Trump collected $543,094 in management fees from the project from Jan. 2014 to July 2015, according to his financial disclosures, less than what he collected in the first year of the tower in 2012.

The problems in Toronto echo some of his other soured deals and partners abroad, themselves reminiscent of problems in the U.S. Trump said some of his international partners haven’t worked out.

"Not Everything is Perfect"

"Not everything is perfect,” he said. "Sometimes you find out that people aren’t what you thought they were and sometimes you find out they are phenomenal."

Trump was scouting for international partners in the mid-2000s when he thought he had found the right guide: Tevfik Arif. As chairman of New York-based Bayrock Group, Arif worked to put Trump’s name on hotels in Russia, Turkey, Poland and Ukraine, according to court testimony. Those plans and others to expand internationally never came to fruition, in some cases because of the sharp drop-off in luxury real estate around the world caused by the 2008 recession.

Arif did build Trump Soho in New York together with the Sapir Organization under a licensing and operating deal in one of the highest-profile flops in Trump’s real estate empire. After opening in 2010, the $450 million hotel-condo skyscraper struggled to find buyers, with two-thirds of the units unsold last year. Los Angeles-based CIM Group took control of the building in 2014 after foreclosing on Bayrock and Sapir. Trump remains the hotel operator.

Over the past six years, Trump has dispatched three of his children -- Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr. -- around the world to seek new business, saying in the interview from South Carolina that he had more than 100 deals under discussion, 85 percent of them abroad.

Panama

One of the first attempts to export the Trump brand was in Panama, where his partnership is now tied up in legal wrangling. Panama’s then-president Ricardo Martinelli attended the ceremony when the Trump Ocean Club, with some 70 floors, opened in 2011. The developer, Newland International Properties Corp., agreed to a deal that could have paid Trump about $75 million under a licensing agreement, based on sales price assumptions. That included a base fee of 4 percent on all gross revenue, according to a 2007 bond prospectus. Trump got an initial fee of $1.2 million and was slated to get a fee of 12 percent on leases of commercial space as well as royalties.

Like Shnaider in Toronto, Newland had no track record in real estate development on this scale. Once again, the project was plagued by delays and competition. Some buyers walked away from their down payments in 2011 as a glut of high-end apartments caused occupancy rates to plummet. Single-room units being offered for $350,000 were reduced to about $180,000. Newland missed a bond payment last year, less than two years after emerging from Chapter 11.