Replies

Of course it was. No such thing as bad publicity.

Kept in the news by none other than Trump himself with his tweets and retweets.

Precisely, it's a "celebrity" culture / "reality" TV strategy - sucking the media oxygen from others keeps your "numbers" up with the "converted" / "followers" (exactly what the Twitter term for them implies) in the "popularity contest" polls, despite high negatives. Trump played the "brand" game all his life, so it's not a surprise that he is an active twit-poster.

Here's what Donald Trump thinks about you and himself, in his own words, from his book Art of the Deal (1987) (which he still falsely claims to be "the No. 1 selling business book of all time"):
"The final key to the way I promote, is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts."

From Donald Trump's Blustery 1990 Campaign Against a Wall Street Analyst - B (subscription), by Jonathan R. Laing, 2015 Ocrober 10

Barron's recounts an incident in which the presidential candidate attacked an unknown securities analyst who didn't think the Taj Mahal was a good bet for his clients.

If there were ever a Teflon presidential candidate it would have to be Donald Trump. He has not only gotten away with insulting many of his fellow aspirants for the GOP nomination, ..... < snip > but the moves have added to his smack-down, reality TV popularity with a large segment of the American Public.

Perhaps his constant self-preening and simplistic policy ideas delivered with country-club locker room bravado will wear thin with the electorate as the campaign drags on. ..... < snip > ..... But Trump continues to run ahead in almost all of the major Republican polls, testament to voter disgust over the dysfunction in Washington and distrust of politicians in general.

Barron's isn't going to join the many attempted media takedowns of Trump by unearthing new details about his business and personal life. They, so far, have only seemed to add to his celebrity and popularity.

But we would like to revisit an incident dating back to the early-1990s that, we feel, reflects on his character. That was when he unleashed a brutal personal attack on an obscure gaming-securities analyst, Marvin Roffman, who toiled for a midsize Philadelphia brokerage house, Janney Montgomery Scott, leading to Roffman's unceremonious sacking.

Roffman's sin was to express skepticism about the financial prospects of Trump's Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, N.J., to The Wall Street Journal just prior to its opening April 4, 1990. ..... < snip >

..... He'd been sounding warnings on the giant casino ever since the Trump entity issued $675 million in junk bonds at an interest rate of 14% so construction could be finished. For a time in early-1990, the glitz of the project (Trump's publicists dubbed it the "Eighth Wonder of the World") and the magic of the Trump name helped drive the bonds' price to be valued at 101 cents on the dollar.

But Roffman had been advising investors to sell the bonds virtually from their date of issue all the way up to his firing, when the bonds had sunk to around 80. He reasoned that the Taj couldn't earn enough revenue to cover the interest.

And he proved right. The Taj defaulted on its first interest payment in October 1990, driving the bonds' price down into the 20s. This pushed the Taj into filing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization the following spring.

This was the first of four bankruptcies that Trump casino-related entities filed over the next two decades. And at least in this instance, more folks suffered than just a bunch of big institutional lenders, branded by Trump in the August Republican debate as a bunch of "total killers," who by implication deserved their losses. In fact, many of the Taj bonds were owned by the general public via high-yield bond funds. Asked about the bankruptcies in a recent debate, Trump explained that "hundreds of companies" have gone through the same legal process and that he'd "used the law four times and made a tremendous thing. I'm in business. I did a very good job."
..... < snip >

..... Trump expressed "outrage" at Roffman's disparaging remarks about the Taj and said that he'd long considered Roffman "an unguided missle (sic)" as an analyst. Trump added that he was "planning to institue (sic) a major lawsuit against your firm unless Mr. Roffman makes a major public apology or is dismissed." ..... < snip >

It's a very detailed article but long story short, Roffman (who worked for 30 years as a Wall Street analyst) was made to write a fawning, humiliating and groveling letter of apology to Trump, which was not enough for Trump, because Roffman didn't quite "endorse" the Trump Taj Mahal project, rather only expressed the "hope" rather than "every expectation" that Taj would succeed "and be very profitable." So Trump demanded that Roffman revised the letter using Trump's words, because he wanted to publish it and make Roffman's humiliation public, as well as bolster Trump Taj Mahal's "investability." Roffman couldn't possibly agree to that because he felt he would disavow everything he has written before about casino's prospects and betray the potential investors in what he felt was going to be a colossal failure. Since there was no other way he could appease Trump any more, he sent a fax to Donald retracting his apology. The next day he was fired from the firm.

His reputation besmearched and prospects for finding another job in the industry where he spent 30 years being slim, Roffman filed for arbitration at NYSE for wrongful discharge against his former employer. At the same time he filed a lawsuit against Trump, seeking $2M and punitive damages, in federal court in Philadelphia, charging him with defamation and interference with employment contract by way of threatening legal action against employer.

At that point even his personal life apparently became a "fair game" — at one time the Philadelphia police contacted him about neighbors' reporting that they saw people going through his garbage cans.

Eventually, in March of the following year, NYSE arbitration resulted in award of $750,000. And in July, Trump settled with Roffman for an undisclosed amount, subject to non-disclosure clause, just before the case was scheduled to go to trial.

Roffman, who is now 76, wealthy and retired after starting and running a financial advisory firm, recollects: "... the hell he subjected me to in 1990, sliming my reputation so much that I got fired and couldn't find another job as an analyst. He acted viciously towards me because, I guess, he felt that I had personally attacked his brand. His image is all-important to him."

Regarding Trump's business "successes," several people calculated and commented that if he just left his inheritence in the form of real estate or invested the equivalent of that entire amount in the S&P 500 over the years since, he would be richer today than he claims he is.

That's not surprising either, this post recounts his many failures in business based on nothing but his celebrity name: Jeffrey Sonnenfeld: Why I Still Think Fiorina Was a Terrible CEO - FR, post #43, 2015 September 21

BTW, Jeffrey A Sonnenberg, a "progressive" Yale professor, which Trump occasionally quotes, is completely in the tank for Trump for all his "progressive" views:

From What Can We Learn from Trump? - Yale, by Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, Jacob S. Hacker, 2015 September 15

Q: You study politics and leadership. Donald Trump is right now at the center of discussion in those fields. Is there something you take away from meeting someone like that in person and seeing the differences between the actual human being and the various projections?
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld: You absolutely do. You see somebody who is selling an image. I would say that is a core aspect of leadership that you see across many fields, whether it's Sam Zell, who elected to create an image of the rebel without a cause look of the 1950s, versus the Averell Harriman look for Steve Schwarzman. I don't really think that Tommy spends a lot of time in the hood, or Ralph really plays polo. And Martha, when you get to the backstage of her true life, she's hardly the doyenne of domestic tranquility. But they all create an image.
Trump is masterful at creating what that image is, and living that life, and he knows that it doesn't just happen on its own. You need to fuel it.
It's something that Jimmy Carter never understood — as a virtue and as a failing. As a virtue, there was a certain humility about Carter with the people's inauguration and carrying his own bags. A lot of folks wanted the kind of aura that Ronald Reagan projected. They want the sense of heroic stature, a leader who projects an image larger than the rest of us. We hope that they know something we don't know.
Trump projects a notion of, I'm in charge, I know what's going on, you can relax. Nobody ever called Alexander III of Macedonia "Alexander the Great" until he and his mother invented that whole false lineage to Achilles and Zeus. And Trump somehow instinctively knows that working that image is a critical part of leadership.
And it's a studied maneuver. He is a very disarming personality up close. This will sound like a paradox, but despite all the bravado and grandiosity, there is an authenticity about him when you speak to him in person. He clearly wants to make an impression on everybody, but he cares to know if it works. A truly arrogant person is not that attentive to the audience.
You can feel it in the building, you see it in the elevators, see it in the people that work with him, that they're all proud to be there. They carry themselves with a sense of mission. He makes them all feel important. It's quite different than the persona on his now-gone TV show, where he would sit there frowning, lower lip protruding, with that skeptical, show-me attitude. That's anything but the reality of who he is.
Jacob Hacker: One of the things about Trump is that he's really a politician, even before he seriously entered into politics.
Sonnenfeld: That's a really good point.
Hacker: And that is the essence of politics. It's performance as well as authenticity and policy. And Trump is well versed in presenting an image of himself. ..... < snip >
..... Hacker: Yes. But we need candidates who have policy positions grounded in evidence and who have thought seriously about challenges of public leadership. And so far Trump really does not have many established positions. Most of his policy platform is around immigration, where his position is both completely unrealistic and completely offensive.
He has so far benefited enormously from the fact that he's the story himself. And the degree of press coverage of him is truly remarkable. He basically is getting more coverage than all the other Republican candidates combined.
The people who study politics know that the odds are very much against him. But I do think he's likely going to have a big effect on the Republicans. Initially his effect has been to push many of the other leaders to the right on immigration, Scott Walker most notably.
Sonnenfeld: And now a progressive position on taxation. ..... < snip >

Donald Trump