A lot of other people who answered have already pointed this out. As someone else has said “Donald Trump is a non-business person’s idea of a successful business person”.
Donald Trump made a lot of his money out of siphoning money out of his various businesses at the expense of investors, security holders and trade creditors. He also was given massive amounts of money by his father (apparently to evade taxes) and was a millionaire by the time he was eight. When his father died, he inherited even more money.
His father was so concerned about his business acumen that, shortly before he died, he changed the terms of his will to ensure that Donald would never have control over the whole of the family’s assets.
Donald Trump arguably has one successful project. No one doubts he took the old Commodore Hotel in Grand Central Station, which was a dump that made rehabilitating the rail station questionable (there was talk of tearing it down and starting over) and turning it into the very successful Hyatt-Regency.
But everything else? Not so much. It is suspected Trump Tower is now just a place for criminals to launder money. The Trump Casinos were never profitable and have been sold to a competitor. Most of the other buildings under the Trump name aren’t owned by him, even in part - he just takes a licensing fee and a fee for managing them. Some of those properties, like the Trump International Tower in Toronto, went broke very quickly and Trump is facing personal lawsuits about people who bought units in the building.
Trump is very good at getting people to believe that buying a piece of a Trump branded building is like having your own personal gold mine. He encourages people to beg and borrow to buy a piece of the building. In most cases, those people barely break even. Again, back to Toronto, one person who bought a hotel condo unit in the Trump International had to make payments $1 million in one year before she bailed out, and that was a unit that was occasionally rented out. At its peak, the occupancy rate for the hotel rooms in that tower was about 30%
About the only person who made money on the Trump International Tower was Trump. He collected a licensing fee up front, then sales commissions from his sales force who sold the units, then a management fee to run the place until its main creditor took it over and he was forced out. However, at no point did he ever have $1 of his own money invested in it.
It’s likely that Trump is “robbing Peter to pay Paul” - taking money out of his vast empire’s cash flow and neglecting the buildings themselves so that the whole thing falls apart at some future date.
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