TRUMP BUILT HIS TOWER OF FRAUD 20 TIMES, AND STILL THE BANKS LENT HIM MONEY.
Remember Bugsy, the movie about the gangster Bugsy Siegel who built the Flamingo resort in Vegas, and then was shot down when the Mafia discovered he was stealing money? Bugsy got shot dead for wrecking ONE vacation resort. Donald Trump wrecked EIGHT.
Trump Entertainment Resorts, more than a billion in debt, four different bankruptcies. Trump Taj Mahal, cost a billion, wrecked by debt. Trump Club Panama, units lost half their value, Trump borrowed bond money, payments were missed, bonds got downgraded. And then Trump stole money out of the pockets of a lot of Average Joe investors. Two golf courses in Europe, lost money and trashed a natural habitat along the way. Trump Waikiki, sold units for $700 million total, and somehow the units ended up empty. Trump International Las Vegas, Trump was caught union-busting and slapped down by the NLRB but he’s still screwing workers. Many times Trump’s partners, horrified at the incompetence and sheer theft, wanted to get rid of him.
Trump Baja sold condos for $800,000. Trump took money from families even though the construction wasn’t finished. The buildings never went up, the money wasn’t refunded. In all, over $100 million disappeared. Trump never told anybody that they weren’t just buying condos, they were assuming part of the risk that goes along with one of Trump’s insane investments. A hundred families were ripped off, and the victims had to sue. It emerged that Trump Baja violated both federal and state law.
In addition to the eight resort scams, are the tower scams. One of Donald Trump’s favorite things is to build a gigantic tower and slap his name on it. He’s launched more than a dozen of these projects and ripped people off over and over. The tower in Philadelphia made $300 million disappear; $139 million in Fort Lauderdale; Trump Place lost a billion in value. The towers in Dubai, Charlotte, Tampa, Toronto, all disasters; the one in New Orleans is now a parking lot. Trump Tower Chicago, Trump worked with crooked politicians to get millions in tax breaks which Average Joes -- local taxpayers --will have to pay for. The Istanbul project, the partner wants to get Trump the hell off the project.
He is simply lousy at his work. He lost $80 million on the Trump Plaza; when the grownups took charge of the hotel, they turned it around and made a $1 billion profit.
Trump Soho, huge losses, and because Trump cut corners on safety, a worker was killed. Trump’s project in Azerbaijan, Trump made deals with crooked, brutal dictators. Trump Mortgage, partner lied on his resume, collapsed in less than two years. Along the way, lies about costs and profits, massive debt defaults, Average Joes lost jobs in the thousands, angry bankers had to forcibly take control of the wrecked projects, and other Average Joes who invested had to sue Trump.
Trump has developed an ingenious strategy for these schemes. Choose shady, incompetent partners and inexperienced project managers. Hire foreign workers so he can abuse them all he wants and avoid hiring American workers. Don’t worry about committing flagrant safety and health code violations, even if workers and customers are in danger. Buildings that go empty due to bad planning. Investors and customers angry about being lied to and defrauded. Union workers ripped off. Partners who desperately want to get rid of Trump. Debt, bankruptcies, lawsuits. Lost American jobs. Move on to the next scam with brazen arrogance. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Year after year, his scams got dirtier and more illegal. Trump used front companies to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to New York politicians. He got his concrete from Fat Tony Salerno and Paul Castellano, the heads of two Mafia families. Trump’s gambling license in New Jersey was blocked when officials found out about his Mafia connections.
The amount of other people’s money that he made “disappear” is equal to his total net worth. Billions. Coincidence? Or grand theft?
In the 1990s he racked up $3 billion in debt with these massive projects, and bankers almost forced him into personal bankruptcy then and there. The big banks are now reluctant to lend him anything because he’s ripped them off so many times. These are the same bankers who turn a blind eye to everything, no matter how illegal: they almost crashed the global economy by ignoring the massive dangers in high-risk mortgages. Even THEY won’t lend to Trump anymore.
But now Trump wants us to trust him with the whole country.
TRUMP’S CAREER IS ONE SCAM AFTER ANOTHER.
“Trump University” was a scam which typically would entice an Average Joe with the promise of a “university” experience, and then give him a $1400 seminar which was essentially a sales pitch to get him to buy the $9,000 class or the $34,000 class. He claimed it had an A rating from the Better Business Bureau, and the BBB refuted this lie immediately. The project, like all con games, focused on gullible and vulnerable people, especially the elderly; Trump stole millions and lied about it. The whole fraud collapsed; massive amounts of money disappeared. Average Joes lost their money, lost their homes, went bankrupt, because they trusted Trump.
And…RICO investigation. The kind of investigation they use for ORGANIZED CRIME. The law has already forced him to stop calling “TU” a university and nailed him for fraud damages, and he is still the subject of many more legal actions, some of which may drag Trump into court right during the campaign. When investigators came hunting, Trump got even uglier: Trump released a video promising to expose the names of plaintiffs in the Trump University case, presumably so Trump’s army can hunt them down. He also made an insulting crack about the ethnicity of the Latino judge handling the case. He also bribed a state official to make the investigators go away.
Trump loves to put his name on things, and he loves it even more when he makes money on it. So he rents his name out to skeezy crooked operators and other idiots, or else he launches some new enterprise even though he is completely out of his depth. Trump Shuttle, cost $380 million, collapsed. Trump Steaks, health code violations, collapsed. Trump the Game, Trump Vodka, GoTrump, Trump Magazine, Trump Ice, New Jersey Generals, all gone. Trump lent his name to a video-phone operation that was one big pyramid scheme that ripped people off for hundreds of dollars a pop.
The Trump Network was a scam to sell people vitamins with bogus health claims; the “Network” didn’t pay its debts, and then it collapsed. One part of the scam was testing women’s urine to see if they had “good estrogen” or “bad estrogen”.
Even in the campaign, he can’t resist his natural impulse to cheat and lie. The rules for the campaign debates say you can’t run into the back during a break with a cellphone and get policy answers from your staff. But they caught Trump doing exactly that, and then they caught him actually meeting a staffer in person backstage. When they were confronted, Trump refused to send the staffer away – rules are for everybody else!
Here is Mitt Romney, who is himself a past master at grabbing millions of dollars in scams that destroy American jobs. Even Romney was compelled to say – “Here's what I know. Donald Trump is a phony. A fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers. He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.”
Trump has lied about virtually every aspect of how he made his fortune, including how much he inherited, and how much money he turned it into, and his brand valuation, and how he used junk bonds. He relied on his Daddy’s credit while taking wild but lucky gambles in real estate, but he still owes at least $270 million in debt, even beyond his other scams. He manages money so badly that if he’d handed his money over to a boring S&P index fund he’d have twice as much as he has now. Trump was sued by Justice Dept for racial discrimination; he violated the Fair Housing Act in his management of 39 buildings. He lied to the SEC and got caught; he got caught in a bribery probe.
In a rare moment of honesty, Trump made very clear he didn’t care whose lives he was ruining. “What the hell did I care? I told you, you shouldn't have loaned me that money. I told you the goddamn deal was no good."
And now he is running the biggest scam of them all.