2016 Postmortem

What Trump rarely talks about is his decades-long effort to do business in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. Good U.S.-Russian relations are potentially very lucrative for the Trump Organization. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

In the 1980s, Trump was often seen on news shows offering his services to negotiate with the Soviets. "Why don’t you negotiate the SALT talks for Reagan, Donald?” a man on the street once yelled at Trump, according to a 1990 profile of Donald and Ivana Trump in Vanity Fair. In 1987, Trump traveled to Moscow and Leningrad to discuss building hotels there. He even met with the Soviet ambassador to the U.S.

"It's a totally interesting place,” Trump said at the time. “I think the Soviet Union is really making an effort to cooperate in the sense of dealing openly with other nations and in opening up the country."

In a 1997 New Yorker profile, Trump talked about his trips to Russia to explore having the Trump Organization take part in skyscraper and hotel development projects in Moscow, including the reconstruction of the Moskva and Rossiya Hotels.