organization’s partner for the Gurgaon project. Mr. Mehta
told local reporters that on Monday alone, when Mr. Trump touched down in New
Delhi to kick off his weeklong tour, the company recorded sales of $15 million.
Ground has yet to be broken on the two Trump towers in Gurgaon — the completion
date is in 2023 — but sales have topped $100 million, Mr. Mehta said.
Mumbai is the financial center of the country
and has one of the largest concentrations of billionaires in the world.
It also has some of its biggest slums.
In the city, formerly known as Bombay,
construction cranes and half-finished buildings dot the skyline. New towers
compete with old ones, as buildings go ever higher to maximize space and
provide better views of the Arabian Sea and the city below.
“Bombay all of a sudden has gone vertical,”
said Mr. Arora, whose current home in a 10-story building in Mumbai’s Juhu
neighborhood has slowly been dwarfed by taller buildings.
Ms. Chawla, the brand consultant who attended
the candlelit reception, said she admired the Trump properties she has seen
abroad. But there is a world of difference between admiring and owning.
“I wish I could afford it,” she said. “I feel
really inadequate sometimes when I come to these things.”
Maria Abi-Habib reported from New Delhi, and
Kai Schultz and Suhasini Raj from Mumbai. Vindu Goel contributed reporting from
New Delhi, and Eric Lipton from Washington.