![]() ![]() During one of Trump’s telephone conversations with Useem, the developer said he’d “sue the ass off of Fortune” if the magazine was to “disparage cash flow.”įour years later, writer Daniel Roth revisited this image obsession in his marvelous profile, “ The Trophy Life,” which graced the cover of Fortune’s Apedition. Yet even more striking than the eternal unsteadiness of his business dealings was Trump’s eternal fear of being seen as an unsteady businessman. One industry executive estimates that step alone would bring a 30% bump in the stock.” “Given that the low stock price seems partly a function of Wall Street’s allergic response to Trump’s flamboyance-analysts call it ‘the Donald factor’-the obvious solution would be for Trump to remove himself from management. ![]() “A couple of people close to Trump and otherwise sympathetic to him suggested to me that he’s unfit to be running a public company,” wrote Useem in 2000. But many of those who knew him well had their doubts. Trump denied furiously to Fortune then that he did anything amiss and dutifully swore to pay off his debts. It’s not just the $5 million bonus he drew one year, or the fact that the pilots of his personal 727 are on the casino company’s payroll… he had the already cash-strapped company lend him $26 million to pay off a personal loan from Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette.” “But most disquieting,” wrote Useem-in a magazine yarn that feels like it was written two days, not two decades, ago-was “Trump’s tendency to use the casino company as his own personal piggy bank. In a business where “the house always wins,” Trump’s casino company lost $134 million in 1999 (after special items and depreciation-a theme in the New York Times’ story, too), forcing S&P to lower it bond rating “from junk to junkier,” said Useem, who is now a contributing writer at The Atlantic. When Useem’s story was published in the Apedition of Fortune, Trump’s casino company was awash in $1.8 billion in high-yield debt-the servicing of which gobbled up $216 million of cash flow. In “ What Does Donald Trump Really Want?,” writer Jerry Useem took readers into a frenzied three-ring circus of bombast and leverage-where, somehow, even a thriving Atlantic City casino business could be nearly drowning in debt. All of which means: “Should he win re-election, his lenders could be placed in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president.” Indeed, it would appear he is personally on the hook for $421 million in IOUs, with most of that coming due over the next four years, said the Times’s reporters. Trump’s “revenue from ‘The Apprentice’ and from licensing deals is drying up, and several years ago he sold nearly all the stocks that now might have helped him plug holes in his struggling properties.” Trump’s core enterprises-from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington-report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year,” said the newspaper’s Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire. The Times, which said it verified its account with both publicly available and confidential sources, noted that all of the President’s tax data “was provided by sources with legal access to it.” A lawyer for the Trump Organization told the Times that its reporters’ claims “appear to be inaccurate” and asserted that “over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government.” The President, for his part, called the newspaper’s report “ FAKE NEWS.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |