No. I have owned my own businesses for 30 years, and never once had to resort to bankruptcy laws. As a businessman and investor, I understand the need for the resort to bankruptcy laws. But it still represents a violation of promises made.
In Chapter 7 liquidation, promises to creditors are broken, but the problem is that liabilities far exceed assets, and the business is often no longer a going concern, so not even the shares of the business have any value. The court liquidates the remaining assets, and pays off the creditors as best it can, usually for pennies on the dollar.
And the owners of the business, their investment in the business, their accumulated equty, capital investment, is wiped out. They get noting.
In trump’s case he didn’t use Chapter 7. He used the chapter for business reorganization. This meant that the businesses were still a going concern, and likely, had he liquidated them, he could have paid off the bond holders and note holders with hard cash at a substantial fraction of face value. Instead,he persuaded the creditors and the bankruptcy judge to allow him to break his promise to pay the creditors back with cold hard cash, wipe out the debt, in exchange for pieces of paper saying they were now shareholders in his businesses, the ones that were already declining in value so much that he had to break his promise to pay them back in cash.
And, instead of being wiped out, as in a Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy, in some of these deals he got to keep significant equity in the businesses. Sweet deal. He gets to eliminate billions in debt and still gets to keep a chunk of the business.