Like a gilded house of cards, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign rests delicately on the premise that he is a benevolent job creator, a generous billionaire who has employed thousands of people, and is thus qualified to set U.S. economic policy and re-write trade deals. But a newly reported history of his dealings with the people he actually employed reveals that the real-estate mogul routinely stiffed workers in the same way he has gloated about bailing on his own casinos and bragged about screwing over bondholders.
According to a USA Today investigation, Trump has received at least 3,500 official complaints for failing to pay employees, contractors, and other business affiliates money owed. The paper also found at least 60 lawsuits, 24 instances where Trump failed to pay overtime and minimum wage, and countless out-of-court settlements. Among those to whom Trump owed money, according to USA Today: dishwashers, bartenders, painters, real-estate brokers, and ironically, even his own lawyers. In 1990, a casino commission audit of the Trump Taj Mahal, then about to open, revealed that Trump owed an astounding $69.5 million to 253 subcontractors. Marty Rosenberg, the owner of a plate glass company who was owed $1.5 million, said that he was only able to recover 70 cents on the dollar for his work, and that he was one of the lucky ones. “Yes, there were a lot of other companies. . . Yes, some did not survive,” he told USA Today.
Not all of the incidents highlighted by USA Today are in the past, either. The paper found at least two class-action lawsuits settled as recently as two months ago: one where 48 servers at his Miami golf resort alleged that he failed to pay them overtime, and one where a judge ordered foreclosure of Trump’s Doral golf course if the resort did not pay a Florida painter the $30,000 he was owed.
Trump’s history reveals a specific pattern whereby he and his businesses would first claim that a contractor’s work was subpar, and then refuse to pay for it. If he was faced with a lawsuit, Trump would either settle out of court, or, more often than not, threaten to drag out the legal process for as long as he could, making it financially unfeasible for a small, independent business to successfully litigate a claim.
Trump and his daughter Ivanka defended themselves to USA Today, saying either that the lawsuits were so long ago that they could not remember, or that the contractors were trying to conceal their shoddy work, or that these complaints were but a minute fraction of Trump’s dealings with contractors throughout the decades. “We pay everybody what they’re supposed to be paid, and we pay everybody on time,” he said. “And we employ thousands and thousands of people. OK?”
