Donald Trump bankrupted or otherwise wrecked all of these businesses. Is he about to bankrupt and wreck the United States of America?

The Trump Shuttle. Donald Trump bought this successful route  and its aircraft from
Eastern Airlines — and promptly sank it. And that's only a drop in the bucket.

Wherever Donald Trump goes, whatever he invests in, sooner or later, likelier than not, it ends up lying in ruin — a miserable wreck of what was once a going business if he took it over, or a shambles and a failure almost from the beginning if he started it.

Interestingly, he bought some companies, crashed them, but then better businessmen than Trump turned them into going concerns, further evidence that Trump isn’t as smart a businessman as he pretends to be, or perhaps he’s not a businessman at all, period. Instead, he’s a screwup, one of those rare individuals with an uncanny knack for failure. Precisely the kind of person who shouldn’t be running the most powerful office in the United States.

Some of the highlights of Trump's business "career":

•Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort, Atlantic City, NJ. He opened it in 1990 at a cost of $1.2 billion. Only a year later, he was seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

•Trump Castle Hotel and Casino, Atlantic City, NJ.. Opened in 1985. Bankrupt in 1992.

•Trump Plaza Casino, Atlantic City, NJ. Opened in 1984. Bankrupt in 1992. 

• “Trump” Plaza Hotel, New York City. Opened (under different management) in 1907. Purchased by Trump in 1988. Entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1992.

• The “Trump Shuttle.” Founded by Eastern Airlines, it flew regular hourly flights between Boston, New York and Washington D.C. Purchased by Donald Trump in 1989. Lost over $250 million the first year Donald Trump owned it. Defaulted on its debt in 1990. Trump “bailed out” in 1992. The airline route is now successfully managed by American Airlines.

• Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts. Entered into Chapter 11 in November, 2004. After restructuring that reduced the company’s $1.8 billion of debt by approximately $600 million (as well as cutting interest payments) Trump relinquished majority control and lost his title of chief executive officer.

• Trump Entertainment Resorts, a Trump casino holding company, entered into Chapter 11 in 2009.They more recently became a subsidiary of Icahn Enterprises. Icahn sold the Taj Mahal to Hard Rock International in 2017. Hard rock renovated to get rid of the tackily-glitzy décor, and reopened the rebranded hotel in 2018.

•Trump University. Opened in 2005. Closed under a cloud of scandal in 2010. The New Yorker magazine reported

If anyone still has any doubt about the troubling nature of Donald Trump’s record, he or she should be obliged to read the affidavit of Ronald Schnackenberg, a former salesman for Trump University. Schnackenberg’s testimony was one of the documents unsealed by a judge in the class-action suit, which was brought in California by some of Trump University’s disgruntled former attendees.Schnackenberg, who worked in Trump’s office at 40 Wall Street, testified that “while Trump University claimed it wanted to help consumers make money in real estate, in fact Trump University was only interested in selling every person the most expensive seminars they possibly could.” The affidavit concludes, “Based upon my personal experience and employment, I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.”

In 2018, the so-called University settled with its former students for $25,000,000.

And don’t forget these fiascoes: Trump Water. Trump Steaks. And Trump Vodka. Bloomberg News reports:

…on St. Patrick’s Day, J. Patrick Kenny, the creator of Trump Vodka, is sitting in his New York office, sipping a Diet Coke and explaining what had gone wrong. Not even he has a bottle of the stuff left. “There used to be one here, but it’s gone,” Kenny says. “The company cratered.” Trump Vodka had problems, from distillery to bottling to finance. Even so, it would be just another celebrity’s doomed foray into liquor if it weren’t the project of a potential president. With no political résumé to speak of, the only way to evaluate the capabilities of Trump is by once again poking around in his exploits in commerce. Like his bankrupt casinos, closed college, and other dead-end brand journeys, Trump Vodka was a flamboyant exercise in failure. Trump, naturally, insists it was a triumph, though good luck finding a bottle today. Its slogan was “Success Distilled.”

Why does all this matter? It matters because Trump is now doing to the United States precisely what he did to his many failed businesses. He’s bankrupting the country. 

If this failure continues the jobs getting lost today will never return. Hundreds of thousands more Americans will be added to the 100,000 already dead of Covid-19. Trump is already talking about cutting Medicare to pay for his give-aways to the rich, and Social Security can’t be far behind. Under the best of circumstances, without Trump, it will take many years for the USA to recover from the damage Trump has already done to us. If he is voted back into the presidency, this nation is doomed to mass bankruptcy and a plunge into Third-World nationhood.