‘It’s shameful’: Clinton goes to Atlantic City to torch Trump's casino bankruptcies
Hillary Clinton took her presidential campaign to Atlantic City, N.J., on Wednesday to rip into Donald Trump’s rocky business record in the seaside resort.
“Donald Trump says he is qualified to be president because of his business record. Now, three weeks ago he said, and I quote, ‘I’m going to do for the country what I did for my business,’” Clinton said as she stood next to the shuttered Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.
“He’s probably hoping nobody will check up on what he has said. Because what he did for his businesses and his workers is nothing to brag about,” she said. “In fact, it’s shameful.” She was introduced by a man who said he was a local small-business owner hurt by Trump’s recklessness.
Trump was among those who took advantage of legal gambling in Atlantic City to construct casino after casino in the ’80s and ’90s near the city’s famous boardwalk. In addition to the Trump Plaza, he built Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Marina Hotel Casino.
His various Atlantic City casino ventures, none of which he currently owns, went through four rounds of bankruptcies, which cost “workers, lenders, stockholders and contractors jobs and money,” the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. But Trump nevertheless managed to make millions in net profit from his business ventures in the city, according to various accounts, in part by ensuring that he was not personally responsible for the casinos.
In a statement responding to Clinton’s speech, Trump defended the bankruptcies as an “effective and commonly used practice.”
“Out of the hundreds of businesses I have owned over the decades, and hundreds of deals and transactions, I have used the chapter laws of our country in four instances, much as many of our country’s elite business people do (but nobody cares about),” he said.
“Nobody understands the economy like I do, and no one, especially not Crooked Hillary Clinton, will do more for the economy than I will,” Trump said. “I want to bring jobs back to America, while Hillary Clinton wants to get elected to enrich herself with power at the expense of the people.”
Clinton’s Wednesday speech was notable for the sharpness of some of its jabs. She derided Trump as “the Donald,” brought up the fact that many Trump-branded products were made overseas, criticized various other Trump businesses for allegedly defrauding customers and declared him “temperamentally unfit to be president of the United States,” among other attacks.
“It is the same scam over and over again,” Clinton said. “The people he’s trying to convince to vote for him now are the same people he’s been exploiting for years: working people, small-businesses people, trying to support their families,” she said.
