A Saudi developer paid Trump $5.25 million for a Qatar golf resort led by a Qatari state company
On April 30, 2025, Eric Trump signed in Doha with Dar Global and Qatari Diar, Qatar's state developer, for a Trump-branded golf club and villas. Trump's 2025 disclosure shows a $5.25 million licence fee from the project — signed two weeks before he flew to Doha.
What happened
Trump's 2025 financial disclosure lists a $5,250,000 licence fee to DT Marks Doha LLC from Dar Global Holdings for Real Estate; CNBC and The National tie it to this project. The golf club and villas sit inside the $5.5 billion Simaisma development led by Qatari Diar, a company Qatar's sovereign wealth fund established and which Qatar's municipality minister, Abdullah bin Hamad bin Abdullah Al Attiya, chairs. It was the Trump Organization's first foreign deal since Trump took office; in his first term he forswore foreign deals at a press conference staged with stacks of legal documents. Qatari Diar's involvement "would appear to violate" the Organization's weaker second-term pledge, which allowed foreign deals but not deals with foreign governments, the Associated Press reported. The Organization told the AP its deal was with the Saudi firm, not the Qatari one, though Eric Trump's own statement named both. The fee is one of the seven Gulf licence lines totalling $37.1 million on money-2026-06-13-079, inside the $61 million counted on money-2026-07-08-097, so it is logged here and counted there.
Why it matters
Two weeks after his son signed with Qatar's state developer, Trump flew to Doha on the first major foreign trip of his second term and announced aviation, defense and economic agreements. The Qatari government and Qatari Diar did not answer CNBC's question of whether the Trump project was discussed alongside them. "You want a president making decisions that are in the best interest of the United States, not his bottom line," said Noah Bookbinder, who leads Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The Trump Organization says it operates "completely separate from the presidency." AP asked the two Republicans who chair the congressional foreign relations committees about the deal; neither responded. The filing and the reporting cited here do not show that the licence fee bought the agreements.
Sources
OGE Form 278e (2025 annual); Associated Press; CNBC; The National; Qatari Diar / Dar Global release; Newsweek; Times of Israel (AP relay), apnews.com, timesofisrael.com, cnbc.com, thenationalnews.com, prnewswire.com, newsweek.com