March 24, 2026

I Have Been Waiting Six Hundred Years for This Deal. I Have Some Concerns.

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Trumps, on a Deal-Making Spree, Turn Next to Transylvania

President Trump’s family business is setting its sights on Transylvania, the central Romanian home to literature’s Count Dracula. The company has selected, records and interviews show, a site alongside one of the region’s biggest landfills and a former medical waste dump.

The project, which has yet to be announced, would revive a stalled real estate development in the Romanian city of Cluj that had been tainted by government corruption. It would put Mr. Trump’s name on luxury apartments and a golf course not far from an informal encampment where Roma people have been effectively exiled to live beside toxic garbage.

New York Times March 20, 2026

1,476 words · 6 minute read

by Count Vladislav Draculaz

I have owned property in Transylvania for longer than most nations have existed. I have seen the Ottomans come. I have seen the Habsburgs come. I have seen UNESCO come, which was in some ways worse. And now, according to the New York Times, something called the Trump Organization is eyeing a site in my homeland for a golf course and luxury apartments, and I find myself in the unusual position of being both intrigued and deeply, professionally offended.

Let me be precise about what is being proposed. Tee times will begin at dusk and end at dawn. The golf balls will glow. The bars will serve international brands of blood — which I assume means they have managed to secure distribution rights for something bottled in Bordeaux and labeled with a crest that has no actual family behind it. And the site, apparently, sits atop a landfill the size of a small principality, which emits an odor that several early investors are describing, charitably, as “challenging.”

I have been managing the smell of death for six centuries. I recognize a euphemism when I encounter one.

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The nocturnal tee time is the detail I keep returning to. Dusk to dawn. I want to be clear: I did not lobby for this. I have never played golf. I find the sport aesthetically repugnant — all that clipped grass, all that purposeful walking, all that cheerful conversation in pastel clothing. But I understand the gesture. Someone, somewhere in the development team, looked at a map of Transylvania and thought: the brand synergy demands it. And they are not entirely wrong. There is a logic here that transcends marketing. Night golf on cursed ground is simply correct. I will not argue with correct.

The glowing golf balls are another matter. I have spent the better part of six centuries cultivating darkness as an aesthetic and a lifestyle, and I have very strong feelings about the introduction of luminescent spheres into my natural environment. The Carpathian night sky is not a canvas for recreational lighting. The wolves need that darkness. The bats need that darkness. I need that darkness. A golf ball that glows is a golf ball that makes me visible, and visibility is not a condition I have historically sought.

“The landfill, I am told, smells powerfully of something the locals are calling garlic. I want to address this directly: it is not garlic. But I understand why the mind goes there.”

Still. Dusk to dawn. I will give them dusk to dawn.

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Now. The clubs. I am told — and I have confirmed this with the provisional membership documents circulating among Bucharest’s investor class — that there will be no silver on the golf clubs. No silver anywhere in the resort, in fact: not in the cutlery, not in the decorative accents, not in the bar fixtures. This was presented as a cost-cutting measure. I choose to receive it as a courtesy. I have instructed my solicitor to send a note of thanks. One does not need to know why a door has been left open to appreciate that it has been.

The bars. I must speak about the bars. “International brands of blood” is the phrase being used, and I want to dissect this language with the care it deserves. What is an international brand of blood? Is it blood with a logo? Blood that has been focus-grouped? Blood distributed through a network of regional licensees who bear none of the liability if the vintage is off? I have been drinking blood since the fourteenth century. I have extremely developed opinions about provenance. The idea of blood with a marketing strategy is not something my palate is prepared to encounter, and yet here we are. I will order the house pour and try not to think about the supply chain.

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And then there is the landfill.

The site — the actual physical ground upon which someone proposes to build fairways, a clubhouse, and what the renderings show to be a quite aggressive fountain — sits atop a capped municipal waste facility. This is, I am told, a manageable obstacle. Remediation is possible. The methane can be collected. The ground can be stabilized. These are the words being used. Manageable. Remediable. Stable.

I am a man who sleeps in the soil of his homeland. I have very specific feelings about soil quality. If I were to open my coffin tomorrow and find that someone had replaced my native Transylvanian earth with capped landfill substrate, I would consider this a breach of the fundamental compact between a vampire and his ground. The earth of my ancestors is not, and has never been, interchangeable with the compressed refuse of a mid-sized Romanian municipality. This is not snobbery. This is theology.

The landfill smells powerfully of something the locals are calling garlic. I want to address this directly: it is not garlic. Garlic has a specific aromatic profile I have spent centuries learning to detect at distance. What this smells of is decomposition, methane off-gassing, and the chemical signature of several decades of improperly sorted household waste. Not the same thing. However, the effect on the surrounding landscape is not entirely dissimilar. People are staying away. The birds are behaving oddly. The local cats have opinions. In this sense, the landfill functions as a moat, which I respect in principle, even if the mechanism is ignoble.

“A brand that casts no reflection in the mirror of its own project history is, in my experience, the most dangerous kind of brand. It does not know what it looks like.”

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The New York Times mentions, with the light touch of a publication that has delivered bad news for a very long time, that there is “a troubled project history” following this brand into my homeland. In vampire terms, this is what we call a reputation that travels. I have my own troubled history — whole villages, a castle that inspires an unseemly amount of tourism — and I can tell you that reputation does not stay behind when you cross a border. It arrives before you. It is already at the table when you sit down to negotiate.

A brand that casts no reflection in the mirror of its own project history does not know what it looks like. It presents the gleaming tower and does not mention the towers still technically under construction in countries that have largely stopped expecting them to be completed. I have lived through the Ottoman Empire. I recognize an entity that overextends.

And yet — I cannot pretend disinterest. Dusk to dawn. No silver. Blood at the bar. These are not accidents. Someone did the research, and they delivered the aesthetic of what a vampire would want — which in the luxury market is often indistinguishable from the thing itself. I have been known to mistake the performance of power for power. I will not pretend to be immune.

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Here is what I know about my homeland that the development team does not. The Carpathians do not change for the transaction. They have seen every empire that ever believed it had tamed them, and they are still there, unchanged, while the flags above the fortresses have been replaced six, eight, twelve times. The forest does not care about the brand. The fog does not clear for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. The wolves that come down from the hills in November will not be rerouted around the fourteenth fairway simply because someone has paid for a landscape architect.

The landfill, too, will assert itself. Capped waste has a way of uncapping. Stabilized ground has opinions about that stabilization over time. Methane is patient. These are not my arguments against the project — I have no formal standing to oppose it, and frankly the prospect of a resort full of wealthy visitors who arrive at dusk and cannot explain why they feel compelled to return night after night is not entirely unappealing. These are simply the conditions of the ground. They were here before the deal. They will be here after.

Six hundred years teaches you, if nothing else, that the land has a longer memory than any investor’s timeline.

I will reserve a tee time. I will drink whatever they are calling blood. I will inspect the no-silver policy personally, with one of my own clubs, at the first opportunity. And I will watch, as I have always watched, from the treeline, patient as the fog, to see what this place does to what arrives in it.

It has never yet failed to get the last word.

Count Vladislav Dracula has been a property owner in Transylvania since approximately 1431. He writes occasionally about real estate, hospitality, and the geopolitics of the undead. He does not have an agent. Do not contact his castle directly; correspondence left at the gate will be returned, eventually, in a condition that reflects the seriousness with which it was sent.

FTS