Viet Families Pushed Off Land For Trump-linked Project

By: Split Nguyen

Six hundred miles from its headwaters in southeast China, the Red River flows through Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city, and then through a broad, fertile delta on its way to the South China Sea. About 45 minutes’ drive downriver from Hanoi is Khoai Chau district of Hung Yen province, long rich in farms and orchards and now the fortuitous site of a US$1.5 billion resort development project with a familiar name floating up around it.

That is the name associated with the family of the President of the United States, in particular the elder sons Donald Jr. and Eric. Following their father’s return to the presidency in 2024, the two assumed managerial control over the global real estate and licensing empire. The brothers have been heavily involved in expanding and operating the family’s vast portfolio, which includes hotels, golf courses, and commercial properties, a progression that has speeded up as the president’s term proceeds.

Plans for the 990-hectare (roughly 2,500-acre) project area include two golf courses, a five-star hotel, and luxury villas. A top Vietnamese firm, the Kinh Bac City Development Holding Corporation, is managing construction and providing capital. The Trump Organization’s ostensible role in the project is simply to provide its good name for a fee of US$5 million for brand use. Across the world, that private business name is becoming associated with the power of the US government.

Directly on returning to power in January 2025, the second Trump Administration, deploring a “lack of reciprocity in bilateral trade relationships,” began pressing trading partners to negotiate and finalize agreements on “reciprocal, fair and balanced trade.” Specifically, it noted that the third largest US goods trade deficit was with Vietnam.

Spooked by worry that Trump, while launching several more ventures in other countries (mostly in the Middle East), might abandon his plans for Hung Yen, provincial authorities have been authorized to fast-track the Trump project, skipping legally required steps in order to shorten project implementation time by six to seven months.

Presuming that (1) American and Vietnamese negotiators can do the larger deal on bilateral trade that they’ve been straining at for the past 18 months, and (2) all agree to pretend that Donald Trump has not benefited personally (i.e., only his sons) from the Hưng Yên mega-resort, the project now seems certain to go forward. Champagne corks have already popped at a groundbreaking ceremony hosted by Donald Jr. and attended by Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính.

Not everyone’s a winner, however. The approximately 5,000 Vietnamese households forced to accept trivial sums for their fields and orchards are unquestionably losers.

Projected Hưng Yên mega-resort

If the confiscation of their farmland were treated as a market-value business transaction, they might have received US$30 or more per square meter. The catch is that under Vietnamese law, land that is ‘reclaimed’ by the state is compensated at a far lower rate; less than half what the land would sell for in a private transaction.

It’s no surprise that farmers in the nearly four square mile “Trump International” project tract are both boiling mad and helpless to do anything about the confiscation of their homes, fields and orchards. Or of their family graves, other than to exhume the coffins and rebury them elsewhere if they can afford to do so.

A colleague who spoke to farmers in the tract area earlier this year was told that local authorities have fiddled their compensation, hastily calculating land value at its 2019 price and not the current market price. There were lots of other complaints – that the authorities have failed to distribute documents, missed deadlines, cut short public comment and refused to show how amounts were calculated or to grant extensions. Training for non-agricultural jobs was promised but has yet to be provided. “We don’t oppose the project,” my colleague was told; “we just ask that it be fair, clear and in accord with law and market prices.”