The Emergence of “For-Profit” Cities in the U.S. with Ties to Trump’s Real Estate Development Company
- Donald V. Watkins
- 6 minutes ago
- 3 min read
By: Donald V. Watkins
Copyrighted and Published on December 9, 2025
An Editorial Opinion
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised he would develop 10 “charter cities” or “freedom cities” in the U.S. on undeveloped federal lands. He committed to using federal funds to develop these cities. The new cities will have near autonomous governance.
The concept is described in a December 5, 2025, Financial Times article titled, “Tech elites are starting their own for-profit cities.” According to the article, which is summarized below, proponents of "charter cities" want to escape from regulation and ‘failing’ democracy.
Trump's stated goal in building these cities was to boost American innovation in light of the U.S.-China technology race. His real goal was the enrichment of the Trump family.
The infrastructure money and necessary bond financing tax credits for building these cities are already in place. Trump has aligned himself with tech elites and pardoned criminals to bring his plan to life. Of course, the Trump family's real estate development company has an undisclosed role in these projects.
What was a fringe concept a few years ago is now attracting more interest as scrappy start-up chief executives and aggrieved billionaires contemplate the allure of tech-friendly havens unbound by legacy rules and regulations.
There are now about 120 “start-up societies” in the works. A few of them have received hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital from funds from multibillionaire investors like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI founder Sam Altman, and Brian Armstrong, Coinbase's chief executive. Thiel and Armstrong are two of Trump's 37 "Big, Beautiful Ballroom" contributors.
Próspera, California Forever, and the Praxis Movement are Early Experiments in “Charter Cities”
The most evolved prototype for this bold experiment in "charter cities" and alternative governance is Próspera, a gated private community on a Honduran island run by a Delaware-based company, where close to 1,000 residents enjoy co-working spaces, a beach resort, and a golf course. As a "for-profit" semi-autonomous zone, Próspera has low taxes, its own labor rules and an arbitration system run by retired Arizona judges who hear its cases online. Bitcoin is one of the currencies of choice.
The special legislation that allowed for Próspera to be established was championed by former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, whom Trump released from prison last week. Hernández was serving a 45-year prison sentence for trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. and for weapons crimes. Trump’s pardon set him free.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley billionaires including Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, and Michael Moritz have put money into California Forever, a group that has quietly bought up $1 billion worth of land in Solano County in its bid to build a walkable mega-development with affordable housing and a shipping complex — without extra autonomy.
Also, the Praxis Movement recently announced plans to start a “defense-focused spaceport city” called Atlas at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, already home to companies including Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. Project sponsors have assembled 150,000 prospective citizens. Among them are key members of Elon Musk’s controversial so-called Department of Government Efficiency initiative.
Connecting the Dots
The Trump family’s real estate development company, headed by Eric Trump, will be quietly co-developing the 10 U.S. “charter” or “freedom” cities in a "ghost" developer's role.
Trump has also hooked up a U.S. rare earth minerals company backed by Donald Trump, Jr.’s private equity firm 1789 Capital with lucrative Pentagon contracts and exclusive rare earth minerals concessions worth up to $24 trillion in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This is a level of corruption and grifting on a scale NEVER seen in America before an immunized Trump arrived in the presidency for his second term.
Now, Americans can fully understand Trump’s seemly bizarre presidential pardons for narco-trafficking kingpins, cryptocurrency crooks, imprison politicians, and Wall Street fraudsters.