He turned it into the Trump Castle, his second Atlantic City property, and installed his then-wife, Ivana, as CEO. Trump purchased a nearly finished casino, sight unseen, from Hilton Hotels when the chain was denied a gambling license. To do so, he saddled the casino with more than $300 million in debt from junk bonds. But Trump fought constantly with Harrah’s over the partnership and eventually bought out its stake. Trump built the Trump Plaza, the largest casino in Atlantic City at the time, in partnership with the casino chain Harrah’s, with Trump overseeing construction and Harrah’s parent company footing the $220 million bill. May 1984: Trump’s first casino opens in Atlantic City Then, when Trump’s debts spiraled out of control in the early 1990s and nearly destroyed him for good, he figured out how to use other people’s cash again to make millions for himself and dump his debt-ridden failures on investors. “It’s called ‘other people’s money.’ There’s nothing like doing things with other people’s money.” It’s a phrase he taught students at Trump University, and he put it into practice by building his first empire in the 1980s on massive loans that allowed him to erect towers in New York, acquire casinos in Atlantic City, and buy other businesses including the Plaza Hotel and the short-lived Trump Shuttle airline. “I do that all the time in business,” he said at a rally in North Carolina last month. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.įor decades, Donald Trump has operated his businesses on one fundamental premise: Use other people’s money.

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