On April 5, 1990, Donald Trump stood in Atlantic City and opened the Trump Taj Mahal, a billion dollar casino he proudly called "the eighth wonder of the world,"

 

On April 5, 1990, Donald Trump stood in Atlantic City and opened the Trump Taj Mahal, a billion dollar casino he proudly called "the eighth wonder of the world," with Michael Jackson himself in attendance for the launch. The building was the biggest and flashiest casino ever built at the time, financed with about 675 million dollars in high yield junk bonds carrying a brutal 14 percent interest rate, and one Wall Street analyst named Marvin Roffman publicly predicted it would flop the second the summer tourist crowds thinned out. Trump was so furious at the prediction that he pressured Roffman's firm into firing him, and Roffman later sued for wrongful termination and won. It turned out Roffman was right on the money, because the Taj Mahal missed its very first debt payment that October, just six months after opening, and by August 1990 New Jersey gaming regulators were warning in an official report that a complete financial collapse of the entire Trump Organization was not out of the question, citing a staggering 3.4 billion dollars in total debt. Things got so tight that Trump's own father, Fred Trump, sent a lawyer to one of Donald's other casinos in December 1990 to buy 3.3 million dollars worth of poker chips just to funnel emergency cash into the business, a move regulators later ruled was an illegal loan and fined the casino 65,000 dollars over. By 1991 the Taj Mahal was in bankruptcy court, and Trump's other two Atlantic City properties followed into bankruptcy the very next year. What makes this such a wild story for a guy known for branding himself a winner is that this pattern repeated itself, with Trump's casino companies filing for Chapter 11 protection multiple more times over the following two decades, including a major filing in 2004 and another in 2009, plus a final closure of the Taj Mahal in 2016 after the property changed hands entirely. Somehow Trump personally kept profiting through parts of the collapse, reportedly pulling in tens of millions from licensing deals even as vendors and casino workers were left holding the bag. It is one of the most well documented boom and bust stories in modern American business history, a literal eighth wonder that crumbled into bankruptcy court within eighteen months of its grand opening.