Trump's Last New Jersey Casino Is Now Just Another Failure In His Empire of Failures

Donald Trump does not ever admit failure, even when it stares him right in the face and calls him a dumb lunatic, and implores him to get rational and admit defeat. No, Donald Trump doesn't know failure because at the first sign of trouble, he picks himself up by the straps of his pennyless loafers, and then sells off as much as humanly possible without technically being labeled the source of another monumental clutsterfuck. Sure, there might be "Trump" branding in big, gold letters on the facade, but that's just a decoration left over from the last owner, who legally is not Donald Trump anymore.

The Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort, now set to close after Labor Day , is soon to be just another in a series of HUGE embarassing failures with Trump's name attached. What is being called the perfect metaphor to Trump's empire of false hopes and shattered dreams, the Trump Taj has SHOCKINGLY been a smoldering money pit from the very beginning as mentioned in top10casinowebsites.net .

After Trump took control of the fledgling, half-built casino resort that was already over budget, he went before the New Jersey Casino Commission in February of 1988 and bullshitted his way to something close to an answer when asked how he could even finance the project. Let's set the scene for full effect: picture 1980s Trump, with the pouty duckface jowls and that feathery pompadour-mullet thing, confidently looking a bunch of concerned regulators square in the face and boasting that he would be better than other investors because he was Donald fucking Trump. He was fabulously wealthy; constantly being pestered by banks to borrow money because his name made creditors swoon and faint into their Scrooge McDuck cash pools.

“I also, as I said before, don’t have to use junk bonds. I can use my own funds or I can use regular bank borrowings, so I can build at the prime rate. I mean, the banks call me all the time. ‘Can we loan you money? Can we do this? Can we do that?'...It’s easier to finance if Donald Trump owns it. With me, they know there’s a certainty they would get their interest. I get it done, and everybody is happy and it turns out successfully."

Less than a year later, Trump was forced to secure funding from junk bonds to finish the construction of Taj. When it opened, at a total cost $1.1 billion, Trump's two other Atlantic City casino's were in the toilet $1.3 billion, with an additional $2.1 billion owed to other lenders. Trump claimed to be worth $1.4 billion at the time, but a Forbes piece called shenanigans and said it was maybe more like $500 million. Of course, the commission reported it was REALLY only $206 million. Minor details, a slight miscalculation!

Just seven months after opening the Taj, Trump defaulted on his debt for it, in November of 1990. In July of 1991 Trump filed for bankruptcy with half of his controlling stake going to bond holders to reorganize his HUGE fuck up. Pretty much everyone who invested in the Taj got screwed, including Atlantic City as the following year his other two casinos, the Castle and the Plaza, went bankrupt. Trump had to sell his yacht and his airline , Trump Shuttle (which was its own separate bullshit excursion into the annals of Trump's stupidity), but the Taj still went through three more bankruptcies before he finally lost majority control of the hotel.

Since 2009, Trump has had not any management control of the hotel, and only held a 10 percent stake as a penitence for keeping his name plastered on the side. That is at least until 2014 when another bankruptcy pulled that too.

Carl Ichan bought the Taj this past February, and things have only gotten worse. In a May 2015 memo from the Health Department, the mice in the Taj were ballsy enough to stroll right up to a service dog, prompting the guest to comment, " They were very brave ." The rot inside the Taj is so bad that reports of bed bugs go back as far as 2010. And as grandma always said, where there's rats, there's roaches. 

Recently, food, beverage and housekeeping staff from the Local 54 of the Unite-HERE union were in the middle of staging one of the longest strikes in Atlantic City history after workers lost health care and pensions benefits in the most recent bankruptcy. Coincidentally, the workers lost their benefits in March when Ichan took over, and Trump lost his 10 percent stake in the company. One way to look at the 3,000 people who will lose their jobs (joining a growing pool of 8,000 jobless casino workers in Atlantic City) as a result of decades of mismanagement, would be that those blue collar workers who helped to support a Trump branded product just got a bad deal.

[ Portland Press Herald / Slate / ABC News / WaPo ]