Real estate is a dynastic business. In the case of Donald Trump, his family’s property investments began with his grandfather, a German immigrant who ran hotels for gold prospectors in Northwestern boomtowns, and eventually bought land in Queens. The Trump Organization, as Donald named the company when he took it over, in the early nineteen-seventies, owns, leases, and invests in properties, including seventeen golf courses and ten hotels. According to its Web site, it is “the world’s only global luxury real estate super-brand.”
This past spring, at a hotel-industry conference in New York, the Trump Organization announced that it was developing a new, less expensive hotel brand, aimed at the millennial market. Several months later, it sent out a press release, naming the concept: “Scion, which means ‘descendant of a notable family,’ is a multi-faceted lifestyle brand developed in response to the boom in social clubs and the ‘we’ economy.”
The lofty name—a decoy?—suggests succession, and, indeed, under pressure to abide by ethics guidelines, Trump says he has relinquished control of the Trump Organization to his older sons, Donald, Jr., and Eric. But the President made it clear he has no intention of taking the more complete step of divesting from his businesses, which government ethics lawyers argue is the only way to avoid conflicts. (The A.C.L.U. and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington are both pursuing legal claims against the President arguing that, by accepting money from foreign governments in the form of hotel-bill payments, bank loans, and rent, he is in violation of the Emoluments Clause, a rarely invoked constitutional provision intended to prevent members of the U.S. government from being corrupted by “any King, Prince, or foreign State.”) He still holds his ownership stake in the Trump Organization, which includes Scion, a name that reflects, in the way of too many mirrors in the lobby, the President himself, a son of privilege.
Objectors added #scionhotels to the list of brands to boycott, but for now there are been no actual buildings for protesters to picket, and only computer renderings to tilt at. This week, at another big real-estate conference, in downtown Los Angeles, Eric Danziger, the C.E.O. of Trump Hotels, represented the company. The Trump scions were nowhere in sight, and a Trump Hotel Group display area was deserted. At an empty table strewn with cookie crumbs lay a brochure for Trump Hotels. “Trump Hotels is built for the entrepreneur in all of us. Driven by the part of us that thinks big and then keeps on pushing,” it proclaimed. “Our guests inspires us.” Solecism slipped into solipsism into full-blown narcissistic projection. “There is no mistaking a Trump Hotels guest. His attributes mirror our own.” Typos aside, that’s a first-person plural that pretends to the crown.
The Scion brochure, beside the one for Trump Hotels, promised a break from all that pomp, a purposefully caffeinated world of professional women, artistic men, and human-scale, un-gilded design. “Keep Connecting,” it exhorted its desired audience of “Travelers & Wanderers.” The booklet, laid out like an Instagram account, featured pleasantly muddy, oversaturated images of bicycles, bar stools, friendly surfers, paper maps, workers hiving with tablets at a farmhouse table, a mother of color enjoying brunch with her son, a man with a turban and beard working a phone. The idealized guests occupied a world where work is lightly juggled alongside a diverse and eclectic social life and adorable offspring: a utopia that is as far from the vision that won Trump the election as it is from the oppressive Shakespearean weight of the brand’s name.
One floor up, in a large ballroom on the Diamond Level, Danziger was speaking about luxury for millennials, who, now that they are in their mid-thirties, spend two hundred and fifty billion dollars a year on travel. A moderator asked him where he envisioned opening hotels in the future. Danziger laughed. “Well, I would have said internationally, but increasingly we have turned that spigot off.” (In December, Trump tweeted, “No new deals will be done during my term(s) in office,” and this month he reiterated his pledge, while his tax attorney said he had cancelled thirty pending international deals. Nevertheless, a few days later, the Trump Organization announced plans to expand one of its golf-course properties in Scotland, adding a four-hundred-and-fifty-room five-star hotel and a housing development.) Danziger said that the Trump brand would continue to grow in primary domestic markets but not overseas. Scion would move into second- and third-string cities. (Altogether, Danziger told Bloomberg News later, the hotel group hopes to triple its footprint, expanding to all twenty-six “major metropolitan areas" in the United States.) He went on, “Part of the creation of Scion was not only to grab customers earlier into their quest for luxury and make them company-wide supporters, but to be able to roll out a product everywhere. In our case, frankly, both brands, and any other products I create, will have a domestic emphasis for the next four to eight years.”
The motto of the conference was “Please Stand By . . .” but the President’s pro-business stance was encouraging to the attendees, even if his nationalism, for an industry dependent on unimpeded global flow, was disconcerting. People found cause for optimism where they could. Niki Leondakis, a C.E.O. whose portfolio includes Thompson Hotels, said, “If Saturday's march didn’t make it clear that there will be more women on the road and staying in hotel rooms, I don’t know what will!” Another woman, a researcher for Real Capital Analytics, told me, “We believe this is the darkness before the dawn.”
Danziger, who has a gray beard and was sporting a red tie, is a veteran of the industry, having started as a bellboy at the Fairmont in San Francisco more than forty years ago. After his presentation, he lingered in the hallway, chatting gregariously with friends—a man in tortoiseshell glasses and a fine suit, another wearing a tie adorned with pigs. They asked him which inaugural ball he’d attended. One mentioned the view from his hotel room: protesters smashing a sheet-glass window. The men chuckled. When they caught a glimpse of my notebook, elegant excuses filled the air. Danziger, smiling apologetically, hurried away like the White Rabbit, suddenly late for an appointment.