Donald Trump’s global business movements are well-known – his plans to contruct ‘the best golf course in the world’ faced stubborn opposition from a lone Scotsman, and the local government. That saga continues, and with electric cars. He has lent his name and organisational nous to a Trump Tower in Dubai, that he will not own; a Trump Tower in Tampa was recently scuppered by a bankruptcy. Most fittingly, there is a Trump World Tower at United Nations Plaza in Manhattan. Prices start at $1.5 million for a one bed, one-and-half bath (is the half ensuite?).
But his work is not done; there is a teetering architectural monolith just begging for his intervention. A white elephant that has lain untouched, until this very year, since 1992. We present to you the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea – said by Esquire to be the ‘The Worst Building in the History of Mankind’ – begun in 1987 and remaining unfinished, possibly dangerous, with an estimated price tag for completion of $2 billion. Surely a bit of venture capital, some of the promised ‘relaxed oversight’ on foreign investors and he’d be away. Like Sheldon Adelson in China’s gambling haven, Macau. The sky’s the limit.
As national vanity projects go, wouldn’t the country have been better off simply building a colossus of Kim Jong-il? Perhaps with a luxury penthouse in the head, for entertaining gullible celebrities? Like a communist riposte to the Statue of Liberty. A hotel for a country with such restricted access and limited resources seems boneheaded, but it doesn’t stop them; just witness Waldemar Januszczak’s undercover trip to Turkmenistan where, posing as part of a stag party, he witnessed any number of bugged, under-occupied luxury monuments to tourism in absentia.
Hell, since the death of President Niyazov, otherwise known as ‘Turkmenbashi’ (translates as ‘leader of all Turkmens’ his personality cult is well worth exploring, as is his book, the Rukhmana) the nation has been in need of steer, a figurehead. Those gas reserves won’t last forever, and Turkmenistan was was a post Soviet construct in the first place – so why not reinvent it again? Trumpmenistan has a real ring to it. Niyazov’s current successor is clearly nervous about the long shadow cast by his predecessor – he moved the marvellous Neutrality Arch (see above)out of town.
Turkmenistan’s new motto? ‘Think big and kick ass.’
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 