Yahoo Finance We're watching Trump's 7th bankruptcy unfold

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

As a businessman, Donald Trump ran 6 businesses that declared bankruptcy because they couldn’t pay their bills. As the president running for a second term, Trump is repeating some of the mistakes he made as a businessman and risking the downfall of yet another venture: his own political operation.

In the 1980s, Trump was a swashbuckling real-estate investor who bet big on the rise of Atlantic City after New Jersey legalized gambling there. He acquired three casinos that by 1991 couldn’t pay their debts. The Taj Mahal declared bankruptcy in 1991, the Trump Plaza and the Trump Castle in 1992. Lenders restructured the debt rather than liquidate and Trump put his casino holdings into a new company that went bankrupt in 2004. The company that emerged from that restructuring declared bankruptcy in 2009. Trump’s 6th bankruptcy was the Plaza Hotel, which he bought in 1988. It went bankrupt by 1992.

Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 paralleled the arrival of the brash upstart in Atlantic City more than 30 years earlier. But in the fourth year of his presidency, the Trump operation is once again reeling. Voters give him poor marks for handling the coronavirus crisis, underscored by an outbreak at the White House that infected Trump himself. Democrat Joe Biden is beating Trump is most swing states and an Election Day blowout is possible. Trump has suggested he won’t leave office if he loses, threatening a constitutional crisis and his own political legacy.

The lessons of Trump’s bankruptcies explain much of the Trump campaign’s current tumult. Here are 5 similarities:

Trump loses focus. As a real-estate developer, Trump had a reputation as somebody who relished the dealmaking but not the everyday work of running the companies he bought. “In business, he would focus for about two or three days before the closing, and after that he would lose interest,” one former associate told the New York Times for a 2016 analysis of the Plaza Hotel bankruptcy. Trump himself has admitted this. “The fact is, you do feel invulnerable,” he told author Timothy O’Brien, author of the 2005 biography “Trump Nation.” “And then you have a tendency to take your eye off the ball.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/were-watching-trumps-7th-bankruptcy-unfold-171903858.html

You'd figure all that Adderall would take care of his short attention span.

[sarcasmo]

1. Trump knows bankruptcy.

[Laelth]

2. He needs something stronger than Adderal to keep him focused.

People with Cluster B personality disorders get BORED, very quickly. You don’t want to be in a relationship with one of them.

-Laelth

[underpants]

3. Nope, nope, nope, nope and nope.

This is a very astute observation by someone who clearly knows Trump well.


He holds his partners hostage. Trump’s lenders lost hundreds of millions of dollars on his bankruptcies and other underperforming businesses, but they’ve often written off the losses and extended Trump even more credit, because it’s better than liquidation. One former chairman of New Jersey’s casino commission described Trump as “too big to fail” in Atlantic City: Had his casinos stopped operating, it would have devastated the local economy. So lenders and gaming officials found ways to keep Trump in business, while reducing the control he had over those businesses so he couldn’t single-handedly get in over his head again.

Dozens of Republican senators and members of Congress are now tied to Trump in the political equivalent of a banking relationship. As Trump won control of the Republican party, fellow Republicans lent him their support in an all-or-nothing bid for political dominance. When Trump was winning, so were they. But if Trump goes down, some of those will sink with him. That could cost Republicans Senate elections in states such as Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Maine and North Carolina and give Democrats control of the Senate. If Biden wins the White House as well, Democrats would control the legislative and executive branches in a withering wipeout for Trump and his GOP allies.

[RockRaven]

4. Hmmm... Trump's last bankruptcy was 7 years BEFORE his inheritance from Fred Sr.

He's out of backstops.

He goes bankrupt now, he's in "low-rent infomercialish grifter hustle" territory just to afford his face paint and hair spray to allow his continued grifting. He'll be looking *UP* at Alex Jones or Jim Bakker and hoping to have his own studio...

[kurtcagle]

5. Very much a narcissist

Narcissists make terrible managers because they love the chase, but are like a dog that eventually captures the car - they have no idea what to do once their teeth are caught in the rubber of the tire. The worst thing that could have happened to Trump was that he became President of the United States. There's nowhere up to go from there, and he was ill suited to actually do the work that came with the office.