by Jason Wilson
Back in my room, still hungry, I open a container of honey roasted peanuts ($8) and a Mexican beer ($11) from the minibar, flip on CNN, and lie on the bed watching reports on the first indictments in the Mueller investigation. As a jaded travel writer, someone who has stayed in many soulless hotels and eaten in many overpriced restaurants in many disappointing places, I’m completely at ease with a certain exquisite idleness and ennui. But there’s something profoundly unsettling about the sort of boredom that I’ve been feeling in the Trump properties over the past many weeks.
To be clear, none of my experience has been terrible, and some of it has been pleasant. Mostly, though, I’ve been overwhelmed by a relentless, insistent, in-your-face mediocrity: the scolding “Notice to Guests” in my room at the Trump MacLeod House & Lodge in Scotland, warning that I will be charged punitively if I take the lint brush, shoehorn, coasters, or other Trump-branded amenities; the strange card displayed in my room at the Albemarle Estate in Charlottesville explaining that “countryside stink bugs” will “occasionally be found” inside; the jar of stale chocolate chip cookies I’m told was the only food available later at night; the eerie near emptiness and peeling paint of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Panama, touted as the tallest building in Central America. And it’s this mediocrity that’s the most disquieting.
I think about the woman earlier this evening who screamed from her SUV, yelling at those of us who happened to be standing in front of the silent, cold, glistening tower. It was a little over-the-top. I suspect that this type of white-hot outrage and hysteria will eventually cool. I also suspect that the era of Trump will pass soon enough. When that happens, what terrifies me is not that Trump’s presidency will have ended up as an exploding, burning disaster—but rather that it will have become something dangerously lukewarm, seeping into our identity. Kind of like that black truffle siu mai with the quail egg inside, served room temperature, with the soft yolk that threatens to ooze down the shirt of the person who ordered it.
I’m wandering the ghostly hallway of the 50th floor, the high rollers’ floor, of what was once the Trump Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. Tables, lampshades, hangers, broken chairs, and other pieces of furniture line the peeling walls. In some places the carpet is soaked.
The penthouse suite has been emptied of all its contents, save for an ironing board. A window treatment is dangling from its rod, and the wallpaper is separating from the wall, revealing what seems to be black mold. The mirrored fireplace and two faux-classical pillars stand pathetically naked in the center of the suite.
It’s July 2017, nine months after the Taj shut its doors in October 2016. This is the third week of a liquidation sale run by National Content Liquidators, and the public has been invited to rummage around the 1,200 guest rooms, to buy anything with a yellow tag. Men are loading furniture into Ryder trucks near the entrance, close to the gilded elephants, in the shadow of the Taj’s onion-domed towers that always looked more Russian than Indian.
Inside, it’s clear that most everything of value went in the early days of the sale. Apparently, I’ve missed out on several “Hand Embroidered Burmese Thai Kalaga Tapestries” and a baby grand piano. HIDE-A-BED SOLD OUT, a handwritten sign announces. But there are still plenty of cheetah-print dining chairs, $16 each.
Near the old casino floor, I walk by a large man wearing a TRUMP-PENCE T-shirt, reclining on a leopard-print fainting couch tagged for $125. “Comfortable?” I ask.
“Yeah, not too bad,” he says. “But the really comfortable ones are over there. The ones where you lay all the way back.” He points a few feet away. “See, that one. Sit on that.”
It’s hard to believe that this place was hyped as the “eighth wonder of the world” when it opened back in 1990. At the time it was the world’s largest casino, as well as the tallest building in New Jersey. But within 15 months of its opening, the Taj filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. By 2009, after another bankruptcy, Trump had sold most of his ownership in the casinos that bore his name. After another bankruptcy filing by the company that ran the Taj Mahal, Trump finally sold his remaining ownership, reported to be less than 10 percent.
Now, from the 50th floor, through the dirt-smudged windows, you can look all the way down the Boardwalk at what casinos remain in Atlantic City. Five of the 12 closed between 2014 and 2016. From this high up, looking out past the beach, toward the ocean, things don’t look so bad. But the view on the ground is of a different, grimmer reality.
I’m from southern New Jersey, and standing in the ruins of the Taj Mahal is profoundly depressing for me. I think about all of the jobs in this vacant building that have been lost; some of my family members have worked for the Trump casinos. One relative won’t talk openly about it with me, still fearing a nondisclosure agreement she signed two decades ago. I actually began my journalism career, in 1992, as a reporter at the Press of Atlantic City. This was the moment when the Trump casinos had just emerged from the first of their bankruptcy reorganizations, and Trump still presented himself as a sort of ruling monarch of Atlantic City, helicoptering in from Manhattan occasionally to express his disapproval with how the town was being run. It’s mostly forgotten now, but Trump’s second Atlantic City casino, opened in 1985, was originally, and unironically, named Trump’s Castle.
I remember one speech he gave at a local business luncheon in the spring of 1992, right when I started my job. He told the gathering that Atlantic City needed to “clean up its act” and excoriated officials for funneling money into “unneeded low-income housing” rather than beautifying the entrance to the city “so it won’t look like you’re coming into a slum.” Trump hated us at the Press. “They kill us every day,” he told the business gathering, bemoaning that we couldn’t be more like the newspapers in Las Vegas; the Vegas papers, he said, “didn’t talk about most casinos losing money.” Trump was always looking for someone to blame for his casinos’ lack of profitability. He was obsessed with the rising competition from legalized gambling in other parts of the country—from Louisiana, from Connecticut, and especially from Native American casinos. “I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations,” he once told radio host Don Imus. Perhaps it’s perfect irony that the Taj Mahal will soon be replaced by a Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, owned by the Seminole Tribe of Florida.
I exit the Taj Mahal and cross the Boardwalk to the Steel Pier. It’s pretty quiet for a sunny July afternoon, with the amusement rides about a third full. A young woman with a Russian accent at the Krazyballs game holds a microphone and says, “Everyone’s a winner!” over and over again, but no one comes to play.
As anyone who has seen HBO’s Boardwalk Empire knows, the Steel Pier, opened in 1898, was once the classic landmark of Atlantic City—hosting Miss America pageants, dance marathons, and musical acts ranging from John Philip Sousa to Diana Ross. But the diving horse act—that is, a horse diving off the pier into the ocean—is what the Steel Pier’s fame, or infamy, rested upon.
The pier closed in 1978, was destroyed by a fire in 1982, and a decade later was reopened, by Donald Trump, who suggested with much fanfare that he was reviving Atlantic City’s glory days. Then, during the summer of 1993, it was announced that the diving horse act would be revived. The world, however, had changed. The diving horse act was now met by an angry crowd of animal rights activists, carrying signs that read DONALD TRUMP PROMOTES ANIMAL CRUELTY and chanting “Donald Trump, stop the jump!”
I covered one of the opening nights of the diving horse act for the Press, getting reaction from activists, from pier workers, and from people on the Boardwalk. I walked to the end of the Steel Pier to watch the act. All of us in the crowd looked skyward at a raised platform. That’s where we saw a “horse” slowly led out onto a plank. It soon became clear that the diving horse was not actually a horse. It was a mule. And it was not going to jump into the ocean, but rather 15 feet down into a pool of water.
The diving mule act went on throughout the summer. Then, with only three days left before the season ended, Trump blew into town to hold a news conference at the pier. He told the assembled television cameras that the diving mule act would be canceled, never to return. Further, Trump claimed to have never really liked the act anyway. Though, he said, “from a purely money standpoint, it was successful.” Even People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals joined him at the news conference, with a sign that read DONALD, THE ANIMALS THANK YOU.
The following summer, when the Taj Mahal hosted the Moscow Circus for a six-week run, the mob of animal rights activists returned, angry as ever at Trump—now over the alleged mistreatment of the circus’s elephants and bears. This time, protesters dropped a half ton of animal feces at the entrance to the Taj Mahal.
Early the next morning, I walk from the Taj Mahal down the Boardwalk to the completely abandoned Trump Plaza. Here, every mention of Trump has long been removed from the building, and grass now grows up through the pavement of the empty parking lots and entranceways. The Plaza will soon be demolished. At the ground floor, from the Boardwalk, you can still look into the dirty windows of Evo Restaurant and see that the tables—now covered with debris—were set for a dinner service in 2014 that never happened. I sit on a bench in a little area across from Boardwalk Hall, which is right next to the former Trump Plaza. There’s a monument here erected by the local unions in the 1980s to remember “those who lost their lives while working on the redevelopment of Atlantic City.” Legalized casino gaming was supposed to be the city’s savior. Sitting here looking at the ghostly shell of Trump Plaza is like the final word, showing once and for all that the casinos were not the savior. Today, Atlantic City just limps along as always, dazed and confused by endless promises, sales pitches, and big talk. It was the perfect place for Donald Trump, someone who would promise you the spectacle of a horse diving into the ocean, and then deliver a mule diving into a swimming pool.
David Milne flies the Mexican flag from atop his home, a former coast guard station that sits on a hill above Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Milne identifies with Mexico’s current plight because adjacent to his yard is a fence that Trump built and then sent him the bill for (more than $3,500, which he threw in the trash). This was back in 2009, when Trump was constructing his golf course on the environmentally sensitive sand dunes and harassing several of his neighbors in the village of Balmedie.
It’s a September day in Scotland, sunny one moment, overcast and drizzling the next, with waves of driving rain in between, all of it buffeted by a cold wind off the North Sea. In the distance, we can see working ships, likely heading back and forth to oil rigs. Milne, a health-and-safety consultant for the oil industry who has been living here for 25 years, says the area’s been hit hard. Nearly 100,000 people have lost their jobs since oil prices tanked.
The course at Trump International Golf Links is nearly empty. Milne says it’s like this almost every day. We see one foursome and some maintenance workers on a hole in the distance. I note that the parking lot still looks half-full. Milne corrects me. “That’s actually only half the parking area,” he says. “There’s another half over there.” That half is empty. So only a quarter of the parking lot is full. “And there’s actually more cars here today than usual.”
Trump came to Aberdeenshire with a lot of promises: 6,000 jobs, 1,450 homes, and millions for the local economy. Nothing near that has happened, and Trump’s two golf courses in Scotland are losing a lot of money. Neither has turned a profit since he poured more than $200 million into both Trump International Golf Links and the famed Turnberry course (which he acquired in 2014) on the Ayrshire coast, an hour from Glasgow. The course here in Aberdeenshire lost nearly $2 million in 2016, and the Scottish government recently blocked Trump’s attempt to build a new course on the dunes, according to multiple news sources. (The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.)
The employees at Trump’s MacLeod House & Lodge, the baronial mansion on the property that’s been turned into a five-star hotel, tell me the season is “winding down”—even though I’m paying what the website terms a “High Season” rate of nearly $350 per night. In any case, the hotel has few guests and is unnervingly quiet. Everyone else I talk to in Aberdeenshire says that in Scotland the golf season never really ends, and many of the more than 50 other golf courses in Aberdeenshire stay open all winter.
The few people who have paid to play Trump’s course today are mostly inside the Dunes Restaurant & Bar, which is sparsely filled. I order a lunch of “haggis bonbons” with “whisky mayonnaise”; the Golf Channel is on mute in the background. It’s so quiet in the Dunes that I can clearly hear a foursome of older American men a few tables away, involved in a numbingly boring conversation about the rain during their round, which apparently really started coming down on their back nine.
“It wasn’t so bad,” says one guy. “At least I didn’t shoot a fifty!” (Which apparently he had shot on the front nine.)
“Yeah,” says his friend. “But I just don’t want my handicap to go up.”
“Well,” says another, “it’s hard to convert what you do over here.”
“Really? I don’t see how it’s any different to swing a golf club here as at home.”
I’m not a golfer, but I’ve been to enough golf clubs to know that the 19th hole at the Dunes isn’t really all that impressive. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with it (with the possible exception of the haggis bonbons, which are wrong in several ways). Mostly, it’s just sort of crushingly average. Maybe it’s the generic newness of the place, which was built a little over five years ago—all browns and maroons and sea foam green. It looks no different than plenty of similar golf clubs I’ve been to for weddings and youth sports banquets back home in South Jersey.
After I finish my haggis bonbons, I zip up my jacket and head outside into the wind and drizzle, wandering up a path toward the tees. As I look out over the dunes toward the sea, I see no one on the course. But I do see a gold-lettered plaque, affixed to a pole, commemorating the opening of this course “conceived and built by Donald J. Trump” in 2012. The plaque reads: “Encompassing the world’s largest dunes, The Great Dunes of Scotland, Mr. Trump and his architect, Dr. Martin Hawtree, delicately wove these magnificent golf holes through this unparalleled 600 acre site running along the majestic North Sea. The unprecedented end result is, according to many, the greatest golf course anywhere in the world!”
To be clear, in the latest rankings by both Golf and Golf Digest magazines, Trump’s course in Aberdeenshire is listed, respectively, at 46th and 54th in the world—certainly pretty good, but far enough from what most people would term “the greatest.” Further, the “Great Dunes” referenced are part of a natural area called the Sands of Forvie, which is actually the fifth-largest dune system in Britain. It is not even close to the world’s tallest dunes—Namibia, Chile, Peru, and several other countries have dunes that are five or more times as tall.
Since his business arrived in Scotland, Trump has clashed with locals over an offshore wind farm project and been mired in controversy over whether he’s damaged the environment. But oddly, after reading so much about the Scottish disdain for Trump, I didn’t find too many people beyond Milne and his neighbors who expressed negativity toward him. “Regardless of what you think of the man, the golf course is beautiful,” said a manager at the White Horse Inn, about five minutes down the road, where I stayed one night before checking into my lavish Trump room. “Yes, it’s an American’s interpretation of a traditional Scottish links course. But it’s a beautiful course. I love playing there. The man loves golf and knows golf.” This was a prevalent sentiment I heard: Trump’s owning a course in Aberdeenshire was good for everyone’s business. “He’s been a good boy here,” said the taxi driver who took me to a pub called Brig O’ Don in a nearby town. “He’s done what he said he’d do.”
The only other person I’d
encountered with a truly negative word for Trump was the Pakistani taxi driver who drove me to MacLeod House. “I think he’s rubbish. He’s a crazy man. Why did you Americans vote for him?” And then, as if to answer his own question, he said: “Do you know that sixteen million Americans actually believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows?”
Back at my room at MacLeod House & Lodge, I lie under a gaudy, crown-shaped headboard, on a tartan pillow and a shiny gold bedspread, and watch CNN coverage of the Russia investigation. Right outside my room, there is a framed photo on the wall of Donald Trump on the cover of the Russian-language edition of Rolling Stone. The name “Trump” is branded on so many things in my room: slippers, coasters, lint brush, toiletries in the pink-marbled bathroom.
That evening I have a few drinks in the clubby whisky bar in the cozy lobby of the main guesthouse. There are shelves with dozens of fine Scotch whiskies here, truly an amazing selection. The guy who drives the shuttle bus to the golf course is also the bartender, and he pours me an Isle of Jura 16, a Highland Park 18, and a special Royal Lochnagar “distillers edition” that’s finished in old muscat casks.
I’m joined in the whisky bar by four blokes from Liverpool who are here on a golf holiday. They’re the only other people in the hotel besides a couple I overheard speaking Russian in the breakfast room. All of them are enthusiastic about the course; after a couple of whiskies, I ask one guy if the Trump association with the course bothered him at all. “My wife said, ‘Why would you give that man any of your money?’ And I told her, ‘Because it’s a really nice place!’ Honestly, I don’t like him, but what was the choice anyway? Hillary Clinton?”
“I own, actually, one of the largest wineries in the United States. It’s in Charlottesville.” Thus boasted President Trump after a news conference at Trump Tower in August, in which he addressed questions about the clash between white supremacists and those protesting a statue of Robert E. Lee that resulted in a neo-Nazi allegedly killing a woman with his car. There were “very fine people on both sides,” he said.