He Bankrupted His Casino. Now He's Bankrupting Our Country.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast · Mar 7, 2025 · 5m

Throughout three presidential campaigns, people who’ve voted for Donald Trump have repeatedly said they’ve done so, in part, because he was a “successful businessman.”

Well, they’re half right.

He was a businessman alright, but if you'd been paying attention even a little bit at any time over the last forty-years, there were plenty of better-fitting adjectives to describe the kind kind of businessman he was: unscrupulous, irresponsible, incompetent, crooked—and failed.

In 1990, Trump launched the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, which cost over a billion dollars to construct. He called it…