'Toxic' Trump brand blamed for demise of Australia's proposed tallest building
The proposed Trump-branded Gold Coast tower was always a long shot, and now the $1.5 billion project has officially collapsed.
Australians as a whole have not looked up to US President Donald Trump and with the collapse of plans to build the country’s tallest building emblazoned with his name, they won’t have to.
A deal that looked decidedly questionable from when it was first reported in February has fallen through, with the developer declaring the Trump brand is now too toxic in Australia.
Queensland developer David Young and the Trump Organization had entered a deal to design, build and brand a $1.5 billion 91-storey mixed-use skyscraper in Surfers Paradise.
As API Magazine reported at the time, there were ample signs that the building might never come to fruition.
Mr Young’s experience as a twice-bankrupted developer bore a certain resemblance to the proposed building’s presidential namesake, and he had not previously delivered any projects approaching that scale in size or complexity.
Work had been touted as beginning in August but never got close to the planning stages.
Despite the fact it was going to be built on site that had been vacant for a decade, it was never popular. One petition aiming to stop the project garnered more than 140,000 signatures.
Polls in April showed that only 19-25 per cent of Australians had favourable views towards the US president. Only 16 per cent of Australians believed the second Trump administration has been good for Australia.
The relationship between Mr Young and the Trumps reached its zenith with the signing of an agreement with Eric Trump, Executive Vice President of The Trump Organization and son of the president, at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Valentine’s Day.
But the romance has quickly soured.
Mr Young has announced that the deal is off and put the blame on the Trump brand’s local reputation.
“Let’s just say that with the Iran war and everything else, the Trump brand was increasingly unpopular in Australia,” he said in a statement.
The Trumps, who have not been known for accepting disparagements on the chin, replied promptly, saying 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.”
They added that their local partner had fallen well short of expectations.
“After months of negotiations and empty promise, after empty promise, on a supposed $1.5bn project, (Mr Young’s property group) was unable to meet the most basic financial obligation due upon the execution of the agreement,” the Trump Organization 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.”
Mr Young was more conciliatory about the breakup from the short-lived relationship.
Although he had labelled their brand toxic, Mr Young described this public reaction 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.”
What was from the outset a coupling that all the friends and onlookers strongly suspected wouldn’t last, surprised few with the seemingly inevitable denouement.
