NEWSWEEK SHOWS WHY DONALD TRUMP IS A BIG FAKE!

…Before going bankrupt, this is what Trump called the “Eighth Wonder of the World”

 

Without his father’s help, “The Donald” would have filed for bankruptcy at a very early age.

 

If you are an avid reader of Newsweek Magazine, you were probably intrigued by their roasting of Donald Trump as a successful business executive.  The article doesn’t hold back, and after you are done absorbing its findings, you can see why they totally question Donald Trump running for president as a “successful businessman”.

 

Newsweek even goes back into Trump’s background, starting from his early college experience.

 

I will now summarize what they eventually came to and what they found out that left them with such a negative attitude.

 

First, did you know that Trump’s first stab at college, was for developing his future career as Hollywood film producer?

 

Yes, Trump did eventually attend Fordham University, and two years later, he transferred to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania where he earned a degree in economics.

 

But as Newsweek has written, “When he [Trump] was first ready for college, Trump wanted to be a movie producer, perhaps the first sign that he was far more interested in the glitz of business than the nuts and bolts. He then applied to the University of Southern California to pursue a film career.” 

 

However, not being that creative or innovative for a Hollywood career, he early on realized that film producing was not in his gene pool.  Newsweek then added, “Trump boasted when he announced his candidacy last year that he had made his money “the old-fashioned way,” but he is no Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg, self-made billionaires who were mavericks, innovators in their fields.

 

 

Instead, the Republican nominee’s wealth is “Daddy-made”. Almost all of his best-known successes are attributable to family ties or money given to him by his father. The son of the wealthy developer Fred Trump, he went to work for his father’s real estate business. immediately after graduating from Wharton.  He then found some success by taking advantage of his father’s riches and close ties to the power brokers in the New York Democratic Party, particularly his decades-long friend Abe Beame, the former mayor of the city.”

 

Trump always wanted to be part of the Manhattan elite, rather than just be known as the son of a Brooklyn developer.  “So, in 1970, he took another shot at joining the entertainment business by investing $70,000, to snag a co-producer’s credit for a Broadway comedy called Paris Is Out! Once again, Trump failed; the play bombed, closing after just 96 performances.”

 

Afterward, Trump finally decide to stick with his daddy’s business, he got involved with revitalizing the Swifton Village apartment complex in Cleveland.  His father had purchased the complex for $5.7 million in 1962. After Trump finished his work, they sold the complex for $6.75 million. 

 

 

Now this appears to be a small financial return, but it was still a big loss.  The complex would have had to sell for at least $7.9 million to have earned an actual profit. Still, being pure Trump, he happily boasted about his supposed success with Swifton Village and about his personal wealth that came from his dad.

 

Newsweek wrote the following: “The next year, he moved to Manhattan from the outer boroughs, still largely dependent on Daddy. In 1972, Trump’s father brought him into a limited partnership that developed and owned a senior citizen apartment complex in East Orange, New Jersey. Fred Trump owned 75 percent, but two years later shrunk his ownership to 27 percent by turning over the rest of his stake to two entities controlled by his son.”

                                   

The most disgusting part of this story is what Newsweek wrote about Trump’s dealing in fighting against the Native American casinos.  The following is the exact quote from the Newsweek Magazine:

 

“Donald Trump was thundering about a minority group, linking its members to murderers and what he predicted would be an epic crime wave in America. His opponents raged in response—some slamming him as a racist—but Trump dismissed them as blind, ignorant of the real world.

 

No, this is not a scene from a recent rally in which the Republican nominee for president stoked fears of violence from immigrants or Muslims. The year was 1993, and his target was Native Americans, particularly those running casinos who, Trump was telling a congressional hearing, “We’re sucking up to criminals.”

 

Trump, who at the time was a major casino operator, appeared before a panel on Indian gaming with a prepared statement that was level-headed and raised regulatory concerns in a mature way. But, in his opening words, Trump announced that his written speech was boring, so [as he does today] he went off-script, even questioning the heritage of some Native American casino operators, saying they “don't look like Indians” and launching into a tirade about “rampant” criminal activities on reservations.

 

Trump claims that this business acumen and personal wealth are ample evidence that he’ll be a great president. (Yeah, right!)

 

“If [Indian gaming] continues as a threat, it is my opinion that it will blow. It will blow sky high. It will be the biggest scandal ever or one of the biggest scandals since Al Capone,” Trump said. “That an Indian chief is going to tell [mobster] Joey Killer to please get off his reservation is almost unbelievable to me.”

 

His words were, as is so often the case, incendiary. Lawmakers, latching onto his claim to know more than law enforcement about ongoing criminal activity at Indian casinos, challenged Trump to bring his information to the FBI. One attacked Trump’s argument as the most “irresponsible testimony” he had ever heard. Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker Jr., whom Trump had praised in his testimony, responded by calling him a “dirtbag” and a bigot; Trump immediately changed his mind about the governor, proclaiming Weicker to be a “fat slob who couldn't get elected dog catcher in Connecticut.”

 

As Trump was denigrating Native Americans before Congress, other casino magnates were striking management agreements with them. Trump knew the business was there even when he was testifying; despite denying under oath that he had ever tried to arrange deals with Indian casinos.  He had done just that a few months earlier, according to an affidavit from Richard Milanovich, the official from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians who met with Trump.

 

 

The deal for the Agua Caliente casino instead went to Caesars World. (In 2000, Trump won a contract to manage the casino for the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians, but after Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts declared bankruptcy in 2004, the tribe paid Trump $6 million to go away.)

 

 

And in his purposeless, false and inflammatory statements before Congress, Trump alienated politicians from around the country, including some who had the power to influence construction contracts—problems that could have been avoided if he had simply read his prepared speech rather than ad-libbing.”

 

Now, I won’t go into all of what Newsweek wrote, with the availability of the Internet, you can Google and read the whole article yourself.

 

But, the whole thing is vast proof that Trump is no fantastic businessman.  There are, and have been, many more real, serious and innovative business executives out there such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison, or Michael Dell of Dell Computer, or even the late Steve Jobs of Apple Computer.

 

But to show some his other failures, when he tried to attempt things other than what he inherited from his father, let’s talk about another Trump disaster called the “Trump Shuttle”. 

 

Back in 1989, the faltering Eastern Airlines, which had been struggling for years, had put its northeastern air shuttle up for sale. Trump then persuaded the banks to lend him $380 million to purchase the route, and in June 1989 the Trump Shuttle began flying.

 

Here is what Newsweek wrote about this debacle:

 

“Trump introduced the airline with his usual style—by insulting the competition. At an elegant event at Logan Airport in Boston, Trump took the stage and suggested that the other airline with a northeastern shuttle, Pan Am, flew unsafe planes. Pan Am didn’t have enough cash, he said, and so it couldn’t spend as much as the Trump Shuttle on maintenance. “I’m not criticizing Pan Am,” Trump told the assembled crowd. “I’m just speaking facts.” But Trump offered no proof, and others in the airline industry seethed; talking about possible crashes was bad for everyone’s business.

 

He promised to transform his shuttle into a luxury service—bathroom fixtures were colored gold, and the plane interiors were decked out with mahogany veneer. He

 

was spending $1 million to update each of the planes, which were individually worth only $4 million. With those changes, he boasted, he would increase the shuttle market share from 55% to 75%.

 

But just like with casinos, Trump was in a business he knew nothing about. Customers on a one-hour flight from Washington to New York didn’t want luxury; they wanted reliability and competitive prices.

 

Trump Shuttle never turned a profit. But it didn’t have much of a chance; even as he was preening about his successes, Trump’s other businesses were falling apart and would soon bring the shuttle crashing down with them.”

 

You have probably read how Trump has gone in with many other big businesses and added his name to everything from casinos, to hotels to clothing, ties, furniture, Trump steaks and even Trump bottled water.  In reality, these are just private labeled products where Trump Corp buys them and adds the Trump name.

In the few agreements where Trump actually went into business with other corporations, most of those have ended, and not so favorably. Remember when Trump had sought a deal for the Agua Caliente casino, but after denigrating Native Americans before Congress, the deal instead went to Caesars World.

 

After Trump’s first casino opened, Trump took advantage of his new credibility with financial backers interested in the gaming business to purchase the nearly completed Hilton Atlantic City Hotel for just $320 million; he renamed it Trump Castle. The business plan was ludicrous: Trump had not only doubled down his bet on Atlantic City casinos but was now operating two businesses in direct competition with each other. When Trump Castle opened in 1985, Harrah’s anticipated Trump’s failure and they decided to ditch Trump and sold its interest in their joint venture to him for only $220 million.  They had made a good decision.

 

When you don’t know what you are doing, disaster can hit very fast.  When he then opened his, “Eighth Wonder of the World”, the Taj Mahal Casino, as predicted by the Wall Street analysts, Trump’s voracious appetite cannibalized his other casinos.  Trump had virtually tipped the Atlantic City boardwalk and slid all his former customers at his Trump Castle and his Trump Plaza, down to the Taj Mahal.  The revenues for the two smaller casinos plummeted to a combined $58 million that first year.

 

Trump’s many misrepresentations of his successes and his failures matter a lot.  As a man who has never held so much as a city council seat, there is little to determine if Trump is competent enough to hold public office. He presents few details about any specific policies. Instead, he sells himself as qualified to run the country because he is a businessman who knows how to get things done.  And while yes, Trump has had a few successes in business, most of his major ventures outside of his father’s development business have been total disasters.

 

This can all be confusing for voters with little exposure to the business world. So to sum all this up, Trump is rich because he was born rich.  Without his father repeatedly bailing him out, he would have likely filed for personal bankruptcy before he was 35 years old.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016