Trump’s Obsession With Real Estate Is Fueling a Ruinous Foreign Policy

Everywhere you look, Trump’s foreign policy is driven by his instincts as a developer. Last February, he posted an AI-generated video showed Gaza, then in rubble due to Israel’s genocidal post–October 7 military campaign, transformed into a glitzy resort: “Trump Gaza.” “It acts as a synthesis of Trump’s old identity as a failed casino owner and golf course peddler mixed with the authoritarian impulse to aid and abet other authoritarians,” the architecture critic Kate Wagner wrote for The Nation last year. “These obscene AI-generated ‘plans’ for Gaza communicate either an exaggerated notion of wealth (gold statues of Trump, crowds tossing US dollars into the air) or progress (solar farms, glassy buildings, and windmills).” (The creator of that video later said it was satire, mocking Trump’s “megalomaniac idea.”)

In Greenland, there’s a similar mindset. The U.S. has its strategic needs mostly met in the country, which should be enough. It doesn’t have to run the frozen country or be responsible for its people or infrastructure. But that doesn’t compute for Trump, who similarly has no interest in what the people in that nation desire for their future. Instead, he sees a vast space that he can stick his name on—and thinks not owning it is actually worse for the simple reason that, well, owning is always better than leasing.

There are, of course, other considerations at play, the biggest being what may be the main driver of Trump’s second term: his desperate attempt to build a “legacy” after the failure of his first term. But in practice, he’s doing this not by modeling his presidency after the great leaders of the past. He’s modeling it after great developers, or specifically one developer: Donald Trump. Thus far, it’s going about as well as his real estate empire.