From: marketwatch.com, by Brett Arends, on Mar 7, 2016, see the article HERE.
Why is Donald Trump getting a pass for his disastrous and incompetent track record of running a public company?
The Republican front-runner has made much of his supposed “success” in business and says he now wants to do the same for America.
But the only part of his business track record for which we have the full picture shows that Trump wasn’t a successful executive but an absolute catastrophe.
For 10 years between 1995 and 2005, Donald Trump ran Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts — and he did it so badly and incompetently that it collapsed into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. His stockholders were almost entirely wiped out, losing a staggering 89% of their money. The company actually lost money every single year. In total it racked up more than $600 million in net losses over that period.
Trump was chairman of the board throughout the entire time, and CEO as well for about half of it.
This is the sort of record usually associated with an Enron or a WorldCom or a Pets.com.
Meanwhile, over the same period, all his competitors were enjoying an enormous boom. Take a look at our chart.
While Trump was running Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts into the ground, the Dow Jones index of gambling stocks — the index that Trump himself cited in public filings as his best benchmark — soared 160%. Investors in Harrah’s saw their stake go up by nearly 150%. MGM MGM, -2.47% quintupled. These people were making out like bandits.
Donald Trump ran the worst performing casino company on the stock market. This isn’t a matter of “opinion.” This isn’t speculation or politics. It’s a matter of plain fact.
However, one person associated with Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts did make money:
Donald J. Trump.
A review of the company’s public filings show that over that period, while his ordinary investors were getting hosed, Trump himself was siphoning millions out of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts through salary, “bonuses” — yes, really — and cozy “service agreements” or side deals with his private corporations.
Check out the relevant page from the 2003 public filing, for example:
In total, Donald Trump pocketed $32 million over nine years, while his public stockholders lost more than $100 million.
Follow the money. It really isn’t that complex.
Now his supporters want to put him in charge of the federal government. They actually hope he will do for America what he’s already done for his business.
Heaven help us all.
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A friend asked me not long ago, “why do you continue to bash on Donald Trump, a lot of people like him”? I know, I know, and a lot of those people are friends and relatives. I just feel that they are being snookered by a con-man.
Here’s a little background: I didn’t start posting articles about Trump in earnest until January, 2016 – at the time, he was a novelty, a billionaire who thought that he could campaign for the presidency … and win. I didn’t know much about him, had never seen his TV show and just knew him as a celebrity. There were several other candidates that I had been considering, but my favorites (Rick Perry and Scott Walker) had dropped out by then. I did like Ted Cruz simply because, as a Texan and my Senator, he went to D.C. and did exactly what he promised he’d do – do his best to stop Barack Obama and the establishment GOP from ruining the country.
Shortly thereafter, more and more people seemed to be jumping on the Donald Trump bandwagon. I simply wanted to know why, so I started reading everything I could find to learn more. The material was kinda thin at that time once you got past the real estate Trump and the TV show Trump. But little by little, more began to come out that called into question his rhetorical platitudes that he was “the best” and “he’ll do wonders” and “he’ll build such a wall,” etc.
I even wrote one piece titled, “I like Donald Trump, but I don’t think that he can win the election” and published it on January 10, 2016.
From there it began to go downhill. Watching the debates and seeing his demeanor and antics on the debate stage turned me off. He just wasn’t acting like I wanted my president to act. He just wasn’t very “presidential.” I saw numerous press conferences and rallies at which he basically acted the same and said the same things. I began to notice that he almost never volunteered any detailed information – it was all high level stuff – always what he was gonna do – never how he was gonna do it.
So, that has been the genesis of my distrust of Donald Trump. The more I dug, the less I believed him and the more suspicious I became that we were dealing with a con-man, a snake-oil salesman. And that conclusion remains to this day. Each day I find more evidence that something that he’s said was not true or that a fact that he represented was not as he presented it. In other words, I’m convince that he’s lying to us and lucky for him, his supporters are so loyal to him, they’re just ignoring the evidence.
You ask why I’m bashing Trump – it’s because I value the TRUTH and I’m just old fashioned enough to believe that our president, of all people, should be truthful to the American People.
Garnet92.
Categories: Political
Pesky Truth 
Don’t know if you noticed, but I’ve darkened the text slightly here in the comments section.
I also just ran across yet one more business that Trump started up and later it went belly-up – a multi-level marketing company selling vitamins, the Trump Network. I wonder how many more there are? The Trump Network got in financial trouble, couldn’t pay its vendors or employees and Trump sold it after two years.
The Trump Network’s losers were not Donald Trump, but mainly the more than 21,000 people who invested in the company as recruiters, hoping to make it big, swayed entirely by Donald Trump’s promises. Several thousand people believed Kim Stone, a “two-star diamond director” — one of the highest tiers of Trump Network marketer — when she told them that “literally, you will be able to set yourself up for the rest of your life, financially speaking, if you take advantage of the timing right now with this company.”
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Yes, I did and meant to comment on it – you learned a new trick and much easier on the old eyes now.
The thing that surprises me is that none of those people came forward with any of these truths and I’m wondering why not. If they knew he was underhanded, wouldn’t they want people to know? Maybe they were too embarrassed, but still… no reason to let him run roughshod, thereby allowing him to do the same thing to the entire country.
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Heaven help us all, indeed. If he gets the job, we could be in worse trouble than we already are. Normally, I’d say it’s lucky for us that the House holds the purse strings, but their recent history tells us that’s not working in our favor either. Personally, I’d rather have the guy that’s been fighting for us since the day he hit the door, and that he’s ticked off all the lifers in Congress, should be viewed as a huge A+ on his report card.
The Trumpbots bought into all the ‘Billy Badass’ talk and never looked past it for the real guy behind the curtain.
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