The Trump Family’s Island of Dreams
A new resort on the remote Albanian island of Sazan promises “high-end luxury.”
JUNE 12, 2025
On Sazan, a small island off the coast of Albania, the landscape is Jurassic. Ferns, giant lavender, plumbago, rosemary, broom, and laurels grow on the mountain at its center. The view from the top, with its dramatic sunsets, is dizzyingly beautiful.
Albanians call Sazan Ishulli i Trumpëve — Trump Island. Until now mostly untrammeled by development, it is on the verge of becoming a Mecca for ultra-luxury tourism, another addition to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s real estate portfolio. Speaking on the Lex Friedman podcast in July 2024, Ivanka could barely conceal her excitement: “I’m working with my husband, we have this 1,400-acre island in the Mediterranean and we’re bringing in the best architects and the best brands,” she said. “It’s going to be extraordinary.”
When I reached Kushner by phone the same month, I detected brimming enthusiasm for Sazan, which he seemed to regard as something of a treasure. He said he plans “to create the ideal resort that I’d want to be at with my family and with my friends.”
When I got there, on a clear day in July 2024, I found that the island doesn’t lend itself to getting lost: It is covered in signs depicting skulls and bones, warning of landmines.
Before I visited the island, I marveled at the thought of traversing its roughly 40 miles of trails, climbing its mountains covered in rainforest, and exploring its deep waterways with names like Paradise, Hell’s Gorge, Devil’s Gulf and Admiral’s Beach. I wanted to see it before the phrase “I’m going to Sazan” becomes the prerogative of the rich.
When I got there, on a clear day in July 2024, I found that the island doesn’t lend itself to getting lost: It is covered in signs depicting skulls and bones, warning of landmines. My guide, Arbër Celaj, a lieutenant commander in the Albanian Navy, stopped me from venturing too far. He did not want to get a dressing down from his superiors.
Sazan lies between the Adriatic Sea and the Ionic Sea, strategically positioned at the entrance to the Bay of Vlorë, in the strait of Otranto that separates Italy from Albania. But as Celaj explained, “Sazan’s climate is not Mediterranean — it’s subtropical. You can see from the vegetation. The biodiversity is crazy.” Indeed, the brush seemed to have emerged from Spielberg’s computer, giving rise to a jungle of colossal ash trees, horn breams, maritime pines, and holm oaks.
Unable to stray off the beaten path, I made do with glimpses of carpets of rare ferns and valleys of tall grass sloping down to turquoise waters. It was like standing at the dawn of time, watching the landscape be created. Kushner was also speechless when he first saw it in 2021, he told me: “I was just very surprised that something like that existed in the middle of the Mediterranean and hadn't been developed.” Preliminary approval from the Albanian government for Kushner’s project came on December 30, 2024.
I last spoke to Kushner and his associate Asher Abehsera, the CEO and co-founder with Kushner of Affinity Global Development, in July 2024. Jonathan Gasthalter, the spokesperson for Affinity Partners, a Miami-based firm belonging to Kushner managing $4.6 billion in assets, did not respond to multiple emails and text messages asking for comment from Kushner or Abehsera on updates to the real estate project.
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Implausibly, Sazan’s environment owes a lot to communism. During its communist era, from 1946 to 1991, Albania was known as Europe’s North Korea and Sazan became a symbol of extreme isolation: an inaccessible military fortress that dictator Enver Hoxha, who feared the country would fall prey to a superpower, imagined could help defend against an attack from NATO or members of the Warsaw Pact.
For decades, soldiers stationed on the island waited for such an attack, scanning the horizon, listening for the submarine that sooner or later would emerge from the depths of the Adriatic. There was a military base on the island, with living quarters, a theater, a school and a hospital. By the 1970s, about 150 military families lived on the island without contact with the mainland. “But they were privileged. They had food, clothing, education, appliances,” Celaj told me. The wait only ended with the fall of the regime in 1991.
Walking along a trail with my guide, we come across several bomb shelters and tunnels designed to store supplies and ammunition or act as hideouts in the event of a guerrilla war against the imperial invaders. Celaj told me there are about 10 miles of tunnels, now mostly inhabited by bats, vipers and wild rabbits. There are about 3,600 bunkers on Sazan, armored cement mushrooms emerging from the vegetation or perched on mountaintops like lookouts against phantom American aircraft carriers or Soviet frigates. Some will be preserved and integrated into the new real estate project, according to Kushner.
I asked Rama if he worried about any political complications relating to the new real-estate project. He told me his country “can’t afford not to exploit a gift like Sazan,” claiming: “We need luxury tourism like a desert needs water.” He isn’t afraid of controversy, he added, especially “if it helps draw attention and bring investment.”
I ask my guide about the signs warning of landmines. “Actually, they’re not exactly landmines,” he explained. “This place is full of unexploded ordinance, there are still many areas that need to be cleared.” He pointed to a ravine on the eastern coast, where Affinity Partners wants to develop a significant part of the real estate project that will span the entire surface of the island. “The [unexploded ordinance are] remnants of the 1990s,” Celaj went on, “when criminals attacked the island right under the noses of the military, looting the weapons and ammunitions depots.” The enemy had come in the end, but in small makeshift vessels and speaking the same language as the soldiers.
These days, the island is controlled by Albanian armed forces. It is patrolled by three sailors, who walk back and forth between the rusty and ramshackle docks on the gulf of San Nicolo (the port where Affinity will build the main marina for the yachts, according to Abehsera).
Albania has risen to the top of some of the most prestigious travel rankings in recent years, largely thanks to Prime Minister Edi Rama, who has turned the country into an economic tiger of the Balkans.
I asked Rama if he worried about any political complications relating to the new real-estate project. He told me his country “can’t afford not to exploit a gift like Sazan,” claiming: “We need luxury tourism like a desert needs water.” He isn’t afraid of controversy, he added, especially “if it helps draw attention and bring investment.”
Rama has been “a great partner” and is very forward-thinking, according to Kushner. “The government’s clearly seen that it can be something,” he told me during our conversation in July 2024. “They’re building an airport right there [in the Vlöre area].”
Albania isn’t Kushner’s only target: He is also interested in Serbia, where Affinity Partners plans to turn the former defense ministry building in Belgrade into a luxury hotel.
Affinity’s business broker in the region is former ambassador Richard Grenell, who served as Trump’s special envoy for Serbia and Kosovo peace negotiations between 2019 and 2021. According to the New York Times, while Grenell was special envoy, he pushed a related plan that Serbia and the U.S. jointly redevelop the former defense ministry. He has since joined forces with Kushner on the new development deal, and is now a partner in Affinity. (Kushner told me it was Grenell who first suggested he invest in Albania.)
Serbia’s president, the opportunistic Aleksandar Vučić, saw in Grenell and Kushner an opportunity to get close to Trump should he win reelection, according to the Financial Times. Vučić is, in fact, playing a dangerous game: As well as cozying up to Trump’s acolytes, he has refused to impose sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. In May 2024, he rolled out the red carpet for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whose government has made major investments in new infrastructure in Serbia, Reuters reported. All the while, Vučić continues to express his desire to join the European Union but refuses to meet Brussels’ main condition: recognizing the borders and independence of Kosovo.
Negotiations with Affinity about the sale of Sazan were kept secret. Residents and parliamentarians were not aware of the $1.4 billion deal until it was published in the papers. Mirela Kumbaro, Albania’s minister for tourism and the environment, defended Rama’s decision to strike a deal with Kushner’s company.
When I spoke to Rama, the Albanian premier, I asked what role American investment played in geopolitics. He replied that it was just business, but didn’t deny it could advance a broader political strategy. “We must keep Serbia in the Western sphere and get it out from under Moscow’s thumb,” he said. In an interview with the Financial Times in July 2024, Grenell, too, said investments like the real estate deal to take over the former defense ministry are meant to bring Serbia closer to the U.S.
Kushner, who served as a senior adviser to Trump from 2017 to 2021, denied using his position to advance any plans to develop Sazan when we spoke in July 2024. “I never met Prime Minister Rama when I was in government,” Kushner told me. “But even if I had, it’s not a conflict of interest. People who serve in government, they build different relationships.” He claimed that interest in Serbia and Albania “is going up tremendously” as a result of his company’s real estate deals.
Negotiations with Affinity about the sale of Sazan were kept secret. Residents and parliamentarians were not aware of the $1.4 billion deal until it was published in the papers.
Mirela Kumbaro, Albania’s minister for tourism and the environment, defended Rama’s decision to strike a deal with Kushner’s company, which was heavily criticized by the opposition. “We can’t compete with Italy, Croatia and Greece in the mass tourism industry. We don’t have enough infrastructure or experience,” she told me. “We have to focus on quality. On value over volume. More profits and fewer problems.”
Nearly 12 million foreign visitors traveled to Albania in 2024, a 15 percent increase over the previous year, according to local media. That’s “too many for us, and too much pollution,” she said. “Sazan is the way to go. The ideal recipe: nature and luxury tourism.” Kumbaro was enthusiastic about the project, explaining that Affinity is working closely with the government agency in charge of strategic investments, meaning those that exceed 15 million euros.
The trade-off is substantial: zero taxes during the construction phase and the state takes care of all infrastructure, including water, electricity, sewage, according to Kumbaro. Everything else — the sun, the sea, the monk seals and the subtropical jungle — is already there.
That is precisely what worries environmentalists like Olsi Nika, a marine biologist and the director of the NGO EcoAlbania. “This area is in the Sazan-Karaburun maritime national park. It means the beaches and waters within 2 kilometers [1.25 miles] of the shore are protected. What will large public works, the building of docks, yacht traffic and sewage run off do to the place?”
Abehsera, from Affinity, told me the company had hired the global sustainable development firm, Arup, as a consultant on the project. “Their practice is principally focused on really accentuating and respecting the local ecology and the environment,” he said.
Kushner, too, had an answer at the ready. “When people announce a development, everyone gets scared,” he said in July 2024. “Everybody assumes the worst. But once they see the plans we have, the way we’re designing it, the way we’re being faithful and considerate of the environment around us, I think that people will be very, very pleased. And again, with developments, you never make everyone happy.”
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When I met Abehsera for lunch in Vlöre in August 2024, he gave me a preview of the plans for the island’s development. The hotel, he said, would be a “jewel on the Mediterranean,” the answer to people who ask, “what have I not seen yet?” The design of the hotel would not “impose” on nature; the buildings would “sculpted or even scalloped by nature.” It will feel “more like you’re nestled in a beautiful tree.”
I was having difficulty following. I asked him whether the island would remain accessible to normal people, to locals who want to make use of its beaches. “I think everyone should have the opportunity to visit the island,” he told me.
Kushner was more skeptical. “We’re creating a very high-end luxury product,” he told me. “One of the most compelling points about the island is just the ability to have privacy ... But I also think there are certain aspects of the island we can build out that will give people the opportunity to come visit and enjoy some of the food and the trails.”
I thought back to my afternoon with Celaj. He’d told me that up until a few years ago, soldiers on patrol would sometimes report seeing a little gray donkey among the wild figs in a clearing, or in Hell’s Gorge. Then it would just disappear. I wondered if it was just a legend, or if the gray donkey died along with the mystery of the island, the last bastion of wilderness in the Mediterranean, conquered, in the end, without a single shot fired. All it took was for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to climb out of a helicopter and say, “Wow!”
This article was originally published in Reportagen and Internazionale.
IMAGE: Illustration overlay on photo of Sazan Island (2016) by Pasztilla aka Attila Terbócs (via Wikimedia)
✺ Published in “Issue 29: Fathers” of The Dial
