Donald Trump the Scammer and His Failed Business Ventures
Donald Trump later started various side ventures, including licensing his name for real estate and consumer products. He taught his children to follow in business footsteps. His daughter Ivanka was able to get an endorsement from various companies to pay for her wedding! But alas, consumer products and services bearing his name have largely been failures.
At one point, Donald Trump operated one third of the casinos in Atlantic City, but his various properties faced bankruptcy or went bankrupt as other states permitted legalized casinos, so people did not have to travel far to gamble. Ultimately, Trump was able to download his Atlantic City casinos and able to make a profit while unlucky buyers lost their shirts.
Trump beverages, both natural water and alcohol, failed as brand names by 2006. In 1988, Trump teamed up with Milton Bradley to create Trump: The Game but it failed in the market place as well as its relaunch in 2004. Trump launched his eponymous magazine aimed at the high-end consumer market in late 2007, renaming and reinventing them as Trump Style and Trump World. Trump magazine but his timing was poor with the Economic Crisis of 2008. Donald Trump started a mortgage company in 2006 just before the real estate bubble burst. Like many of his business ventures, GoTrump.com was a gaudier version of an existing product — the travel booking website Travelocity—that was vanity travel site and quickly went out of business in the same year it started, 2006. Trump registered a trademark in 1990 for Trumpnet under the category of “corporate telephone communication services but the trademark was abandoned in 1992.
.The 52-story Trump Tower in Tampa wasn’t conceived of or proposed or drafted up by Donald Trump — he just sold the use of his name to developers of the $300 million condo project for a cool $2 million. They, in turn, collected down payments from individual buyers drawn in by the Trump mystique. After the project went belly-up in 2008 (it listed two scale models and some office furniture, worth a grand total of $3,500, as its only assets in bankruptcy court) buyers sued Trump for misleading them. He eventually settled, in some cases for as little as $11,115, with plaintiffs who had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Donald Trump was not a Richard Branson or an Elon Musk. They have engaged in numerous business ventures with far greater record of success. They dreamed big but had the commitment, the intelligence, and the willingness to invest time and effort in making these businesses successful. In contrast, Donald Trump was too lazy to make the effort to be successful. He preferred to grift than to make the actual risks. Above all, Trump was a scammer who walked away with Above all, Trump was a scammer who walked away with other people’s money not caring whether or not he hurt the little people or the collateral damage he did in his fake ventures.
NYC Walks Blog 81 Donald Trump the Scammer and His Failed Business Ventures