Reason 21: Gambling

Reason # 21: Gambling

Fred Trump was a relatively conservative, if distasteful, businessman. He accumulated a considerable fortune by buying or building apartment houses and middle-class residences, over the decades, managing more than twenty thousand units in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. He was also arrested in 1976 for housing violations in the state of Maryland.

https://www.salon.com/…/trumps-father-once-got…

While daddy Fred was a staid entrepreneur, the same cannot be said of his flamboyant offspring Donald. The third generation Trump has taken many risky gambles and left a long trail of burnt-out enterprises littering the modern American landscape. Tracking the gambling motif, let’s briefly consider Donald’s catastrophic years as a casino owner.

My first encounter with legalized gambling was during a long western road trip in 1975. We drove into Las Vegas, past hundreds of “payday loan” and “paychecks cashed here” signs and dined at an inexpensive chain restaurant. There was a row of one-armed bandit gaming machines in the foyer, where a young couple was frantically inserting coins and pulling handles. Next, we came upon a toddler roaming about, unwatched, wearing only a soiled paper diaper. You could flash forward with confidence and envisage that toddler’s life, featuring bankruptcy, divorce, lack of education and economic deprivation. The agency of this future harm was the gaming industry.

The evangelists who now worship Donald Trump have always decried the immorality of gambling and its devastating effects on family life. The history of casino gambling in the U.S. is riddled with sordid associations with prostitution, money laundering, loan sharking, organized crime, political corruption and miscellaneous other squalid criminal activity. This is the business young Donald turned his path towards in the early 1980s, first acquiring a lot on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Harrah provided him with two hundred million dollars to build a giant casino hotel, Harrah’s at Trump Plaza.

Standard practice is to defeat your competitors. In a bizarre twist, Trump chose to create more, and more formidable competitors. Predictably, he soon fell out with Harrah’s and purchased an almost completed casino from Hilton for more than $300,000,000 and renamed it the Trump Castle (Marina). The conflict with Harrah ended with Trump taking over the Trump Plaza for another $200,000,000. Now the Donald had two enormous competing gambling dens. It is difficult to see how that might make business sense, but in any case, he next got involved in corporate control war with Merv Griffin, that ended with Trump also owning the enormous Taj Mahal casino. He now had billions of dollars invested (much of it borrowed) and three self-competing businesses. He allowed his new wife, Marla Maples to manage. At one point, unable to make payments on the enormous debt, his father stepped in purchasing more than three million dollars’ worth of chips.

The results were inevitable. Two of the casinos became derelict buildings while the third limped shabbily along under new management. The long downward spiral featured five enormous bankruptcies, thousands of unemployed, a long list of stiffed local businesses and beggared investors. Trump continues to brag that it all went well for him and that he pocketed millions while others were impoverished. There was some justice as Trump lost his short-lived airline, his yacht and control of Manhattan hotels. But that is a story for another day.

The daughter of a local sub-contractor summed it up this way.

“Trump crawled his way to the top on the back of little guys, one of them being my father”. “He had no regard for thousands of men and women who worked on those projects. He says he’ll make America great again, but his past shows the complete opposite of that.”

For much more detailed information on this conniving titan of industry follow the link below.

https://www.tampabay.com/…/heres-how-donald…/2281296

Have a heart; use your mind, search your conscience, and vote for Democratic candidates – across the ballot – on November. 5th.

Please share this message with your friends and please, add your thoughts, to expand upon what are only brief sketches here.

Fred Grannis

August 6, 2024


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