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The little-known property developer and the US president’s son were all smiles when they shook hands on Valentine’s Day within the gilded walls of Mar-a-Lago on a deal they claimed would bring a Trump Tower to Australia’s Gold Coast.
But that dalliance has been dashed in less than three months, with the developer now claiming the Trump brand is now too “toxic” to work with – and the Trump Organization responding that their local partner had provided only “empty promise, after empty promise”.
After posting a picture of himself shaking hands with Eric Trump in February, Altus Property Group’s David Young wrote effusively about a Trump brand that he said was synonymous with luxury and quality, one that would help him build the tallest tower and “the best” resort in the country.
The Trump Organization’s executive vice-president and the US president’s second son tweeted an image of a proposed $1.5bn shimmering monolith emblazoned with his family name rising like a mirage above the towers of the “glitter strip”.
“I am so proud to announce what will soon be the tallest building in Australia – Trump International Hotel & Tower Gold Coast,” Eric Trump wrote.
And: “It will be a great honor! #Australia”.
But this week, the boasts and back slapping turned to finger pointing.
Young, who has gone bankrupt on two previous occasions, took to LinkedIn and used all caps on Tuesday night to correct a headline that read “Trump abandons plan for Gold Coast tower”.
“DEVELOPER ABANDONS PLAN FOR A TRUMP BRAND TOWER,” Young wrote.
In the post, Young said that the US war in Iran had made the Trump brand “toxic to Australians”, something he described as “grossly unfair” on a brand that had “nothing to do with the President”. That link, he claimed, was driven by “pure sensationalism”.
“There is no acrimony between the Trump family and myself, why would there be after knowing them for 19 years when no one here then even knew who Donald Trump was,” he wrote. “It is pure business. My team and I look forward to completing the project and as an old expression goes, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”.
An Altus spokesperson said that Young’s first bankruptcy was later annulled and that he believed that all subcontractors had been paid out on the second, which came after the global financial crisis and at a time when “numerous companies went bankrupt”. Neither were linked to Altus.
A statement in response from the Trump Organization, however, certainly seemed to contain more than a hint of acrimony.
The statement said that, while the Trump group were “very excited about the opportunity to bring a world-class development to the Gold Coast”, its licensing partner, Altus, had been unable to uphold its end of the bargain.
“After months of negotiations and empty promise, after empty promise, on a supposed $1.5bn project, Altus Property Group was unable to meet the most basic financial obligation due upon the execution of the agreement,” the statement read.
“Mr Young’s attempt to blame certain world events for our termination of the agreement is merely a ploy to distract from his own defaults and failures.”
Young denied the parting of ways was due to his “not meeting obligations” saying that “with the Iran war and everything else”, his team “knew it was time to part company”.
Both parties claimed they were forging ahead with tower plans in Australia. As of Wednesday morning, Altus’ website still listed the Trump Tower as the one project in its “developments” page – though in its “communities” section it has a number of housing estates in regional Queensland. With a video of artistic renderings of the resort, including a bikini-clad DJ playing by an elevated pool, the website claimed early works had been approved on the Trump Tower and that construction would begin in August.
Gold Coast mayor Tom Tate said that no application had yet been submitted to the council.
Tate, who also travelled to Florida earlier this year and met the president and his family, had previously been effusive in praise for the tower proposal, saying that putting the Trump brand on the Gold Coast would “take it next level”.
On Wednesday, he issued a brief statement to say that, in the absence of an application, council “didn’t have a proposal to consider”.
“This project was an agreement between two private parties,” he said.
Paul Burton, an emeritus professor of planning at Griffith University, who lives on nearby Tamborine Mountain which overlooks the Gold Coast, had previously cautioned that the coastal strip had a history of ambitious tower and resort projects that never came to fruition. Most collapsed, he said, because they either failed to get approval or, “much more likely” to raise the funds to finance construction.
“One of the problems now is that you can just feed something into Claude or Copilot or ChatGPT and say: ‘produce me an image of a fantastic gold plated tower sitting in the middle of Surfers Paradise’ and it’ll do it in five seconds,” he said.
“But unless you are Harry Triguboff, most developers will still have to go to a bank or an institution and borrow money – and those institutions are pretty sensible and cautious”.
Burton said he was “absolutely not” surprised at the collapse of the Trump Tower plan.
“It was very predictable and the most likely outcome was that it would all fall over and end in tears,” he said. “The only question was: would it be sooner or later?”
