The Trump Casino
America's most vulgar second act gets another turn of the roulette wheel
One of the lessons I learned from covering presidential elections is that a candidate’s record tells you how they’ll behave in office. Shrinks and self-help gurus assure us that the past isn’t prologue. True, perhaps, for people recovering from romantic disappointments. Hey, anyone can get lucky! But professionally? Politicians? Power-hungry guys with big egos tend to be pretty damn consistent. Women, too.
Full disclosure: I’m not in the U.S. right now, and being so far away is a bit disorienting. I’d grown accustomed to the cognitive dissonance of ordinary life trundling along even as the latest reports on incipient fascism provoke anguished phone calls among my friends.
Here in a country where people complain but in a routine way (taxes!) I miss the daily (hourly?) sense of crisis when the news lands hard. Reports from the U.S. have a cartoonish quality, as if the country has become a Marvel movie, or even more two-dimensional, one of the comic books that inspire them: Zow! Whack! Boom! The serious reduced to caricature. That’s how weird the news appears when seen from a distance.
The good news is that Americans appear disenchanted by the ICE’s Gestapo-like tactics. The bad news? The administration doesn’t seem to care. Sometimes immigration seems like the only story and it is one that deserves a book.
Certainly we are in the midst of an obscene violation of everything we believed in, facing the alarming notion that the U.S. could become a police state with ICE ballooning to the size of France’s army and acting as Trump’s private military. But even if the worst doesn’t happen, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s research points to an alarming future. Autocracies, she has written, are financial disasters.
The Trump junta seems to operate on two tracks. One is efficient and relentless because it’s not being run by Trump himself. The other is Trump’s Atlantic City boom and bust all over again.
Golfing Through the Apocalypse
Directed by Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, the dismantling of the U.S. government proceeds apace while Trump serenely golfs through the apocalypse. Stephen Miller is not a mystery - if one needs to understand him, Hatemonger, the biography by New York Times columnist Jean Guerrero provides both psychological insight and context.
Russell Vought is a man we still don’t know enough about, other than he’s a Christian Nationalist and one of the main authors of Project 2025.
There are hints. Bernie Sanders called Vought on the carpet in confirmation hearings during Trump 1.0 when Vought was chosen to head the Office of Management and Budget, questioning him about the statement: "Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned." He refused to testify on the Trump-Ukraine scandal and once Biden was elected, would not follow tradition by having OMB officials meet with the incoming administration.
So, a petty guy. Recently divorced and with a tedious affect, but scarily effective. And he is loyal. Vought recently became the point man for Trump’s efforts to unseat Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, issuing a two-page letter that gave Trump a pretext for firing the recalcitrant chair, who persists in placing economic stability over the exigencies of Trump’s poor impulse control. In his letter, Vought accused Powell of mismanaging the renovation of the Federal Reserve building. (The cost recently climbed to $2.5 billion from $1.9 billion.) It’s unclear whether this pretext will be enough to dislodge Powell, who’s proven resistant to Trump’s bullying on interest rates.
It’s safe to assume that Trump paid attention to Vought’s obedience, if little else. Last week, the nominal president apparently didn’t even know that arms transfers to Ukraine had been delayed, apparently by Defense Secretary Pete “DUI” Hegseth. This wasn’t a one-off: for much of his administration Trump has sounded as though he was taking the Fifth, professing ignorance about a striking number of actions. In a number of these cases, one suspects, he truly may have been oblivious. Also not particularly interested.
As we know, what interests Trump is money. The problem is that he actually isn’t very good at dealing with it. You may remember that, in 2015, The New York Times published a major investigation of Trump’s finances, debunking his claim to a self-made fortune when it revealed that he’d received at least $413 million from his father, real estate developer Fred Trump. By transferring enormous amounts of money to his children, Fred Trump evaded taxes for decades. More destructive to the myth is the fact that Fred repeatedly bailed out his feckless favored son.
One of the more telling moments came when Fred Trump helped Donald make a bond payment on one of the Atlantic City casinos by buying $3.5 million in casino chips. This followed Fred “loaning” Donald millions in 1970 alone. By 1990, Fred Trump had transferred the equivalent of at least $46.2 million.
Trump’s track record in Atlantic City is a roadmap to what he is doing to the U.S. economy. He arrived full of bluster, knowing nothing about the casino business. In short order, he opened three casinos, employing 8,000 people and accounting for nearly one-third of the city’s gambling revenue.
Existing on junk bonds and borrowed money, Trump’s casinos had a good run - for a while. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous came to smarm. Wrestlemania grunted. Michael Jackson moonwalked.
But the tackiness and debt couldn’t be hidden, wrote Dan McQuade in Philadelphia magazine. “The shortage of funds was obvious inside the building,” McQuade writes of the Trump Taj Mahal. He quotes Temples of Chance, investigative reporter David Cay Johnston’s book detailing how the U.S. government colluded with junk bond kings and their takeover of the casino industry.
“The long second-floor hallways leading to the New Delhi Deli and the ballrooms were supposed to have marble columns. Instead they had been hastily covered with pink wallpaper. Many rooms were a mess, with hanging rods lying on closet floors, curtains that would not close and keys that did not match the doors weeks after the grand opening.” More than 200 contractors, the Inquirer reported, were owed $72 million.
Within a decade, more than the seams were showing. Soaring debt, weak local demand, and negative press all played roles in Trump’s Atlantic City downfall, but Trump’s hubris - his refusal to learn anything from casino veterans - was a major contributing factor. (Those famous “instincts.”) In the end, Trump’s company filed for bankruptcy not once, but twice.
Even dodgy and possibly illegal tactics didn’t help. Trump’s businesses were suspected of money laundering, not exactly a surprise, given reports that Trump condos were a favored laundromat for the Russian mob. Nothing has changed since Trump’s casino fling other than the scale. This article isn’t long enough to delve into the massive corruption of Trump 2.0. Suffice it to say that the only ones coming out of this debacle richer will be Donny Jr. and Eric, along with the requisite billionaire toadies.
Again, look at the record. Two of Trump’s casinos now have new owners; one has been demolished. As usual, Trump left behind a string of unpaid bills.
In Philadelphia magazine, Dan McQuade summed it up: “Donald Trump likes to brag that he made a lot of money in Atlantic City and got out before things went sour. Like professional wrestling, though, that’s mostly an act.”
In the end, McQuade writes: “Trump once had an Atlantic City empire. And he didn’t sell it — he lost it.”
Après Donald Le Deluge
Hey, don’t listen to me. I’m just another impecunious writer. Listen to Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman:
Yesterday’s CPI report looked fairly tame on the surface, but if you look at the details it showed clear signs that Trump’s tariffs are starting to drive up prices. And private surveys suggest that there’s a lot more inflation in the pipeline. For example, look at S&P Global’s Purchasing Managers’ Index for manufacturing, which shows the percentage of firms reporting higher prices. A higher number almost always points to higher official inflation ahead, and right now it’s definitely telling us that tariffs are about to hit hard.
For Trump, and men like him, the past is prologue. Look at Atlantic City. By the time photographer Brian Rose arrived in 2019, the beachfront resort had reverted to the bad old days of desuetude, when film director Louis Malle made it a metaphor in Atlantic City, the 1980 noirish romance between Burt Lancaster’s aging gangster and a croupier-in-training played by Susan Sarandon.
Rose’s book of photographs, also titled Atlantic City, inspired architecture critic Paul Goldberger to write in his foreword: “Bleakness forms the constant theme of these images, a sense of emptiness and an utter lack of urbanity.”
But in the Guardian, arts writer Thomas Hobbs quoted the photographer on his belief that there was a social reality behind the bleakness: “The book is full of dystopian imagery, with Trump’s failed casinos looking as if they could be part of a Blade Runner movie. But Rose insists this work goes beyond the ‘aesthetic of an abandoned amusement park,’ believing it says just as much about America in 2019. He believes there are Atlantic Citys all across the country.”
“Tourists,” he says, “go to Atlantic City, go straight into their hotel and the casino, and then they don’t leave, which means the town outside is very isolated and dangerous, with the casinos cannibalising all the local businesses.”
Rose recalls a particularly ironic sight. “When I was taking photos of the casinos, I saw two women in MAGA hats. They live in a place that Trump helped ruin, yet still believe in him. I found that extraordinary.”
We know the drill now. Even with brutal cuts to crucial services, Trump’s Big Bullshit bill is projected to double the national debt, rekindle inflation, raise interest rates, and depress the housing market. While it’s hard not to wish for the worst in hopes the electorate will wake up, it’s important to keep in mind that the very people attracted by his populist message will be the ones most affected.
“The wrong question is: whom has Trump betrayed? The right question is: whom hasn’t he betrayed?” wrote Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian.
Michael Macleod, the artist who produced the elephant sculpture on the grounds of the Taj Mahal pictured above, was never paid for his work. Photographer Brian Rose believes that the elephant, still at the site when he visited in 2016 because it was too heavy to move, evokes Trump’s legacy in Atlantic City: “Making a lot of noise and stomping his weight around, but ultimately only leaving a trail of destruction.”