Down goes the Trump Hotel
For months there’s been steadily growing buzz that Donald Trump was about to sell off the rights to his one profitable real estate property, the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, in a desperate attempt at raising cash. Then last week a congressional probe revealed that the hotel in question has actually been losing money for years. Now it turns out Trump really is selling off the rights to the failing hotel – and it tells us a lot about what’s going on here.
Even Trump’s biggest detractors are often confused by how a scammer like him can bring in so much dirty money, and still be flat broke. The answer is that it’s because when you’re massively in debt, you have to come up with enough money to make minimum interest payments to your lenders at the end of every month in order to keep your financial house of cards from collapsing. So all the money you bring in each month ends up going right back out the door.
Now that it’s becoming more clear that Donald Trump has had no legitimate source of income or revenue for years, it means his monthly debt service payments are being funded entirely by money he’s been scamming and stealing. In other words, as fast as he can bring in dirty money, it goes right back out the door to keep him from default or bankruptcy.
We all know someone who lives on credit cards and has run them up so badly as to barely be able to make the minimum payments. Now imagine if this person also had no job and no legitimate income, and had to run scams just to come up with enough money to make those minimum credit card payments. That’s Donald Trump, on a different scale. As with any hopelessly indebted person, he brings in money and it just goes right back out.
In any case, the WSJ is confirming that Trump’s name will indeed be removed from the Trump International Hotel as part of the sale. The new operators clearly think one of the keys to turning the money pit into a profitable hotel is getting Trump’s toxic name off it. And so down goes another one of his properties. It won’t be the last.
