1. In October 1988, Donald Trump threw his wallet into the airline business by purchasing Eastern Air Shuttle, a service that for 27 years had run hourly flights between Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C. For roughly $365 million. Trump pushed to give the airline the Trump touch, making the previously no-muss, no-fuss shuttle service into a luxury experience. To this end, he added maple-wood veneer to the floors, chrome seat-belt latches and gold-colored bathroom fixtures. But his gamble was a bust. A lack of increased interest from customers (who favored the airline for its convenience not its fancy new look) combined with high pre–Gulf War fuel prices meant the shuttle never turned a profit. The high debt forced Trump to default on his loans, and ownership of the company was turned over to creditors. The Trump Shuttle ceased to exist in 1992.
2.The Donald had a vodka. Trump vodka (labeled super premium, naturally) was introduced in 2006. At the time, Trump predicted the T&T (Trump and Tonic) would become the most requested drink in America, surpassed only by the Trump Martini. The New York City blog Gothamist
reports the vodka has stopped production "because the company failed to meet the threshold requirements." Trump's company filed an injunction to prevent an Israeli company from selling Trump vodka without his consent or authorization. Meaning the Donald stopped the only people in world who wanted to drink his vodka from doing so.
3,"I don't like the
B word," Donald Trump said in 2010 while testifying in a New Jersey bankruptcy courtroom about his gambling company, Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc., which had filed for bankruptcy for the third time. Given the number of times Trump has flirted with bankruptcy, you'd think he'd be used to that word by now.
In 1990, the banking institutions that backed his real estate investments had to bail him out with a $65 million "rescue package" that contained new loans and credit. But it wasn't enough, and nine months later the famous developer was nearly $4 billion in debt. He didn't declare personal bankruptcy, although his famous Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, N.J., did have to file for it (bondholders ended up taking a 50% stake in the investment). Trump's economic troubles continued through the early '90s, while he was personally leveraged to nearly $1 billion. In 2004, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts also filed for bankruptcy. The company was only a small portion of Trump's real estate empire, but he did still have to personally cough up $72 million to keep it afloat. In 2009, the same company (by then renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc.) filed for bankruptcy again. Yet during all of this, no one ever told Trump, "You're fired!" Probably because no one could.
4.In April 2006, Trump announced that, after years in the real estate business, he was launching a mortgage company. He held a glitzy press conference at which his son Donald Jr. predicted that Trump Mortgage would soon be the nation's No. 1 home-loan lender. Trump told CNBC, "Who knows more about financing than me?" Apparently, plenty. Within a year and a half, Trump Mortgage had closed shop. The would-be lending powerhouse was done in by timing (the housing market cratered in 2007) and ironically enough, given Trump's Apprentice TV show, poor hiring. The executive Trump selected to run his loan company, E.J. Ridings, claimed to have been a top executive at a prestigious investment bank. In reality, Ridings' highest role on Wall Street was as a registered broker, a position he held for a mere six days.
5."The problem with our country is we don't manufacture anything anymore," Donald Trump told Fox News a year ago. "The stuff that's been sent over from China," he complained, "falls apart after a year and a half. It's crap." That very same Donald Trump has his own line of clothing, and it's made in ... China. (O.K., O.K. — not all of it. Salon, which reported this intriguing, head-scratching fact, notes that some of his apparel is from Mexico and Bangladesh.)
6.When recently discussing oil prices on air with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Donald Trump blustered on about the scheming malfeasance of OPEC and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Trump insisted the U.S. could leverage its military supremacy to persuade OPEC to lower prices. In his words: "I'm going to look 'em in the eye and say, 'Fellas, you'd have your fun. Your fun is over.'" But this rather naive suggestion of bullying one of the U.S.'s most longstanding and essential allies in the Middle East — not to mention the recent customer in a megabillion-dollar U.S. weapons sale that would create tens of thousands of American jobs — was comparatively harmless when set against his next suggestion. Trump bemoaned U.S. costs sustained during its wars in the Middle East and floated the idea of "taking" Iraqi oil. Stephanopoulos countered incredulously, "So, we steal an oil field?" Trump responded, "Excuse me. You're not stealing anything. You're taking — we're reimbursing ourselves." Given how many U.S. leaders have had to stress to their Middle East interlocutors that they're not in it simply for the oil, Trump would be starting off regional relations on pretty slippery ground.
-------Time
Refute even 1 of these.
So....where would you like to start?
(he even looks a bit like Bernie)
