How Donald Trump bankrupted

"Even as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen," wrote Russ Buettner and Charles Bagli in The New York Times.


All of this was bought with debt. There wasn’t a lot of money that Donald was putting into the properties. So then, he’s no sooner done acquiring two, when Resorts International, which was the first company to build a casino, is now building what they say will be the biggest casino in the world. So he got the Taj Mahal. He told regulators, "Don’t worry. I’m going to do fine here." But then, five minutes later, he turned around and put $675 million of more debt, high-interest debt, on the properties.

It’s siphoning off, ultimately that year, $58 million from his other two casinos. It was a fatal amount of debt that was there. In fact, the Casino Control Commission was appalled at the high levels of debt—$3.4 billion on his entire empire at that point. Trump has often used smokescreens, other clever diverting tactics to distract the public mine from important but embarrassing issues. This is also the most important psychology of the magician who specialises in tricks known as sleight-of-hand, the principle point of his operation being to distract your attention from what he's actually doing so you won't see what he has done!

Ted Rudow III, MA