Five towers rise from the port of Rio de Janeiro, each 38 storeys high, together the largest office complex in Brazil. A 47-storey glass monolith of luxury residential condominiums and a casino soars above the Georgian Black Sea resort town of Batumi. An ocean resort in Tijuana, Mexico looms over the Pacific.
Separated by continents, two things unite these projects. One is the name emblazoned upon their peaks like crowns: Trump. The other is the fact they were never built, existing only in the archives of the internet as breathy press releases and glossy renders.
Now another can be added to this list of imagined edifices: rising from the white sands of Surfers Paradise, a new Trump Tower on Australia’s Gold Coast. The news was splashed across media outlets and social media around the world on Monday, with the announcement of a deal between the US president’s business empire and a local property developer.
That developer, Altus Property Group’s David Young, has twice gone bankrupt.
The Altus website lists the previous development of just a handful of housing projects in regional Australia. They seem a far cry from the $1.5bn tower Young suggests will be the tallest in the country – a project he declares has had “early works approved”, will begin construction by August, and be completed by the end of the decade.
Gold Coast’s acting mayor, Mark Hammel, appeared to contradict the first of those claims when he responded to questions about the proposal with a statement saying that a “formal development application” would still be required for the council to consider the resort.
So what of the second? Will Trump Tower break ground by August?
Those with longer memories might ask: will it be built at all?
Almost 20 years ago, Donald Trump was reported to be planning a trip to the Queensland glitter strip to headline a seminar, Think Like a Billionaire, and inspect the site of another proposed Trump Tower.
The seminar never went ahead, and that tower exists only in the realm of its brethren from Rio, Batumi and Tijuana.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
Paul Burton, an emeritus professor of planning at Griffith University, questions whether it will ever emerge from that world to this, whether he will ever be able to look down from his home on Mount Tamborine upon the Surfers Paradise Trump Tower.
For what characterises the Trump universe, he says, is “unpredictability and volatility” – and uncertainty is not unique to the US president, his progeny and their new local affiliate. The coastal strip of the Gold Coast, Burton says, has long been a magnet for flash and bluster.
“If you took all the plans and proposals for massive, luxury, spectacular, high-rise, innovative, world-beating projects that have never come to fruition there, you could build a pretty impressive sea wall across Surfers Paradise,” he says.
“This area is special because it attracts people who go: ‘I’ve got some fantastic plans and I’ve got some backers somewhere, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, wherever.’
“Most of them don’t come to fruition, because something falls apart along the way.”
Those that do, he says, tend to “rumble on for years” in development, often taking on numerous different incarnations before finding their final built form.
Yet from Manila to Istanbul, Trump Towers do get built around the world. So perhaps Altus can build this tower before the 2032 Olympics come to the sunshine state – it is “impossible to predict”, Burton says.
But if the Trump logo was to rise above the glitter strip, he asks, what would that do to the image and brand of the Gold Coast?
In recent years, Burton says the city has made concerted efforts to reimagine and recast itself: investing in scientific research, a burgeoning film industry and nature-based tourism.
“Taking a very celebratory, ‘oh this will be the making of the Gold Coast if we get a big tower that has got Trump’s name on the front of it,’ I think that is running a bit counter to the branding narrative that says, ‘we’re a more mature city now,’” Burton says.
But the city’s mayor, Tom Tate, seems happy to embrace the Trump name.
While the acting mayor was playing things with a straight bat at home, Tate was in the US meeting with Trump and was effusive in his praise of the project.
Fresh from meeting the president in his Florida club, Tate took to talkback radio on Tuesday to marvel at how “beautiful Melania is in real life” and recount his experience dining with Trump’s son and “genuine guy” Eric.
“It’s going to be the first Trump Tower in Australia … it’s quite incredible actually, it’s all about quality,” Tate told his Triple M radio hosts. “Putting the Trump brand on it, it will take it next level – and all the Americans will know where the Gold Coast is.”
Most Australians, of course, have the Gold Coast well and truly on the mental map. And for one of the country’s most popular satirical news sites, at least, Young’s Trump vision was one easily conjured.
“Known for it’s [sic] bikini-clad metre maids and exotic organised crime syndicates, the Gold Coast has for many years been synonymous with Australian divorcees, retirees and blokes on the run,” the Betoota Advocate’s fictitious editor, Clancy Overell, wrote this week.
“[I]n fact, most Australians say they could’ve sworn that the Gold Coast already had a Trump Tower.”
