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| When this happened-- at the opening of the Trump Taj Mahal in 1990-- my elementary school was abuzz. |
I grew up across the river from New Jersey; I grew up in the shadow of Donald Trump (or one of them). Long before he was a reality television star, in the 1980s, Trump was a board game, a real estate tycoon, and a chump often parodied by MAD and Cracked magazines-- he was right up there with ET and Hulk Hogan, among my elementary school crowd. His transition from his fame as a real estate mogul into status as a television personality. In the Philadelphia suburbs in the 1980s and 1990s, Trump was a looming presence: his name was synonymous with wealth that none of us expected to see in our lifetimes. I knew Trump best as the man who built the Taj Mahal, the grandiose casino in Atlantic City, that my maternal grandmother raved about ("oh, Chris, it's beautiful," she told me, having attending the Taj's opening weekend in 1990, seven years after construction began, under a different company and owner altogether). As a kid, I recognized Trump as a financial success: my grandmother was more than willing to save her spare change to feed his slot machines over a few weekends a month, and my parents would follow suit in the following decades-- bouncing between comp’d rooms at a number of different AC properties. Buses that ran from the Philadelphia suburbs to the casinos often cost ten or fifteen dollars, but riders were given twenty (or more) dollars in free slot play upon arrival.
I was ten years old when Trump's operation of the soon-to-be-opened Taj Mahal came into question, as New Jersey statute barred any individual from operating more than three casinos. In response, Trump explained away the conflict, claiming that Resorts, the adjoining property he already owned, would become, in effect, an annex of the larger Taj Mahal complex. Initial construction costs in 1983 were estimated to be around $250 million; according to the Press of Atlantic City, final costs for the Trump Taj Mahal exceeded one billion dollars, and Trump was widely quoted as calling the building the Eigth Wonder of the World. Its gala opening was attended by Merv Griffin, Michael Jackson, and, of course, Trump himself. Within two weeks, New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement was making daily checks of the casino’s bank accounts, as the place had run so deeply into debt.
The opening of the the Taj-- Atlantic City's twelfth casino-- The Taj Mahal was the twelfth casino built in Atlantic City; the thirteenth, the Borgota, opened in 2003, but the city’s fiscal high water mark may have already passed by that time. The Taj traded hands but retained Trump’s name, but in the last few months, the situation became increasingly tense. A bankruptcy court ruling dictated changes to the unionized workers’ healthcare policies-- namely, there would be no more employee-paid healthcare-- and the scuffle with the union resulted in the casino’s closure (not without the casino fishing around for tax breaks from the city to stick around). The building closed on October 10, 2016, as union protesters rallied outside. It took workers almost an hour and a half to lock and secure the doors, as they had probably never been locked. One protester took the liberty of locking the building, symbolically as well as literally, from the outside.
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| Photo by Press of Atlantic City. |
The Trump Taj Mahal was one of the gaudiest and largest gaming resorts ever built. It was a testament to what appeared-- especially to a ten year old-- to be Donald Trump’s financial success. By the time I graduated from high school, construction on the Borgota-- what was to be even more impressive than the Taj-- had begun. After its opening, another casino-- the Revel-- was slated to be built in Atlantic City, on the farthest edge of the city, disconnected from the Boardwalk and all that had come before. Like the Trump Taj Mahal, construction was delayed on the Revel due to financing problems-- namely when backer Morgan Stanley decided to walk away from its $900 million investment halfway through construction in 2010. By 2012, the Revel was open for business but was impossibly in debt (the city said they were owed $12 million in property taxes, and the UNITE HERE union claimed some contractors who helped build the facility were still unpaid, to the tune of over $50 million). The Revel’s bankruptcy filing became inevitable, and happened in 2014. In the few years it was open as the Revel, the place gained an infamous reputation-- not only when a British tourist fell forty feet from the grand escalator, but when NFL star Ray Rice was caught on one of the casino’s security cameras beating up on his girlfriend in one of the hotel elevators. The Revel shut down three days after the Showboat down the block had closed its doors-- its demise not due to a lack of profitability, but that it simply wasn't generating enough profit for the Showboat's owners to consider continuing.
Unlike the former Hilton Hotel and Casino (which briefly became The Atlantic Club), the Showboat, and Trump Plaza, plans are underway for the rebirth of the Revel casino. In the 1980s, Donald Trump invested heavily in the garish adult experience of feeding coins into a slot machine in an ‘opulent’ environment; by 2007 he had fled the city, leaving behind him a financially decimated community, of mammoth and vacant hulking ‘resorts’ that, for a brief time, were a destination for people my parents’ age, and for people that were, at the time, their parents’ age. Trump helped build Atlantic City, in his awkward and gaudy image; his now-infamous tweet claims he left the city at the right time, and that he “made a lot of money in Atlantic City” before selling off his interests (though allowing his name to be retained in properties’ brandings). In retrospect, Trump’s control of Atlantic City at its peak was larger than life-- larger than anything the Boardwalk had seen previously. The introduction of gambling to the struggling resort town was intended as an economic stimulus-- and it was until it wasn’t. Trump knew when to hold ‘em, and when to fold ‘em, as it were-- or, at the very least, had powerful help in understanding what cards to play when, and how to string along city and state government agencies long enough to be able to cash in all his chips before fleeing for the door. A 2015 ruling by the US Department of Treasury found the Trump Taj Mahal had been negligent-- since its opening in 1990-- in abiding by rules that governed large financial transactions. Consistent disregard for these rules may have allowed “terrorists [...] and other bad actors” to exploit the casino, as a means of money laundering or more. Trump’s ownership and control in his Taj Mahal had long been relinquished; for the Department of Treasury, there was no one left to reprimand, and a substantial fine only compounded the casino’s financial doom.
The Atlantic City I grew up with represented activities of gluttonous adult privilege (gambling, drinking, cigarette smoking, endless buffets) is dying out. The Revel is slated to open early next year as TEN, under the ownership of a Florida land developer, Glen Straub. Changing the character of the casino culture in Atlantic City, Straub’s long term tenants for the property are installing theaters, a white sand beach, a water park, an endurance bicycle course (in a section of the parking garage), and a ropes course in the main lobby. This would make TEN very different from the intoxicating, smoky cavernous gambling parlors constructed in the city by Donald Trump: when me and my sisters would tag along with my parents, to TropWorld (later to become Tropicana), the only recreation inside the resort for those under 21 was swimming in the pool and getting fat at the buffet. The vision for the reborn Revel casino appears to be very different than what Trump built in Atlantic City; if one wanted to intellectualize the history of Atlantic City, one could trace the development and investment in what Robert Putnam named “social capital” (“Financial capital - the wherewithal for mass marketing - has steadily replaced social capital - that is, grassroots citizen networks - as the coin of the realm”). Of course re-investment in the re-opening and re-branding of a closed casino in a town full of closed casinos isn’t necessarily what Putnam had in mind. But as the election hurdles onward, into the final 48 hours, I am struck by my nostalgia for even those scant moments from childhood, spent in the swimming pool with my sisters and mother, splashing around at TropWorld. The grim reality is coming into focus: the man who I learned of through parody in MAD magazine and through his appearances on the Howard Stern show, the land developer responsible for the construction of one of the few Wonders of the World my grandmother would ever see in her lifetime, this man who made Atlantic City Great Again and fled town like any crooked shyster, has more than a chance at becoming the President of the United States. I do not understand how his background has allowed him to emerge as the GOP front runner; I understand less how that party-- seemingly united for eight years in do-nothing opposition to Obama-- allowed Trump to rise to power, and why critiques of his vision of “American values” hasn’t been more widely discussed, critiqued, and downright ridiculed. While Robert Putnam had higher goals in mind when he outlined his definition of "social capital," the phrase-- in Trump's America-- might best be oversimplified as the difference between spending hours getting drunk at a bank of slot machines in the dimly-lit smoking section of the Trump Taj Mahal, and spending hours at an all-ages water park beside the ocean.
Ferrigo, L, et al. (7 July 2016). “The Atlantic City summer…” CNN.com. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/06/politics/donald-trump-atlantic-city-taj-mahal/
Rosenberg, A. (16 Sept. 2016). “Revel casino…” Philly.com. Retrieved from http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/downashore/Revel-casino-gets-rebrand-as--TEN-.html
