by building a reputation as a successful billionaire businessman
His one attribute has been media manipulation - he actually ran his businesses into the ground and was kept afloat by his celebrity. Read about the Trump Taj Mahal or the United States Football League if you think he was a great businessman. And as of his inauguration, the Wall Street Journal and others estimate Trump companies to be several billion dollars in debt.
From the Washington Post:
Trump’s Taj Mahal opened in April 1990 in Atlantic City, but six months later, defaulted on interest payments to bondholders as his finances went into a tailspin. In July 1991, Trump’s Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy. He could not keep up with debts on two other Atlantic City casinos, and those two properties declared bankruptcy in 1992. A fourth property, the Plaza Hotel in New York, declared bankruptcy in 1992 after amassing debt.
Politifact uncovered more bankruptcies filed after 1992, totaling six. Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts filed for bankruptcy again in 2004, after accruing about $1.8 billion in debt. Trump Entertainment Resorts also declared bankruptcy in 2009.
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From PBS Frontline:
The New York Times obtained portions of Donald Trump’s tax returns from 1995 which revealed that the candidate declared a loss of $916 million that year.
It’s a loss that could have allowed Trump to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, according to tax experts interviewed by the
Times.
The Choice 2016, FRONTLINE’s documentary on the lives of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, takes a close look at the decisions that led to that nearly $1 billion loss — including the purchase and subsequent struggles of three Atlantic City casinos, an airline, a yacht, and the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan — and how Trump and his financial backers responded as one by one, those investments failed.
“He sort of blamed the people around him for what went wrong instead of himself,” Barbara Res, a vice president of the Trump Organization from 1980 to 1992, tells FRONTLINE.
The banks that Trump and his companies owed billions to faced a choice: cut ties with Trump or bail him out.
Ultimately, the banks decided that Trump was too big to fail. As they stared into the Trump Organization’s financial abyss, they came to decide that Trump’s assets — the buildings, the casinos — were worth more with his name still attached to them than they would be in foreclosure.
As
The Choice 2016 details, they even put Trump on a $450,000-a-month allowance. In exchange, he would continue to promote the business.
“I think bankers look at Trump as a promoter, not as a CEO. At least, that’s the way I looked at him,” Ben Berzin, who as vice president of Midlantic Bank helped negotiate Trump’s rescue, tells FRONTLINE. “And if you talk to other bankers, I think they share that opinion. He’s a wonderful promoter. He — you know, he’s the P. T. Barnum of the 21st century.”
