To Understand Trump’s Gaza Fantasy, Look To Atlantic City – Forbes
High flyer: Donald Trump, aboard his helicopter from New York to Atlantic City in 1987, has long used the image of success to create excitement around his projects.President Trump’s proposal this week to turn transform Gaza from a “hellhole” into the “Riviera of the Middle East” gobsmacked world leaders, but it’s not the first time Trump has floated luxury development as an urban revitalization tool. Just take a trip back in time to the Donald Trump years of Atlantic City.“Donald was a great promoter,” says Nicholas Ribis, who served as chief executive of his casino empire. “Nobody could promote the way he does—just like he’s promoting what he’s doing on the Gaza Strip, which I’m sure just popped into his head when he was there. It’s a great idea. It will never get done, but it was great.”Trump first got intrigued with Atlantic City in the late 1970s, after gambling became legal and casinos reported $134 million of citywide revenue in their first year. He started working the phone, acting on a tip about an available parcel from an architect close to his father. The locals didn’t always welcome Trump’s plans—a woman who owned a boardinghouse near one site would not sell, sparking a feud. “I refused to call her names,” recalls Alan Marcus, a communications consultant who worked with Trump back in the day. “He believes that if you do that, that’s how you punctuate your rights, by denigrating somebody. He believes that if you denigrate them, it uplifts you.”The Trump Plaza opened in 1984 with blaring red lights. Trump’s Castle arrived a year later, and the Trump Taj Mahal came in 1990, with the young mogul touting it as the “eighth wonder of the world.” All along, he followed the same playbook that Barbara Res, who helped build Trump Tower, had seen at various properties. “Trump aggrandizes everything,” she explains. “Something he could pull out of the sky and put his name on and say this is the greatest thing ever built. That’s what he does.”No one attracts press quite like Donald Trump, who has been in the spotlight for nearly 50 years.The casinos brought in a lot of money, though not enough to cover Trump’s debt expenses, leading to bankruptcies in the early 1990s. Trump, ever the salesman, found more dumb money in the stock market. Investors snapped up shares of his publicly traded company, which debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in 1995 with the ticker symbol “DJT.” The public company initially contained one casino, but Trump eventually added his other two, piling debt onto the balance sheet of the public company. Investors paid the price when the casino enterprise went bankrupt another two times in the 2000s.Among the lessons that Trump could have taken from Atlantic City: Hype matters. Never mind that the financials of his casinos did not add up—Trump flew in on helicopter, attracted crowds, hosted boxing matches and built big. That was apparently enough for banks, then bondholders, then stock investors to buy into Trump’s vision. “He knows how to shape opinion very, very well,” explains Marcus. “Some of the sharpest guys on Wall Street—you know, Bear Stearns and others—made that mistake, in terms of investing and reinvesting in his debt, knowing he never intends to pay.” Big losses followed, but Trump turned out alright, in part thanks to a web of self-dealing that moved money from the public company into his pocket.One of Trump’s true skills is luring other people’s money. In the early 1980s, with about $400,000 in his checking account, he had lenders handing him millions, which ballooned to billions by the end of the decade. “It’s a combination of charm and force and all kinds of whatever maneuvers,” says Andrew Weiss, who worked in the Trump Organization from 1981 to 2017. “He somehow manages to get people, even when they initially think it’s totally off the wall or crazy or whatever. And I’ve seen him do it many, many times.”Now Trump is at it again in Gaza, suggesting that U.S. taxpayers won’t end up footing any of the bill for his plan. “This could be paid for by neighboring countries of great wealth,” he professed Tuesday. Saudi Arabia shot down the idea immediately, and a Qatari spokesperson said it was too early to talk about such things. There is probably zero chance that any Arab nation is going to spend enough money to turn all of Gaza into the Riviera.But who knows, maybe dumb money will come through again, with someone tossing in a few billion to please Trump, who could direct it toward some project that leaves questionable impact in Gaza but allows him to claim victory. “The world gets bigger, but he doesn’t think bigger,” says Marcus. “It always goes back to ‘What’s in it for me?’”
