Trump and Arnault, an ancient bond between business and politics

The entrance of the Trump Tower and that of the Tiffany & co. flagship store along Fifth Avenue are only about thirty steps away and mark another kind of proximity: that between the current president of the United States, who completed the symbolic tower of his empire in 1983, and Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of Lvmh, who in 2021 took over the most important and well-known American jewellery brand for the record sum of $15.8 billion.

A symbolic and personal bond, the one between the two entrepreneurs, confirmed and strengthened last 20 January by Arnault's participation (with his wife Hélène and children Delphine and Alexandre) in Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony as the 47th president of the United States. An ancient bond, dating back to the early 1980s, when Arnault left France, and the new economic policies of socialist President Mitterand, to move to the United States, where he bought a Mediterranean-style villa overlooking the Long Island Sound, in the very New York where Trump's empire was growing.

At the time, Arnault was also involved in real estate development, just like the tycoon. And although he returned to Paris as early as 1984 to take over the Boussac textile group, which in turn controlled the dying Christian Dior brand, and thus plant the seed of the future Lvmh, the bond between the two has never faded.

A few days before his first inauguration into the White House, in January 2017, Arnault and his son Alexandre met Trump in Trump Tower itself: 'Lvmh will do wonderful things in our country,' Trump said on that occasion. Jobs. Lots of jobs'. Two years later, the two found themselves in a former cattle ranch of over 100 hectares in Alvarado, Texas, to inaugurate the new Louis Vuitton factory, the third in the United States, with a capacity of a thousand jobs. Its name, Rochambeau Ranch, was not chosen at random: Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Count of Rochambeau, had been a decisive support to General George Washington during the American War of Independence. And his statue stands right in front of the White House, in the heart of Lafayette Square.

The one in Texas may not be the last manufacturing plant on American soil of the largest luxury group, since during the meeting with the press on the occasion of the presentation of the 2024 budget last January, and after having praised Elon Musk's anti-bureaucratic approach, Arnault himself said that the US authorities would try to convince his group to further expand production in the country: 'It is something we are seriously examining.