We the People: Doing business with the Donald

Donald Trump portrays himself as a sharp billionaire businessman but business owners and entrepreneurs should know about the Donald. He used hundreds of undocumented Polish immigrant workers to demolish the Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue to make way for Trump Tower. The contractor paid them $4 to $5 an hour and ordered them to work recklessly in 12-hour shifts.

Trump never gives a straight answer about his wealth. It was estimated to be $200 million when he was listed on the Forbes List in 1982. He was dropped from the list from 1990 to 1995. The New York Times referred to Trump’s fortune as “verbal billions” in a skeptical article about his self-reported wealth. Trump claimed it was $5 billion and sued a reporter who pegged it at $250 million but he refused to turn over unredacted tax returns although he claimed they justify his claim. He lost the case.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated that a strong real estate market made his net worth $2.9 billion but Trump just claimed he is worth nearly $9 billion, which was characterized as a “100%” exaggeration by Forbes. Why the exaggeration and misinformation? If Donald Trump cannot be honest about his own finances, how can we trust him with the financial engine of the U.S. economy?

“He almost bankrupted us,” a retired owner of a construction business said when he described his deal with Donald Trump. The contractor had a small business with 10 employees when he was hired by Donald Trump to work at his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City in the eighties. He thought he hit the jackpot but learned too late that he needed to add a “Trump discount” to the contract in order to avoid being short-changed by the billionaire.

The builder completed the job but Trump stopped paying once it was done with $200,000 owed on a $700,000 contract. The contractor hired a lawyer who told him to give up since Trump would procrastinate and wear him down with expensive litigation like he did to other builders many times. The contractor only got paid in 1988 because a business deal required settlement of all active litigation by the Trump Organization.

Trump acquired and built up the Taj Mahal with bank borrowing and debt which eventually caused the Taj Mahal to file for bankruptcy in 1991. Creditors and bondholders, facing with a complete loss of investment, were forced to restructure the debt and Trump eventually sold out his interest to other investors.

Ironically, according to polls, small businesses owners are among Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters. They somehow believe that Trump’s main strength is his business acumen. He would like everyone to believe that he has made $9 billion as a dealmaker but people with knowledge have repeatedly pointed out that the greatest success of the author of The Art of the Deal is convincing people that his failures are “great” successes.

Trump over-leveraged himself with junk bonds to pay for the Taj Mahal and despite its short-lived success, it could not generate income sufficient to pay the debt. The “dealmaker” regularly walks away from failed ventures and any claims of fabulous net worth should be looked at with skepticism. He still has not released his tax returns and one may accurately suspect that when released, the information will be edited and redacted to a degree that it will be meaningless.

It has been said that the “greatest menace to freedom” is an “inert people.” If the American people pay attention they will realize that Donald Trump never answers any direct questions on policy and he has a deserved reputation for impropriety, conceit, cupidity and misstatement. This makes him an “unbelievable” success only in the unfettered world of his imagination. If he as president were able to cut taxes, cut the deficit, create jobs, strengthen the military and make America secure, then I would vote for him. The problem is that anyone can promise everything to everyone but the people must insist on a credible plan to deliver on the promise or it is all for naught.

A local entrepreneur, the owner of the Prince Hotel, is enjoying business success … in the courtroom. The Prince Hotel was finally having hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines collected by the city after Mayor de Blasio ordered the sheriff of New York to collect the debt and schedule an auction for the property.

The community breathed a sigh of relief to see action taken to deal with this out-of-compliance bad business. However, lawyers ran to the Supreme Court and asked the court to vacate decades of violations and judgments and to stop the collection of the debt. Incredibly, on March 29, 2016, the court granted the owner a stay and the hotel returned to business as usual. Instead of paying fines owed and getting the hotel into compliance, the owner just paid a lawyer to stall the collection. Why?

This blight magnet on 93rd Street just had another dead patron collected by the medical examiner on April 30, 2016. If the uniformed deputy sheriffs were not stayed by the court order, their presence at the hotel would have discouraged what people suspect to be another drug overdose at this fine establishment. Justice Jimenez Salta will hear argument on the matter on June 24 and hopefully a resolution will not be delayed further, which would reward the hotel owner and punish our community.