Scourge, not saviour: What small-businesses owners might wish to know about Mr Trump

[muriel_volestrangler]

“HE ALMOST bankrupted us,” says the retired owner of a construction business on the east coast. Thirty years ago he ran a small business with around ten employees, which was hired by Donald Trump to work on an 11-month project at his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. It was the biggest contract, by far, that the business had ever had. The builders worked as they had never done before to complete the job on time. As soon as they finished, Mr Trump stopped paying. He owed around $200,000 of a bill totalling about $700,000, a huge sum for a small company.

What followed was a nearly year-long battle to extract the money it was owed. Lawyers advised the company that Mr Trump would procrastinate with expensive litigation, as he had done many times before. Other contractors relayed their experiences with the “Trump discount”, the billionaire’s habit of rarely paying the full sum he owed. As the “Trump discount” made the rounds in the industry, wily contractors quoted a higher price at the outset to avoid suffering any losses. Then, one day in 1988, the phone rang at 9.30am. A sweet-voiced special assistant of Mr Trump’s announced she had a cheque for the builders which, she claimed, had been lying on her desk for a year. “We only got paid because of Merv Griffin,” says the retired contractor. In a surprising swoop, Mr Griffin, an entertainment-business tycoon, had bought the company that owned the Taj Mahal.
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Bryant Simon of Temple University, who wrote a history of Atlantic City, marvels at how the author of “The Art of the Deal” sells his failure there as a great success. Mr Trump paid too much to finance the Taj with junk bonds; he also overpaid for the casino’s interior, whose mirrors and chandeliers made the palace of Versailles look unadorned. Even though the Taj was the highest-earning casino in America for a while it could not cover its debt.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21698613-what-small-businesses-owners-might-wish-know-about-mr-trump-scourge-not-saviour

As The Economist article says, small-business owners tend to like Trump, but he's got a long track record of screwing them. It's a message that needs to be out there - Trump cares for no one apart from himself, not small business owners, not conservatives, not Americans.

[spanone]

1. K&R...