How the Boys Run Trump Inc.: With Other People’s Money and Some Dubious Partners

Days after a July visit from “Park Avenue,” as he calls them, Dinesh Chawla points to where each of the Trump Organization’s top hotel executives sat around his boardroom table, still sounding awed that the Trump team had come to tiny Cleveland, Miss. “When people find out who we are and who we’re associated with, the buzz just goes around,” Chawla says. A month earlier, in a Trump Tower press conference, Donald Trump Jr. had introduced Dinesh and his brother, Suresh, who own a chain of hotels across the Mississippi Delta, as partners who will turn four of their properties into Trump-managed brands. The deal immediately elevated them from the ranks of small-town hoteliers; Chawla recounts calls from bankers and Manhattan developers, attention from media outlets, and entreaties from local people looking for their own shot with the first family.

A nervous young couple are ushered in as Chawla is talking—a receptionist at one of his hotels and her fiancé, who sell food at festivals out of a trailer. They’re pitching a pizza restaurant, to be called Yellow Brick Oven, for the Chawlas’ newest hotel. Dinesh switches to the kind of withering, demanding-dad tone familiar from reality television—thanks, of course, to Donald Trump. “Whatever you do, it’s going to be revised,” Chawla tells the couple. “Now it’s going to Park Avenue.”