The White House runs a mob-style extortion racket that will bankrupt the country the way the U.S. president bankrupted his casinos.
The Don – by Mr. Fish.
I visited Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City the day before it closed in October 2016.
The casino had two huge white gates flanked by 2-ton white, cast-stone elephants. Its entrance was topped by an array of 70 turquoise and teal fiberglass minarets and a dozen gold-tipped domes.
A neon sign with red and gold lettering read: “Trump Taj Mahal Casino and Resort.” A lighted fountain in front of the glass casino doors was decorated with two rows of six white-and-gold urns.
The Trump Taj Mahal, New Jersey’s tallest building and the world’s largest casino, cost $1.2 billion to build. The opulent suites, when they opened, were named after historical personalities — Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Napoleon and Cleopatra.
The suites cost around $10,000 per day. Trump, whose name and image were plastered throughout the casino, employed his familiar hyperbole to call it the “eighth wonder of the world.”
The casino operators were instructed to answer incoming calls with the words: “Thank you for calling the Trump Taj Mahal, where wonders never cease.” The waitresses wore “harem girl” outfits.
The casino went through bankruptcy five times.
Trump is doing to the country what he did to the Taj Mahal. His administration is operating well beyond its means with a budget of $7.4 trillion for fiscal year 2026, against projected revenue of just $5.6 trillion.
Entrance to the Trump Taj Mahal at night, December 2003. (Jrballe /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 3.0)
Trump’s idiocy has embroiled the United States in an endless and unwinnable war with Iran, which may tank the global economy. He is set to cut health coverage for 15 million people, along with food assistance and other basic needs programs.
He has terminated the jobs of thousands of government employees. He has shut down USAID, the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center. He gutted Voice of America and vows to close the Department of Education. He withdrew from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement (twice).
He continued the suspension of funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which had begun under the Biden administration. He canceled thousands of U.S.-funded international development projects.
He erased government datasets and climate-related web pages. He slashed the budgets for renewable energy initiatives while revoking federal carbon and pollution regulations.
His scorched earth policies, which are dynamiting the foundations of the republic, are accompanied by a culture of corruption and deceit that is unmatched in American history.
Crypto Profits
Trump, whose officials face accusations of insider trading and whose family has made more than $1.4 billion from crypto-related ventures since taking office, shamelessly profits from the fusion of unregulated cryptocurrency-based prediction markets and politics pioneered by gambling apps, such as Polymarket.
Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, is a major investor in Polymarket, where he sits on the advisory board. He has an estimated net worth of $400 million.
He also serves as a strategic advisor at Kalshi, the prediction market platform which gave him equity in the company worth some $300,000 — now estimated to be worth millions. Kalshi recently announced it will allow users to bet on whether the FDA will approve individual drugs as “safe and effective.”
Trump’s Truth Social is developing a prediction market called Truth Predict. His administration sued Connecticut, Arizona and Illinois in an attempt to block these states from regulating prediction markets. Truth Social also launched a $100,000 per month service offering quicker access to Trump’s market manipulating posts — a thinly disguised version of insider trading.
The White House, replicating the mob-style shakedowns of Atlantic City’s casino culture, demands huge payouts from corporations and billionaires in exchange for political favors and deregulation. The Wall Street Journal writes that Trump has amassed a slush fund of $800 million for pet projects, including his ballroom, presidential library, super PACs and political issue committees.
Trump’s chief fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, nicknamed “The princess of darkness,” collects the payoffs with the blunt pitch “The boss wants this money.”
The nonnegotiable demand is lifted from the playbook of Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, the head of the Bruno-Scarfo crime family, whose extortion racket collected millions from Atlantic City construction firms, businesses, bars, restaurants, unions — which saw their health and welfare funds looted — and casinos. And, just like the mob, once is never enough for the Trump crime syndicate.
It always comes back for more.
Selling Escapist Fantasy
View of Trump Taj Mahal and Chairman Tower from the Boardwalk, February 2009. (B64/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0)
Trump, who like most mobsters is accompanied by a much younger goomah — his latest being his executive assistant Natalie Harp — has a long history of mob-like retribution.
He issued executive orders targeting law firms that previously employed attorneys who investigated him. The firms lost security clearances and access to federal courthouses. Scrambling to placate Trump, they sheepishly succumbed to his demands.
When I arrived at Trump’s casino, the 22-space tour bus terminal was empty. Most of the 12 restaurants in the casino were closed. The casino’s arena, seating 5,500 people, had shut its doors.
The Trump Taj Mahal, like our republic, was about to die.
“When I walked inside the Taj, glittering Austrian crystal chandeliers, which cost $14 million each, dangled over the softly lit interior,” I wrote in America: The Farewell Tour.
“Many were missing strings of beads. The walls were covered with mirrors. I looked out at rows of gaming tables, blackjack tables, roulette wheels, and three thousand slot machines that twinkled with colored lights. The slot machines emitted beeps, hums, and dings of various pitches. They stretched over an area the size of three football fields. The gambling floor was almost empty. The dealers stood in front of vacant, felt-covered tables.
Most of the gamblers who slumped in the cushioned chairs in front of the slot machines were elderly and haggard. They robotically pulled down levers or pushed square buttons. They stared blankly at the spinning screens in front of them. One slot machine generates between $200 and $300 a day for the casino. The dedicated gamblers are given courtesy drinks. Housekeepers occasionally enter rooms to discover the corpses of elderly men or women who spent hours drinking more alcohol than their bodies could absorb. It is not uncommon for slot players to wet and soil themselves.”
Trump Taj Mahal casino floor, circa ?August 2004. (Wikimedia Commons /CC BY-SA 3.0)
“The seventeen computerized check-in desks near the entrance were empty,” I continued.
“A lone clerk stood behind the long counter facing empty rope lines. Toilets in the bathrooms, adorned with Carrera marble, were covered with plastic bags and had signs reading ‘Out of Order.’ I walked along the soiled and worn carpet through long, deserted, and poorly lit corridors on the upper floors. Semicircular beige wall sconces, some of which enclosed burned-out bulbs, were placed every few feet on either side of the hall. The sconces were dirty and cracked. The ceiling had brown water spots. The air smelled of mold. Three quarters of the 1,250 rooms had been mothballed. The casino felt like a ghost ship.”
Gambling, like Trump’s sham university and his $TRUMP memecoin, is about selling escapist fantasies. It is about preying on people’s despair. The spinning reels on the slot machines, for example, are an illusion.
They do not slowly run out of momentum. They are programmed to appear that way. Computer chips determine the outcome the moment the button is pushed or the lever pulled. Virtual reel mapping ensures that a jackpot symbol appears above or below the payline. The player has the impression of almost winning, spurring the gambler to bet more money.
Trump from his earliest days as a real estate developer was enmeshed with the mob, including his cutthroat lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohen represented Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family, and Carmine Galante from the Bananno crime family.
Trump was schooled by Cohn and others in the art of extortion, blackmail, threats and graft. He has, throughout his career, surrounded himself with mobsters, grifters and sycophants.
Trump, on right, and his executive assistant, Natalie J. Harp, look out of the window of Air Force One on Sept. 7, 2025, as they travel to the U.S. Open Men’s Championship. (White House /Daniel Torok)
Joseph Weichselbaum, a three-time-convicted felon who was eventually imprisoned for trafficking marijuana and cocaine, managed Trump’s helicopter fleet. The helicopters ferried high rollers to and from Trump casinos. These high rollers could get anything they desired, from sex with escorts to cocaine. Weichselbaum’s easy access to drugs was probably an asset.
When Weichselbaum was awaiting sentencing, Trump wrote to the judge that he was “a credit to the community.” The trafficker received a three-year sentence, although he served only 18 months. The couriers who physically delivered the drugs for Weichselbaum got up to 20 years. When he was released from prison, Weichselbaum moved into Trump Tower with his girlfriend.
Trump’s casino opened in 1990 with a concert by Michael Jackson. It was an extravaganza built with $820 million of unsustainable debt, including the issuing of $675 million in junk bonds at a 14 percent interest rate.
Marvin B. Roffman, a casino analyst at the Philadelphia investment firm Janney Montgomery Scott, told The Wall Street Journal that the Taj Mahal would need to make $1.3 million per day to meet its interest payments. No casino had ever brought in that much money.
“The Taj was doomed from the start,” I wrote.
“Trump soon had to service interest rates of $95 million a year. He was able to get new loans for a while and then went bust. It was a brief and giddy moment of insane excess. But it was good for his outsized brand, even if it showed an atrocious lack of business sense.
Trump had borrowed money at high interest rates and lied about the rates to regulators. Trump dumped the losses on stock and bondholders, who were fleeced for more than $1.5 billion. Numerous local contractors and suppliers, never paid by Trump, went bankrupt.”
Trump made out like a bandit. He put up little of his own money. He shifted personal debts to the casino and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. His casino employees collectively lost millions of dollars in retirement savings, along with their jobs. His business debts were off-loaded on his investors.
Trump owned three casinos in Atlantic City and one in Gary, Indiana. The Trump Plaza and the Trump Taj Mahal casinos were shut down. The Trump Marina, his third casino, was sold to Texas billionaire Tilman Fertitta. Fertitta, currently Trump’s ambassador to Italy, renamed it The Golden Nugget. Trump’s casino in Indiana, a 340-foot vessel called the Trump Princess, declared bankruptcy in 2004.
All failed because of Trump’s insatiable greed and mismanagement.
Trump is doing to the nation what he did to the Taj Mahal. He is harvesting and extorting the organizations he oversees for personal profit, while the rest of us will be left bereft amid the ruins.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
This article is from Scheerpost.
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
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Was Don Corleone really that corrupt? Well maybe. But he wasn’t stupid. I can’t imagine him getting into a war with Iran.
I don’t think Trump is all to blame for those financial disasters. Who were the idiots who put up all that money without assessing if it could be paid back? Who were the idiot business people who built all of that trash with getting paid up front? The greedy I suppose thinking they got it made.
Bankruptcies? He cares? He is a multi billionaire now and runs the world, mostly. Can the past losers now get paid? No, I should think but when you live in a country run by criminals don’t expect justice.
You can get mad at the alligator for eating your fluffy bunny rabbit, but that will only get more bunnies eaten as there are always going to be alligators and even bigger alligators. No, it is the people you hired to protect the bunnies from the alligator, that instead just stood there and watched that need to be replaced. Otherwise you go from bunnies, to other small animals, and then before you know it, your own country is the #1 child killer in the history of humanity. I hope that isn’t true. I wish that were not true…but the wood chipper keeps churning. All business as usual.
Some old Leftist observed that: “The Republicans do to the country what the De3mocrats do to their secretaries.
Trump’s Truth Social is developing a prediction market called Truth Predict. His administration sued Connecticut, Arizona and Illinois in an attempt to block these states from regulating prediction markets. Truth Social also launched a $100,000 per month service offering quicker access to Trump’s market manipulating posts — a thinly disguised version of insider trading.
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The STOCK Act (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act) of 2012 prohibits members of Congress and other government employees from using non-public information for personal profit, including insider trading. Additionally, insider trading laws are enforced under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5.
Insider trading laws are enforced by:
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): Responsible for regulating and enforcing securities laws, including insider trading violations.
Department of Justice (DOJ): Handles criminal prosecutions related to insider trading.
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These laws and regulations ensure that insider trading is taken seriously and that those in positions of power are held accountable for their actions.
If an alligator eats your bunny rabbits, who are you going to be mad at? The alligator, for being an alligator, or the people you hired to protect the rabbits? You put their kids through college, and they opt to simply allow the gator to chow down, even helping the alligator at times.
This is a gruesome scenario on a never ending loop, because no one ever really goes after the people who were supposed to be guarding the bunny rabbits. Maybe it started out with gerbils in those cute little wheels, and all manner of furry small animals. Everybody keeps hating the alligator while never confronting the people who fail to do their job. Their job of protecting our farm.
I totally agree with Mr. comment re the Democrats. Our left wing is nothing more that a hollow fiberglass shell that is just there for show…and our plane has been hijacked..
yeah, mate, it’s true, it’s all a gangster op.
Move over, Al Capone.
Including the foisting of “interest-paying” debt on 100 countries. Stand-over, or protection racket, or both? Take your pick
Also, it really should be said that this is one of Chris Hedges’ finer pen-paintings – it’s just lovely to read the work of a master in full flow, regardless of one’s view on the subject. Thanks, Chris, for your dedication to journalism at its best: not just the substance and facts, but the art of writing too. You’re a national and global treasure!
The US economy has been a casino for a long time. Most especially after the deregulation of the 80s and 90s. I place a large part of the blame on a captured media system that has been the gatekeeper for the big players. Some of the blame goes to a majority of the public which takes far too long to even begin pushing back against grave injustice to the working class and the totally disenfranchised.
When you let criminals dismantle the rule of law and defraud the public for decades, (Democrats) you are guaranteed a grifter and carnival barker like Trump will use the corrupted system to their own ends.
Hedges whether he realizes it or not as what everyone has to one degree or another–a penchant for finding without close analysis what fits his perspective agenda.
Everything he says about Trump except for the expletive terms has some or much truth to it. What he ignores to some degree or another every president–whether republican or democrat–has done similar things throughout our history, and especially in our recent history.
Do you really think Chris Hedges doesn’t know this? He has repeatedly said Trump is a symptom not the cause.
I concur, however:
“He has shut down USAID, … He gutted Voice of America … He withdrew from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement (twice).”
These are good things Trump has done !
Well, USAID did provide humanitarian services around the world, but it also worked to promote regime change in numerous countries. Voice of America is primarily a propaganda organ, which is to say that it tells lots of lies. Bring back USAID without the interference in the governance of other countries.
At least provide one good example of why Trump’s actions on the climate agreement is horrible.
yes, I thought that as well.
Trump IS doing to the country what he DID to the ‘Taj Mahal’ casino (Crown of his Narcissistic Ego).
Yet he came out on top – unscathed, eventually even ascending to the Presidency of the entire country, not once, but twice.
What does this say of us, the “working stiffs” who actually built the country!
That he is the most successful, winningest gambler the world has ever known?
His crimes have paid off all the way from his “golden spoon” upbringing through his countless bankruptcies.
How to top this all off?
Why! Build the biggest Arch of Triumph of course, to “be heavily decorated with prominent gold elements and gilded statues”.
And according to Forbes magazine, his private bank amassed an extra cool $2,000,000,000 in 2025 alone, simply by occupying the Oval – tactfully, Orifice of his sh—hole regime; continuing to despoil, not only Americans, but everyone he encounters in his con artistry fleecing operations globally.
A people dumb enough to twice elect a thing like trump simply reap what they sow. Pitiful.
“A people dumb enough”, as well as “‘the working stiffs’” in the previous comment, seriously miss the mark. It is the incompetence of, and the abandonment of the “working stiffs” by the pitiful Democratic Party Establishment which is to blame for Trump. Does anyone actually believe that Trump would have won against Bernie Sanders?
These days it would not surprise me at all. It seems to me that Sanders’s day came and went some time ago.
Yes Trump would have defeated Senator Northrup Grumman.
However, the Dems primaries, as we all learned from “Russiagate”, were a WWF pantomime battle royal, in which the script did not include Bernie winning. And he signed up for that, promising he would unquestioningly endorse the primary winner. Just like another previous one in his mould, Howard Dean. Who exited stage left, and ended up as….Chair of the Democratic Party.
I would sum up this one like this: sheepdogs bred in Vermont.
Yes, the working stiffs were given the runaround by the Dems. And not for the first time. They seem to fall for every trick in the book, inclusing “democratic socialists” that keep dropping to the canvas on cue in round 3, and mulitimillionaires that claim to be “populists”, then enter office and revert to Richie Rich mode.
Now if I keep going to Times Square and losing my money playing three-card montey, at what point do you stop calling them crooks and start calling me a fool? Or as Dubya once said: “Fool me once….fool me…..again?”
Okay!
So you’re Larry McGovern, you didn’t vote Democrat in the election that got Trump elected for a 2nd time in 2024; but if you did, in retrospect, that makes you dumber than the incompetents (lock stock and barrel) you accuse us working stiffs of being.
You either voted for one of the unknown alternate candidates, because you sincerely believed that a third party candidate could indeed win the Presidency, or you voted democrat; or you sat out as millions of disaffected people did.
If your Bernie Sanders party icon had “walked the talk” he may have actually become the viable third party Independent he proclaimed to be and with his 13 million showing in 2016. But what did he opt to do, he conceded without a fight, and the Party of the Clintons lost to Trump.
In my ‘incompetent’ working stiff opinion, a huge proportion — 13M voted for Sanders’ inflated rhetorical program.
Had he stuck to his big gun rhetoric he may indeed have pulled it off.
In his 2019 repeat dog and pony show, as a still potentially viable candidate, what did he do, he once again conceded to the Party’s candidate of choice.
“Does anyone actually believe” that in Larry McGovern’s, “if pigs can fly” dreaming, there will be a free (as in actually independent) and truly fair (non-corporate sponsored, one person, one vote) election in 2028?
What is Bernie Sanders up to these days? He is coaching the new left younger progressives of the Party to be loyal non questioning heroes of the staid old party, applying the age-old political tactic now known as co-optation.
You seem to believe that everyone in the country voted for Trump, or that people who fight every day of their lives against him and the kleptocratic capitalists ruling through him deserve to have their lives destroyed. I really wonder about those who welcome dictatorship because an election was held.
An odd interpretation of my comment.
His reign of hubris and massive incompetence has to be one of the ugliest chapters in human history.
I hope aliens don’t turn up anytime soon. We’ll be laughed out of the galaxy.
A video of the Plaza building being demolished:
xxxx://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Irk6jGe0DXQ
Decadence destroyed.
Meyer Lansky the infamous one, and not Don Corleone, is the true idol and model of DJ Trumpet.
In the southern U.S., Dollar General is the Taj Mahal Casino. We’re betting all we have on a can of beans that doesn’t contain poisonous liquids as a filler. As usual, the south is leading the nation’s inevitable course forward.