Years ago, a reporter friend of ours was gathering information for a book he planned to write about Donald Trump.  It was during the 1990-91 recession, and even though Trump was still riding high, we told our friend to save the final chapter for a sensational bankruptcy. A few years earlier, SPY magazine had similarly predicted that Trump’s empire would crumble and that we would soon hear the last from the “short-fingered vulgarian.” Trump returned fire, asserting that it was SPY, not he, that was doomed, and although this proved correct, the magazine survived just long enough to produce a memorable hatchet job that, in dissecting several of his business deals, revealed Trump to be far less astute than he would have the world believe.

Remember, this is a guy who once steered an Atlantic City casino –  which is to say, a money machine – into bankruptcy.  Now, with recession practically upon us, we would be surprised if that episode turns out to have been much more than a warm-up for what’s coming. For, as America’s most promiscuous developer and promoter of residential high-rises, The Donald is – there is no getting around it – one dead duck. His condos, unfortunately for him, are everywhere you’d care to look:  Miami, Chicago, New  York – although no longer in Tampa, where a $300 million venture with his name on it changed sponsorship after a flurry of lawsuits.

Evasions

Trump has been characteristically dismissive of anyone who would deign to point out how overextended he is in a soft and still weakening U.S. real estate market.  Although a half-dozen towering condos under construction are tied to the man, he claims to have little money of his own in them.  While this evasion fits his modus operandi, we would be shocked if it turns out that Trump ultimately has not leveraged himself up to his famously simian hairline.

That doesn’t mean that when the stock market finally cracks, taking Trump’s real estate empire with it, we expect to see him poised on a ledge high above the streets of Manhattan. He seems too fastidious to end it that way – by going splat, that is, on a gritty New York sidewalk. Nor do we think Trump will ever be truly down and out, since he has come into his own as a reality-TV star, where world-class loathsomeness is a cardinal asset.

And that means that as long as he has a mouth and can use it to make a TV audience believe he’s a somebody, he’ll never technically be broke. Trump has always excelled at repackaging the ordure of his failed business deals so that he walks away with whatever piece of it is still worth something. But this time he’s going to create such a vortex that it will take a fleet of bathyscapes to find any jetsam with salvage value.