Next year will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the opening of the first legal casinos in Missouri.
The industry has done well in those thirty years. It has posted revenues of almost $42-Billion.
For a time, Donald Trump wanted to be part of that, making some deals that would add to his casino empire back east. Before he started sniffing around in Missouri he had bought a casino from Hilton Hotels in 1985 and opened the property as Trump’s Castle Hotel Casino (later Trump Marina) in Atlantic City. In 1986, he bought out a Holiday Inn and opened it as the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.
Two years later he got involved in the Taj Mahal project in Atlantic City and, using junk bonds, turned it into a billion-dollar construction project.
In 1993, a year after voters approved riverboat gambling, he showed up in Missouri, ready to deal. St. Louis Mayor Freeman Bosley didn’t want to cut a deal unless riverfront gambling interests got behind downtown redevelopment, a condition that Trump didn’t seem to mind, telling reporters, “Depending on what he wants, I would be interested in discussing possible linkage. I think St. Louis needs a convention center hotel very badly. St. Louis is certainly a good gaming market.”
Already displaying the modesty to which we are accustomed, he proclaimed in May of ’93, “I think I know as much about convention halls as anyone in the public of private sector.”
While he was casting eyes at Missouri, he was feuding with Native Americans who were opening their own casinos. The same year he looked at St. Louis he was ripping the operators of the Foxwoods Casino operated by he Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in New York, telling New York City radio host Don Imus, “I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up reservations…I think if you’ve ever been up there, you would truly say these are not Indians.”
(Just for the record, Donald Trump has zero Indian blood. His grandfather, came here as a 16-year old barber to escape three years of German military service. The legality of his entrance to the United States is questionable.)
American Indian Republic later reflected, “His discourteous rhetoric involving American Indians has often been used to both demean and frustrate those to which such speech was directed, with his early 1990’s tirades reflecting his discontent with the rapid and expansive rise of Indian gaming in particular. Much of the racially influenced remarks that had occurred during that period would later be conveyed once again during his 2016 presidential bid against his Republican opponents and Hillary Clinton, amongst other politicians.”
The year he was considering a Missouri casino, he filed a lawsuit against the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 that allowed Indian nations to open casinos. His whine was a familiar one to us today. The suit claimed those casinos were providing unfair competition, that the act was discriminatory as well as being unconstitutional.
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit, a defendant, reacted, “My initial reaction was, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’ve never even met Marla Maples. How can he be suing me?’ It is really absurd to think that a self-proclaimed tycoon s threatened by a few bands of impoverished Indians. It’s the theatre of the absurd.”
(Marla Maples was Trump’s new hobby at the time. They had met in 1984 and started carrying on while he was still married to Ivana, who finally split with him in 1990. It was about the time he was fighting Indians that Marla was trying to convince him to marry her. She said they’d set the date “about a dozen times” but he always had “a little freak out” the day before the grand event. She said she helped him get over “that fear monster,” but had started taking her wedding gown along on their travels because “you’ve got to be prepared.” They married late in 1993, two months after the birth of their daughter, Tiffany. Three years later, Trump fired his bodyguard after police reported finding him under a lifeguard stand with Ivana on a deserted beach at 4 a.m. They divorced in June of 1999. By then he was fooling around with a Yugoslavian-born model, Melanija Knavs, who was building a career in New York. They were married in 2005.)
Getting back to our story:
As usually seems to happen with Trump lawsuits, the one involving Bruce Babbit went nowhere.
Later that year, representatives of the Wyandotte Tribe of Oklahoma proposed building an 80,000 square foot casino/hotel/theatre/restaurant complex in the St. Louis suburb of Arnold. One Arnold resident dismissed the idea, commenting, “Trump is in town talking about a deal on the riverfront. Who in the world is going to choose Arnold when downtown St. Louis is 20 minutes away?” Governor Carnahan’s deputy chief of staff, Roy Temple, indicated Carnahan was cool to the idea of a casino in Arnold, generally opposed to casinos beyond those allowed by the riverboat gambling amendment added to the State Constitution in ’92.
Trump also was crosswise with Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker, claiming he couldn’t build a casino in that state until Weiker left office because Weiker opposed casinos. Weiker responded, “My opposition to casinos isn’t just casinos. It’s opposition to Donald Trump,” who he referred to as a “dirt bag” and a “bigot.” Trump displayed his now-familiar brand of logic when he fired back that Weiker “is a fat slob who couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Connecticut,” ignoring the fact that Weiker had gotten elected to an office of somewhat greater importance.
In November of ’93, Trump unveiled his plan for a $300 million floating casino and 20-acre development just north of Laclede’s Landing on the St. Louis riverfront. Five other developers also were eyeing the area.
In February of 1994, he floated the idea of a $98 million casino project in St. Charles that included a golf course, aquarium, and a park. Six other companies were competing.
Trump wasn’t good enough for either project.
In August of ’95, he left some people shaking their heads when he filed a lawsuit in New York to stop the introduction of new lottery game, Quick Draw. He described it as “video crack,” and argued, “When you add it all up, the social costs far outweigh the potential tax revenues” and would be harmful to gambling addicts and casual gamblers “who can lose far more than they can afford.”
The same concerns did not apply to his own casinos because, “The overwhelming number of people who go to casinos do so for limited periods of time and with set budgets.”
By now, by the way, the Palm Beach, Florida, town council had capitulated in the face of a lawsuit filed by Trump and approved his proposal to turn his historic Mar-a-Lago mansion into a private club. The council had refused to allow the change two years earlier and Trump had, well, you know.
Trump’s grandiose plans for St. Louis and St. Charles were stillborn but he wasn’t done with Missouri.
In 1995 he established Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts as a publicly-traded company. Four years later THCR agreed to buy the troubled Flamingo Hilton Casino in Kansas City, reportedly for $15 million. The city port authority approved the deal on Trump’s 53rd birthday. But the deal fell through when the Missouri Gaming Commission refused to approve the company’s gaming license, expressing concerns about the THCR’s $1.8 Billion in debts.
The summer before the deal, the Hilton had agreed to pay $665,000 in fines and penalties to the federal government instead of going to trial in federal court for “providing financial incentives” to friends of the then-chairman of the Kansas City Port Authority in return for his political support to build the casino on city-owned land. The company always denied doing anything improper. The gaming commission threatened to yank the Hilton’s gambling license unless it sold its property. Hilton had spent more than $100 million to develop the site.
In September of ’99, Station Casinos bought the Flamingo Hilton at the fire-sale price of $22.5 million. A Trump spokesman said the deal was cancelled so the company could focus on operating its three casinos in Atlantic City and reduce its debt.
Anyone wanting to learn more about all of this little drama seems to be out of luck. The Associated Press reported in 2016 that about 1,000 pages of documents are locked away in the gaming commission’s files and are secret under Missouri law because Trump’s company withdrew its application on November 17, 1999. The commission lawyer says they’re sealed because the state never took action on the license application.
So ends the story of Donald Trump’s efforts to expand his casino empire to Missouri.
Had he done so, his track record indicates those projects would have been just another part of the story of the great deal-maker’s business failures.
THCR filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and was renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts and declared bankruptcy in 2009.
The Harrah’s at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1992, closed in 2014 and was demolished in 2021.
Trump 29 Casino in Coachella, California is still open but Trump left the partnership in 2006.
Trump Casino in Gary, Indiana was sold in 2005.
Trump World’s Fair in Atlantic City closed in 1999 and was demolished a year later.
Trump Castle in Atlantic City filed for Chapter bankruptcy in 1992, was sold in 2011 and is now the Golden Nugget Atlantic City.
Trump Taj Mahal on the Atlantic City boardwalk filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1991, closed in 2016 and is now the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.
And those are just part of a list of failures that also include an airline, a university, a vodka and a meat business, a travel agency and a mortgage finance company. And Truth Social is weakening.
His last casino development effort was on the Caribbean Island of Canouan, described as “a place where billionaires go to escape millionaires,” when Swiss-Italian banker Antonio Saladino tried to turn his languishing resort into a successful enterprise. He hired Trump to build villas around his hotel and golf course. Trump agreed to run the golf course and put up his own casino. Saladino sold out in 2010 to an Irish billionaire who fired Trump and sold the resort in 2015.
So Missouri missed out on having Donald Trump running a casino here. It’s probably for the best.
Missouri has thirteen casinos, none that have ever born the name “Trump.” There are those who think we need a fourteenth one, or maybe move a license from one location to the next—-which presents another problem of what is a small town that loses its casino going to do for jobs and what’s it going to do with the boarded-up casino. And we have another Indian Nation that is trying to open a casino .
We saw during those years the Donald Trump character that is no different today. The casino industry has moved beyond Donald Trump. Some might think it’s because the industry is run by better people, which is a case of damning by faint praise.
Is there a lesson in this for our political system?