Donald Trump Jr is promoting a Trump Towers luxury development near Delhi by offering buyers the chance to have dinner with him if they sign up.
The US president’s son told The New York Times that he has been cultivating relationships in India for a decade, but critics say the Trump family is using the president’s status as a form of covert advertising - a practice known as “shilling”.
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“The overlap in India between father and son creates a spectacle with few parallels in business and diplomacy,” says Singapore’s The Strait Times.
Trump Jr’s week-long trip comes as his father takes a harder line toward Pakistan and China while strengthening ties with India, where the Trump family earned up to $3m (£2.14m) in royalties in 2016.
“The idea that the president’s son would be going and shilling the president’s brand at the same time Donald Trump is president and is managing strategic and foreign relations with India - that is just bizarre,” former US State Department employee Daniel Markey told The New York Times.
A similar arrangement promoted by developers Tribeca and M3M to fly buyers to New York to meet Trump Jr was described by Norman Eisen, the former Obama corruption watchdog, as an “ethics atrocity”, The Guardian reports.
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