Donald Trump Jr. had his lawyers send a cease-and-desist letter out to an old pal who it seems can’t stop name-dropping him at business meetings around the world.
Since the eldest member of the MAGA clan sailed to victory at last year’s presidential polls, Gentry Beach—a college friend of the younger Trump—has toured no less than 20 countries, leveraging his connections in pursuit of multi-billion dollar deals with presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Among those deals are reportedly several mining concessions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, luxury real estate developments in Pakistan, a colossal railway project in Abu Dhabi, and stakes in Europe’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline—partially destroyed following a mysterious attack in 2022, and which nevertheless remains subject to U.S. sanctions amid Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But the tour has apparently left officials baffled as to how far Beach’s self-styled campaign of “economic diplomacy” actually represents the interests of the Trump administration, given the newspaper maintains “he has no official title or State Department designation.”
Trump Jr., who has invested in several of Beach’s businesses over the years, doesn’t appear to have looked kindly on any of this. The first son, who’s reportedly the godfather to Beach’s child, has apparently told members of his inner circle he is “frustrated” to meet foreign officials and diplomats who claim Beach had told them he’s keen on investing in their respective countries.
The Daily Beast has reached out to his representatives for comment.
Beach told the WSJ “he has never invoked the Trump family or the Trump administration in his business dealings,” insisting that his activities since last November represent a “new model of diplomacy to help foreign governments strengthen ties with Washington.”
“Everyone views Trump as a transactional president,” he told the paper. “They say to themselves, ‘Hey, if we get American businessmen doing business here, then America has something to lose.”
Beach similarly denied having received any letter from Trump Jr’s lawyers, sent out earlier in August, which apparently demands that Beach cease presenting himself at meetings as Trump Jr’s business partner.
“If something exists, it has never been shared with me or my team, and any suggestion otherwise is false,” he told the Journal, which has apparently reviewed both the letter and a series of texts in which Beach confirmed receipt of it.
Beach did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
While both Beach and Trump Jr. maintain they haven’t been in business together since earlier in 2017, Trump Jr. has nevertheless spoken fondly of his former groomsman in the past. He wrote in his memoir Triggered, published in 2019, that Beach was one of three “true friends,” who had “made calls night and day to raise cash” for Trump Sr.’s electoral campaign in 2015, and that “he was phenomenal at it.”
In interviews with the WSJ, Beach claimed he first introduced Trump Jr. to Charlie Kirk, the far-right activist assassinated during a Utah campus event last month. Six days after Trump Sr.’s win that November, Kirk tweeted a photo of himself with Beach, along with the caption: “The guy that put together a group of patriots that shocked the world. #Victory.”
“Don has laughingly said many times that we’ve known each other so long, any information we have is mutually destructive,” Beach explained. “He knows that I’ll always be a loyal friend.”
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