Trump TV: The Latest In Donald Trump’s Long Line Of Failed Businesses?

While the rest of us were watching the election, Donald Trump’s people took to the Internet to launch Trump TV, proving to everyone who’d been watching the election for the past nearly two years that this is what his plan was all along and by the way, I called it about Trump TV months ago right here on this very site, and which was confirmed by The New York Times when it was revealed that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was in the early phases of shopping a Trump TV network to cable providers. Even Trump’s campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, had no choice but to admit that his boss was little more than a television network owner in the making, though he hedged his claims by simply adding that “Trump is an entrepreneur.”

An entrepreneur, indeed. While there’s no telling what the potential success of Trump TV will be (though I’m sure that, if any of his followers could think about it for any period of time, they’d feel incredibly played by a guy who simply wanted them to buy a subscription to his channel), I figure that Trump TV had about as much chance of succeeding as the rest of his businesses.

You know, his businesses like:

1. Trump Magazine

This was actually the third time that Trump had tried to launch a magazine. Prior to seeing a potential cash cow in Trump TV, The New York Daily News reported about Trump Magazine, which was launched in 2007 after being called Trump Style, and then, Trump World, in the 1980’s and 1990’s, respectively. Catering to the luxury market, Trump couldn’t have picked a worse time to launch his magazine. The fiscal crisis would happen less than two years later, and Trump Magazine closed its doors right behind it.

2. Trump Steaks

We live in a country where the phrase “Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner” is a thing. We live in a country whose citizens clog their arteries with animal fats as a national pastime. And yet, future Trump TV “mogul” Donald Trump couldn’t sell steaks to Americans. That’s basically the summary of Trump Steaks, and we, the nation, only found out about it when he filed bankruptcy for the second time, according to ThinkProgress. Calling it a “bad business idea,” Sharper Image CEO Jerry Levin later admitted that the company hadn’t sold $50,000 worth of steaks. Meanwhile, according to the bankruptcy filing, Trump owed the company who provided the steaks more than $700,000.

https://youtu.be/LyONt_ZH_aw

3. Trump Airlines

Sadly, I’m old enough to remember this travesty. My aunt worked for Eastern Airlines prior to continuing on with British Airways, where she’s remained for more than 30 years. Prior to deciding he could be a television mogul with Trump TV, Donald Trump decided he could be an airline mogul with Trump Airlines. According to The New York Times, Donald Trump took out a $245 million loan, it was the 1980’s, and this excess was expected and respected, to secure the planes and the routes of Eastern Airlines when it went belly-up in 1988. These garish planes were adorned with gold bathrooms and painted black with Trump’s logo on the side. Less than two years later, being unable to pay the interest on the loan, let alone the principal, Trump defaulted on the loan and surrendered ownership of the airline to his creditors.

And those are just three of many examples of Donald Trump’s failed businesses. I haven’t even gotten into the failures of the Trump line of beverages, the Trump Card TV game show (I’m old enough to remember that, too), Trump Mortgages, Trump: The Board Game, the Trump casinos (on which he has filed bankruptcy three times on the properties alone), the GoTrump travel website (which Travelocity absolutely trounced), Trump’s Internet company, and the Trump Tower in Tampa which proved, if nothing else, how predatory he really is on the poor.

He is a man that has demonstrated, through words and actions, that he is not a man “of the people.” He’s a spoiled rich kid who got his business money from daddy, was universally despised until The Apprentice (and then, he was universally laughed at), bankrupted himself numerous times, failed at countless companies, refused to pay his workers, hired undocumented workers almost exclusively (because they were “cheaper”), assaulted women and laughed about it, cheated on his first wife with his second wife and his second wife with his third wife, was an absentee father unless his children wanted to follow him into “business,” and now is trying to destroy the entire democratic process of this country by inciting fear, hate, and violence…and in the end, this entire campaign was nothing more than an international platform for him to promote his noxious Trump TV.

Whenever I find myself wondering how I can live in a country where Trump TV can be a thing and Donald Trump can actually find supporters for his proposed presidency after everything this man has done to hurt the average American, I remind myself that I live in a country where people need a commercial reminding them to tell their kids not to eat laundry soap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JJ-Q45-k30

[Featured Image by Alex Wong/Getty Images]