Donald Trump Jr, who landed in India recently to talk branded real estate, will now have what is being dubbed as “A Fireside Chat” instead of the earlier high-sounding foreign policy speech at a business summit on “Indo-Pacific” relations, according to latest reports.
The reason apparently is accusations of “influence peddling” amid the already raging controversy over “conflicts of interest between the family business and his father’s job.”
“We don’t want any conflict of interest,” Trump Jr clarified in a TV interview, even as some ethics experts touted his visit to India as Trump Organization’s covert bid to “literally sell access to the first family.”
Rubbishing all such speculation as “nonsense” the executive vice president of Trump Organization told reporters “that his family had voluntarily agreed to put a number of promising deals in India on hold after his father was elected.”
Trump Jr’s endeavors in India over the past decade have resulted in deals for two residential towers in Pune and a 78-story Mumbai project. Plans for an office tower and residences in Gurgaon are also on the anvil, along with a project in Kolkata.
Talking to journalists, Trump Jr spoke freely on a range of topics from American mainstream media to life in a high-pressure fishbowl. “The level of scrutiny is ridiculous,” pointed out the dapper 40-year-old, seeming unperturbed by criticism as he charmed his audience of buyers and real estate big-wigs.
In Washington though, the visit has raised a few eyebrows and a few clarifications have been sought from the U.S. ambassador in India over the kind of support being extended to Trump Jr.