In an interview The Real Deal published on Sept. 16, Eric Trump said Trump Tower Tbilisi has “nothing to do with the influence of a government.” Nor, he added, with any influence of his father’s.
The same week, he gave a very different interview, to a very different audience.
On the evening of Sept. 20, Rustavi 2, one of Georgia’s main private broadcasters, aired the full interview with the president’s son; excerpts had run earlier in the week. Georgians heard him through a Georgian translation laid over his voice, produced by the channel.
THE PARK WAS THE GIFT, THE FRONTAGE WAS THE POINT: THE SINISTER LOOPHOLE BEHIND TRUMP TOWER TBILISI
That detail matters because of whose channel it is. Rustavi 2 was the country’s leading opposition-leaning broadcaster until 2019, when ownership passed to Kibar Khalvashi, the brother of a then-sitting ruling-party MP. Its chief executive was replaced the day Khalvashi took control, and weeks later, after prominent journalists were fired, much of the newsroom walked out. The channel’s head of news at the time said publicly that representatives of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire the U.S. Treasury sanctioned in December 2024 under its Russia sanctions program, had offered to let him keep his job if he softened the criticism. He refused and was fired.
So what did Georgia hear?
In Rustavi 2’s rendering, Eric Trump attributed Georgia’s economic growth to very wise policy. He said Georgia was actively working to draw closer to the European Union, and described it as a safe country where people can come freely and focus on peace. He said the tower would strengthen trust in Georgia across the West. And asked about his local partners, he said Ilia Tsulaia, founder of the lead developer, Archi Group, has a wonderful reputation.
I am working from the channel’s translation. So is the Georgian public. For the purpose that matters in Tbilisi, the translation is the message. His own English points the same way. Addressing the Sept. 15 launch by video, he told Georgia’s prime minister and economy minister: “You have done an unbelievable job.”
The message, as the government reads it
Georgia’s ruling party has not treated the project as merely a private real-estate deal. When it was announced in April, Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili said that when Trump’s company enters Georgia under its own brand, “it means it has a strong understanding of the existing environment.”
That is the message Georgian Dream has emphasized: a vote of confidence, from the American president’s family, in the country’s economy and its governance.
The government Eric Trump credited with wise policy is the one that announced in November 2024 it would not pursue the opening of EU accession talks until 2028 — even as he described Georgia as actively working toward the EU. Washington suspended its strategic partnership with Tbilisi two days later. In December 2024 Ukraine imposed sanctions on the prime minister and the mayor of Tbilisi, both of whom attended the tower’s launch on Sept. 15.
None of this came up. The host did not ask about Ivanishvili, whose family’s fund sold the land for the tower in a deal the Wall Street Journal valued at up to $85 million. He did not ask about American sanctions, the accession talks, or political prisoners. The questions asked why Georgia, why now, what the project means for the economy, what the building will look like, and whether it opens a new chapter in Georgian-American relations. The next morning, Papuashvili declared EU membership worthless to Georgia without Abkhazia and South Ossetia — a condition that, with both regions under Russian occupation since 2008, only Moscow can meet.
Georgia is safe for a visitor. It has not been safe for Georgians who openly oppose their government. When protests followed the November 2024 announcement, Amnesty International counted more than 460 people detained in two weeks, around 300 of them reporting severe beatings or other ill-treatment. Georgia’s own public defender concluded that injuries deliberately inflicted on protesters amounted to torture. Aleksandre Tirkia, a 22-year-old tattoo artist, was struck in the head by a police tear-gas canister and left with skull fractures and a brain injury; more than a year later he has 10% vision in one eye, has had to emigrate, and no officer has been charged. Earlier that year, according to Human Rights Watch, hundreds of government critics and their families, children among them, had received anonymous threatening calls; a ruling-party MP publicly claimed his people were behind the intimidation. More than 100 people remain behind bars after what Amnesty International calls unfair trials on protest-related charges.
The one question that mattered
Once, the host came close. He asked by what criteria the Trump Organization had chosen its Georgian partners.
The answer, in the Georgian broadcast and in English to The Real Deal, was Alex Sapir: a longtime family friend the Trumps trust, who introduced them to Tsulaia and the rest of the team. Sapir, in turn, told The Real Deal he had himself been introduced to Tsulaia only last year, by his own business partners in Georgia.
That is the selection process as described by the people who conducted it: a family friend’s introduction, resting on an introduction from his own business partners. At the launch, Eric Trump said that five minutes after meeting Archi Group and Sapir, he knew their vision matched his family’s.
Tsulaia is a former ruling-party MP. According to Transparency International Georgia, the state-owned Partnership Fund invested $7.2 million in a factory built jointly with his Archi Group. The watchdog also reported that between 2016 and 2018 he and his business partners gave the ruling party and the presidential candidate it backed some 700,000 lari, more than $250 million. In January 2025 he was named in a letter to then-incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio proposing sanctions on roughly two dozen figures in Ivanishvili’s network; RFE/RL reported that it came from Congress. In June, Mayor Kakha Kaladze confirmed on air that Tsulaia is his childhood friend and the godfather of his child.
Tsulaia has not been sanctioned, and nothing I describe here is unlawful. A name on a proposal is not a designation. But a wonderful reputation is a specific claim, and it was made on Georgian television, by the president’s son, about a man that letter had proposed for sanctions.
An old line, reversed
On Rustavi 2, Eric Trump took care to separate his family from people who travel the world simply attaching their name to projects.
In 2012, before he took power, Ivanishvili dismissed the original Trump Tower Batumi in almost those terms. Trump had not invested in Georgia, he said: “It was more like a trick. They gave him money.”
Now a fund controlled by his family has sold the land for the second Trump tower, and the president’s son is on Rustavi 2 insisting the Trumps do not merely rent out their name.
Two audiences
I spent 12 years in Georgia’s security services, most of them working against Russian intelligence operations. One lesson from that work is that the sender of a message does not have to believe it for the message to be delivered.
Eric Trump told an American trade publication that the tower has nothing to do with government, and he may well believe it. But he told Georgians, at the launch and on Rustavi 2, that the government’s policy is wise, that his Georgian partner has a wonderful reputation, and that his project will strengthen the West’s trust in the country. That second message was at work by the morning after the launch, when a political commentator, in a post Rustavi 2 republished, set Eric Trump’s praise of the economy against an opposition he mocked for waiting on Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-SC) MEGOBARI sanctions bill. Each time it is repeated, it will be heard as the American president’s family vouching for a government whose founder Washington has sanctioned and whose strategic partnership it has suspended.
DON JR. DIDN’T BREAK THE LAW IN THE BAHAMAS. HE DID SOMETHING MUCH DUMBER
Nobody had to arrange that. His own words did.
The Trump Organization is entitled to build in Georgia, and this is not a demand that it stop. It is a suggestion that it notice which of its two interviews Georgia actually watched.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former senior Georgian counterintelligence officer and a former member of the Parliament of Georgia. He is a veteran of the 2008 Russia-Georgia war.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
