Here’s something to cheer you up on a Saturday morning:
Once, Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was a bustling indoor mall, with floors and floors of retail, a pink marble atrium, and an indoor waterfall. On a recent visit, the waterfall and the pink marble were still there, but the escalator going up from the first floor was roped off, a currency exchange was closed, and small ground-level shops had been converted to display windows for Trump-branded merchandise.
There is something new: a wine and whiskey bar, called 45. Its logo, ringed with stars, looks kind of like a presidential seal. Inside, there are enormous pictures of the former president, in and around the White House.
Trump Tower embodies the contradictions of Donald Trump’s business, post-presidency. There’s a cache to sell, but also, an extremely polarizing brand. Trump’s continued espousal of lies about the 2020 election have driven away potential partners; after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, associates from Deutsche Bank to the Professional Golf Association pulled back.
There’s an ongoing criminal fraud case by the Manhattan district attorney against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. The New York attorney general and the Westchester district attorney are also investigating. Trump, his company, and his CFO have denied wrongdoing.
Donald Trump did not put his name back on many company documents after his presidency; Weisselberg, who was indicted for 15 felonies, removed his own name from some corporate documents; only Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump’s names remain on many management filings.
Even without all the brand challenges, Trump is heavily tied up in businesses such as office rentals and retail that are struggling post-pandemic. Just this month, Forbes took the former president off its tally of the 400 richest people. Had Trump sold off his assets and invested in markets while he was president — which ethics experts advised him to do — he would have been $4.5 billion richer today, Forbes said.
“What sorts of businesses would you want to be invested in, in 2021?” asked Dan Alexander, the senior editor at Forbes who calculated Trump’s wealth. “Not many people would pick large office buildings and big fancy hotels located in urban areas.”
Especially ones with Trump’s name on them. And his white working class cult doesn’t have the money for Gucci watches. Trump successfully alienated half of his customer base.
But don’t count him out:
Though there’s millions of dollars of debt, Trump still has steady income
To be sure, while Trump disclosed hundreds of millions of dollars of debt while he was president, his company still owns valuable assets. He gets a steady income from commercial real estate properties that don’t bear his name in New York and San Francisco.
Maybe a few protesters outside making that known would help? I would think that big city liberals could make it known that all of his properties are poison, wouldn’t you?
And then there’s this:
Just days after Donald J. Trump left the White House, two former contestants on his reality show, “The Apprentice,” approached him with a pitch. Wes Moss and Andy Litinsky wanted to create a conservative media giant.
Mr. Trump was taken with the idea. But he had to figure out how to pay for it.
This month, the former president found a way. He agreed to merge his social media venture with what’s known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The result is that Mr. Trump — largely shut out of the mainstream financial industry because of his history of bankruptcies and loan defaults — secured nearly $300 million in funding for his new business.
To get his deal done, Mr. Trump ventured into an unregulated and sometimes shadowy corner of Wall Street, working with an unlikely cast of characters: the former “Apprentice” contestants, a small Chinese investment firm and a little-known Miami banker named Patrick Orlando.
Mr. Orlando had been discussing a deal with Mr. Trump since at least March, according to people familiar with the talks and a confidential investor presentation reviewed by The New York Times. That was well before his SPAC, Digital World Acquisition, made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange last month. In doing so, Mr. Orlando’s SPAC may have skirted securities laws and stock exchange rules, lawyers said.
Mastodon has sent former President Donald Trump’s company a formal notification that it’s breaking the rules by using Mastodon’s open-source code to build its social network, named Truth. This news comes from a blog post by Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko, but others have previously pointed out that the organization behind Truth, the Trump Media and Technology Group (or TMTG), was violating Mastodon’s software license by not providing the source code for the site built on top of it. Trump’s group has 30 days from when the letter was sent to comply with the license or stop using the software, or it could lose the right to do so.
He never ever does business on the up and up. A con artist all the way down.