Trump Bankrupted Casinos, Doesn’t Get Tariffs — Americans Still Think He’d Be Better On The Economy

WASHINGTON — If a year from now prices at Walmart and Target have spiked 15% and a deep recession is suddenly on the horizon, blame Mark Burnett.

Donald Trump has for decades mismanaged the hundreds of millions of dollars left to him by his father, most famously bankrupting casinos, and to this day displays fundamental misunderstandings of basic economics, including his insistence that consumers would not pay at all for the massive tariffs he is proposing. Yet the former president nevertheless continues to hold a lead over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris with voters on the question of who would better manage the economy, based in large part because of the decision by Burnett — a reality television impresario ―` to cast Trump as the genius businessman hero on “The Apprentice.”

“People were primed when he ran, that this is the businessman who can do the deals,” said Ryan Cummings with the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a former economist in President Joe Biden’s White House.

That same faith in Trump’s acumen later allowed him to claim that the economy on his watch was dramatically better than under his predecessor, Barack Obama, even though it was essentially the same, Cummings said. “When he went out and said the economy is great, people tended to believe it,” he said.

And as Trump runs to regain his office, he is basing much of his economic agenda on imposing tariffs as high as 20% on all foreign goods and 60% on those from China, which experts warn would bring back high inflation and risk a major recession.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said the tariffs would increase inflation, decrease the gross domestic product and cause higher unemployment. “Just how much economic damage the higher tariffs would do depends on whether other countries respond to the higher U.S. tariffs on their goods,” he said.

Cummings was even more blunt: “It would be an unmitigated disaster. You would have to reconstruct entire supply chains, and every other country would immediately retaliate, either cutting consumers off directly from goods or making the goods so expensive that they are as good as cut off.”

Trump’s campaign did not respond to HuffPost queries. In his Sept. 10 debate against Harris, the coup-attempting former president repeated his decades-old, but demonstrably untrue, claim about his business acumen after Harris said Trump had received $400 million from his father.

“I was given a fraction of that, a tiny fraction, and have built it into many, many billions of dollars. Many, many billions. And when people see it, they are even surprised,” Trump said.

Americans, it appears, still largely believe him.

In a poll released last week, The New York Times and Siena College found that likely voters think by a 54-41 margin that Trump would do a better job at managing the U.S. economy than would the vice president. Other polls show a smaller gap, but virtually all of them show Trump leading on the issue.

As Trump himself once told fellow NBC TV star Billy Bush, his secret to life was simply to say things repeatedly and with confidence, regardless of whether they were true.

“People will just believe you,” he said. “You just tell them and they believe you.”

During his years as a New York City developer, he would tell reporters and gossip columnists all manner of things, both to exaggerate his own status as well as to disparage his competitors. He once leaked to a tabloid the entirely made-up tip that Prince Charles was buying an apartment in Trump Tower. Upon buying the Eastern Airlines shuttle from Boston and New York to Washington, D.C., in 1989, he told reporters — with zero basis in fact — that the competing airline on that route flew unsafe planes, and only his airline was safe. Just two months later, one of his own “Trump Shuttle” 727s had an accident when its nose gear collapsed on landing.

Trump’s creation myth, known mainly to New Yorkers, got a national audience when “The Apprentice” first aired in 2004. The game show portrayed him as a savvy chief executive as a plot device to let him “fire” contestants each week.

What most viewers didn’t realize at the time — and many voters still do not realize to this day — was that Trump’s actual business record belied the Midas touch image the scriptwriters had concocted.

Despite his oft-repeated claim that he began his financial empire with nothing more than a $1 million loan from his father, in reality he took over Fred Trump’s homebuilding empire when he was just 32 years old, and his business decisions have been underperforming the broader market ever since.

National Journal in 2015, as Trump was starting his first run for president, calculated that had Trump taken that money and simply put it all into an S&P 500 index fund, he would have been worth $8 billion, rather than the $4 billion that Forbes estimated he was worth at that time.

More recently, New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, using thousands of pages from an intra-family lawsuit provided by Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, placed the total value the former president received from his father at more than $413 million. And in a new book, “Lucky Loser,” they show how The Apprentice put another $427 million into his pockets at a time his other ventures were bleeding cash.

By the time of his 2016 election win, Donald Trump’s list of failed businesses included casinos, his airline and his various branding efforts, including Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka and Trump bottled water. His Trump University was under investigation by multiple attorneys general and he ultimately settled the lawsuits with a payment of $25 million.

More recently, his effort to create his social media company, Truth Social, has foundered since going public, with the stock value falling from a high of $79.38 per share after the offering in March to $12.79 at the end of trading on Tuesday.

And in the past few years, while still claiming to be a multibillionaire, Trump has lent his name out and cut advertising for various collectibles, from Trump Bibles ($60) to Trump Sneakers ($399) to Trump digital trading cards ($99) to Trump souvenir coins ($100).

As he tries to regain his old job, Trump has continued to use his tried-and-true tactic of lying, both generally as well as specifically on the economy.

He claims his 2017 tax cuts were the largest in American history. He claims he presided over the “best economy” ever. Neither assertion is remotely true. In fact, the economy was stronger during several earlier stretches, and tax cuts under presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were larger than his.

Indeed, the economy on his watch was about the same or slightly worse than the one under his predecessor, Barack Obama — which Trump and Republicans generally reviled as a disaster.

And as he blames Biden and Harris, now also his Democratic opponent in November, for high inflation in 2022 and 2023, he neglects to mention that two-thirds of the $5.7 trillion aimed at preventing the economy from crashing during the COVID pandemic was signed into law by Trump, not Biden. Economists blame that spending, along with continued supply chain problems, for increasing inflation as the economy came out of the pandemic.

Paired with falsehoods and exaggerations about his own records are apocalyptic warnings about what will happen if Harris wins the presidency. He claims — just as he did when running against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 — that her election would bring a “1929 style depression.”

“Under Kamala Harris, there will be no car industry, no steel industry, no manufacturing of any kind,” he said in Georgia Tuesday. “If we don’t win this election, we won’t have a country anymore.”

Meanwhile, his policy prescriptions for a return to the presidency boil down to eliminating taxes for various voting blocs he is trying to win over — “No taxes on tips,” “No taxes on Social Security,” “No taxes on overtime” — and gimmicks such as capping credit card interest rates at 10%. He also evinces a belief that steep tariffs and drilling for more oil will solve all the country’s problems.

In a rambling 374-word answer to how he would reduce the cost of child care, Trump said that higher tariffs – which he claimed would bring in “trillions” ― would somehow do that. The answer repeated his long-held, but still wrong, belief that exporting nations pay American tariffs, rather than U.S. importers and consumers. Answering how he will lower costs on everything else, Trump repeatedly answers, “drill, baby, drill,” and claims he will slash energy costs in half within a year.

Energy industry experts ridicule that pledge, pointing out that oil and natural gas are sold on a global market and that the only way for prices to fall that low would be for an economic calamity that would accompany a full-on recession or worse.

“This may be one of the dumbest statements that Donald Trump has ever made,” oil industry veteran Matt Randolph said in a video he produced mocking Trump’s promise.

To Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi, Trump’s economic message is pretty much the same as the rest of his message. “Trump invented a new political rule: Shamelessly take total credit for the successes of others that you had nothing to do with, while ignoring your own catastrophic failures and blaming your opponents for being the cause of them,” he said.