On January 30, 10 days after Donald Trumps inauguration, a firm with ties to the president created two companies in Delaware, DT Marks Abu Dhabi LLC and DT Marks Abu Dhabi Member Corp. The naming conventions of the entitiesstarting with Trumps initials, followed by the word Marks, then a location of a future projectmatch how the president has named more than 30 other licensing entities in his portfolio.

The Trump Organization has not yet announced a deal in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, but its likely just a matter of time. Since last fall, Trump has been on a dealmaking spree, with his business revealing eight new projects in just 10 months. His foreign licensing income shot up from an estimated $6 million in 2023 to nearly $50 million last year. More business is headed Trumps way: Corporate filings point to at least three other unannounced dealsin Abu Dhabi, Serbia and Hungary.

All of this represents an about-face for the president, who hung onto ownership of his assets during his first term but stuck them in a trust and promised to launch no new ventures overseas. In the six years after his initial election, he added only one deal, agreeing to brand a golf development in Oman. But today, Trump profits from politics with little reservationboth domestically, recently signing crypto legislation that probably made him tens of millions of dollarsand abroad, expanding his licensing empire at dizzying speed. The conflicts of interest are now more brazen, and more overlooked, than ever before.

Trumps international travel, for instance, seems to be as much about his personal business as his national priorities. He heads to Scotland Friday, with plans to visit the two towns where he has golf resorts. His only other trip abroad since reassuming the presidency, besides a quick jaunt to the popes funeral and a couple of obligatory summits, was a tour through the Middle East. First, he landed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, home of Dar Al Arkan, a development firm whose subsidiary has signed a slew of new deals with Trump across the region, including in Riyadh. Next, he headed to Doha, Qatar, which will soon welcome a Trump-branded golf community about 25 miles north of the city. Finally, he flew to Abu Dhabi.

It's all head-spinning for people like Walter Shaub, who led the Office of Government Ethics in Trumps first term and clashed publicly with the White House over the presidents decision to hang onto his business; Shaub resigned in 2017. What Trump is doing today, Shaub says, is far worse than in his first term. This president has absolutely demolished any sense of a government-ethics program, Shaub explains. In fact, its gone so far as to be whatever is the direct opposite of government ethicsI suppose wed call that corruption.

Foreign powers have tried to buy favor in the United States since Americas founding. King Louis XVI gave Benjamin Franklin a snuffbox with 408 diamonds upon his departure from Paris, as Zephyr Teachout recounted in her book, Corruption in America. Franklin, recognizing that the Articles of Confederation banned gifts from foreign rulers, got special permission from Congress to keep the box. The next year, he and his compatriots gathered in Philadelphia to rip up the Articles of Confederation and draft the U.S. Constitution. One section that remained: The emoluments clause, which required all officeholders to get permission from Congress if they wanted to accept any present, emolument, office or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince or foreign state.

More than 200 years later, Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, sparking legal debate over the meaning of an emolument and whether the president could retain foreign business interests. Trumps team took the issue somewhat seriously, not only promising to do no new foreign deals but canceling a handful of pending projects, like one in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The emoluments clause was definitely the main concern, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, one of the presidents former partners in Georgia, told Forbes in 2017. Their concern was once you start negotiating with the government, then having Mr. Trump as president, they were worried, again, that the press and everybody else would look at it that hes getting favors.

Trump moved forward with other deals, delegating to his sons Eric and Don Jr. On a 2018 trip to India, Don Jr. bristled at his familys restrictions. Weve put on these impositions on ourselves, he said during a television interview, but essentially got no credit for actually doing that and for doing the right thing.

The reason the Trumps did not get any credit was because they were still taking in plenty of foreign moneyvia licensing deals, hotel operations, even property sales. Lawsuits landed, from a nonprofit group and the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia, accusing the president of violating the emoluments clause. The litigation took a slow route to the Supreme Court, which had never previously ruled on the definition of an emolument. It did not make a decision by the time Trump lost the 2020 election, and shortly after he left office, ruled the cases moot. If the issue had barely come up in 200 years, what were the odds of it resurfacing anytime soon?

From a purely business standpoint, it also seemed unlikely that people would want to pay Trump to brand their buildings after he departed Washington. January 6 left a stain on the presidents brand. Banks made it clear they wanted to cut ties, and social-media platforms shut down his accounts. People are not going to be willing to forgive, Kevin Brown, a stock analyst who covers hotels for Morningstar, told Forbes a month after the attack on the Capitol. He has done permanent damage to the Trump name and image, at least for two, three decades.

Or not. Trump launched his 2024 presidential campaign on November 15, 2022. The very next day, a Saudi real-estate firm signed an agreement to develop a Trump-branded golf community in partnership with the Sultanate of Oman. The deal kicked off more than $6 million to DT Marks Oman LLC, a company Trump owns outright.

Then came 2024. In June, Joe Biden broke down on the debate stage, cementing Trumps position as frontrunner for the White House. That same month, the real estate developer quietly created companies with names that pointed to future business in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. In July, his two eldest sons apparently moved to take a bigger share of branding business, with a Trump-tied firm creating new entities in Delaware named DJT Jr Licensing LLC and ET Licensing LLC. Trumps stake in the ventures fell to 80%, as other family memberspresumably Eric and Don Jr.split the remaining 20%, according to documents the elder Trump later submitted to the government.

The Trump family looked for places to add properties around the globe, finding fertile ground in Vietnam, where the prime minister reportedly promised to expedite a Trump project. Business picked up elsewhere after the election, as the Trumps registered entities named after three Indian localesPune, Noida and Gurgaonas well as Hungarys capital and the Philippines.

The Trump Organization publicly revealed its Saudi deal in December, with Eric Trump suggesting that his family would adhere to the same ethics guidelines that they did during their fathers previous administration. I think we are going to navigate that very smartly, he told Reuters. No different than we did in 2016.

That was clearly not true. With Trumps foreign licensing income up an estimated 650% in 2024, the promise to do no new foreign deals disappeared. Same with the concerns about working alongside foreign governments. Since the start of 2025, the Trump Organization appears to have created at least eight new companies to do business overseas.

Why are so few people paying attention? In part, because there is a lot to scrutinize, including the presidents new crypto ventures. There is burnout on Trump ethics scandalsits just one thing after another, says Richard Painter, George W. Bushs former ethics lawyer, who worked on the emoluments litigation in the first Trump administration but sounds skeptical that the cases will be refiled anytime soon. People think hes like Teflon, that nothing sticks to him.

They may be right. The White House press office, contacted for this story, declined to answer a list of specific questions but insisted the president acts in the interests of the American people, not himself. President Trumps assets are in a trust managed by his children, said Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly, without acknowledging that a trust doesnt do much if the person who puts it together retains his holdings, routinely checks in on them and tweaks rules after they become inconvenient. There are no conflicts of interest, Kelly added.

The Trump Organization, meanwhile, continues to operate, announcing a fresh project almost every month, stomping all over the presidents earlier promisesand the U.S. Constitution. In April, for example, a state-owned real estate firm in Qatar revealed that it had signed an agreement to develop a Trump-branded golf community outside of the nations capital, Doha.

Two weeks ago, the firm that registers companies for the Trump Organization created another two entities in Delaware, DT Marks Doha LLC and DT Marks Doha Member Corp. Its not clear whether those companies are connected to the already-announced project in Qataror an indication of yet another new foreign deal.

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