There’s something not right about a real estate developer whose every project goes bankrupt. There something sleazy about a builder who stiffs the workers and small businesses that worked on his failed projects. There’s something venal about someone who skims hundreds of millions of dollars off loan proceeds that belong to their borrowers.
Let me introduce to our President, Donald Trump. He’s a President whom sitting Republicans enabled, tolerate and refuse to remove.
Trump’s father taught him a lesson: “Do not leave yourself on the hook for loans.” So, in Atlantic City, he had his casinos overborrow secured by mortgages, took half the money from the proceeds to pay off his personal loans, defaulted on every casino mortgage, stiffed his workers and investors and left the City in economic shambles. In other words, sheer larceny
What followed in Atlantic is not pretty. It’s reflected in the City’s 8.9% unemployment rate– nearly double the national average of 4.2%.
“Trump turned Atlantic City into a ghost town,” says photographer Brian Rose who photographed the City in 2016. The bankrupt Taj was practically empty as if all its workers had left in a hurry. Sand dunes damaged by its construction surrounded the once -vibrant hotel. Stray cats nestled where gamblers often drank. “Trump’s legacy still haunts the boardwalk,” Rose said.
An architectural critic lamented the City’s “Bleakness” and sense of emptiness. It was a scene that could have been part of a Blade Runner movie.
The calamity was inevitable. Just four months after Trump opened the Taj Mahal, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission issued a foreboding report that 253 subcontractors had not been paid a total of $69.5 million in full or on time. Most of it was owed to small, local family businesses, many of which had to close, leaving workers unemployed throughout the area.
Atlantic City has also become the nation’s mortgage foreclosure capital where workers will lose their homes and be unable to afford to move elsewhere to seek new jobs.
For Trump it was a very different story. He told the New York Times about his 25 years in Atlantic City: “The money I took out of there was incredible.”
Now he’s taking his father’s advice to his presidency. He abolished the guardrails that restricted presidential corruption and had the U.S. Treasury issue record debt to be paid by taxpayers and from Medicare and Medicaid, he skimmed off of it enough to build his net worth from $4.3 billion in 2024 to over $7.3 billion in 2025.
Trump’s risking a recession as interest rates rise on our Treasury debt – a recession that he and the most dangerous and unqualified cabinet ever, shamefully confirmed by Senate Republicans, could mismanage into a depression.
Does the Bible’s admonition — what we sow, we shall reap – come to mind.
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