Donald Trump: Vision emerges of empty Trump hotels

Donald Trump’s time in the White House could hurt his business significantly, with new vision emerging of an eerily empty Trump hotel.

Over the last five years, Donald Trump repeatedly bragged to world leaders, reporters, and basically anyone else who would listen about the quality of his hotels.

“I have a lot of hotels all over the place, and people, they use them because they’re the best,” the 74-year-old told reporters in 2019.

“We haven’t found anything that could even come close to competing with it,” he gloated of his Florida resorts to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But now, in his second week post-presidency, the cost of the self-described billionaire’s time in the Oval Office on his businesses has been revealed.

Vision emerged this week of the famed Trump International Hotel’s lobby in Washington D.C. – once brimming with lobbyists, White House officials and Trump supporters – now eerily vacant.

In typical Trump form, the hotel’s manager spoke in hyperbole when questioned by The New York Timesover the empty space – which has a 625 person capacity, yet held only eight guests – insisting they are “doing very well” and “are looking forward to welcoming many travellers back to D.C. over the next few months”.

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Donald Trump, along with his children Eric, Donald Jr and Ivanka, breaking ground at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. in July, 2014. Picture: Paul Morigi/WireImage

But a financial disclosure report released last week by The New York Timesshowed the Trump hotel in Washington had suffered a 63 per cent decline in revenue, dropping to $US15.1 million ($A19.7 million).

While his son, Eric Trump, who serves as executive vice president of the Trump Organisation, attributed the revenue loss to COVID-19 and policies in the city that have the closure of the hotel’s restaurants and bars, even before the pandemic many of his resorts were bleeding millions of dollars a year.

Mr Trump had “burned through” much of his cash and easy-to-sell assets, yet personally guaranteed repayment of a $US100 million ($A131 million) loan on Trump Tower next year; $US125 million ($A164 million) on his Doral golf resort in Florida in 2023; and $US170 million ($A223 million) on Washington’s Trump International Hotel in 2024.

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Marine One with Donald and Melania Trump passes the Trump International Hotel as it departs the White House for the last time. Picture: Olivier Douliery/Pool/AFP

Members of Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort are also fleeing. Picture: Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP

The hotel in Washington isn’t the only venue paying the price of the Trump presidency. Once-loyal members of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida have fled since Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, shedding themselves of any connection to the former leader just as he arrived there.

“It’s a very dispirited place,” historian and author of Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace, Laurence Leamer, told MSNBC over the weekend.

He added members are “not concerned about politics and they said the food is no good”.

“It’s a sad place,” he said. “It’s not what it was.”

Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel recounted a dinner at the club before Mr Trump became president on The Ringer’s The Bill Simmons Podcast, describing it as covered in photos of its owner and “just quiet and a terrible place”.

“Even here, people don’t like him,” Mr Leamer said of Palm Beach’s residents – many of whom voted for Mr Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in hopes of lower taxes and a booming stock market.

“It’s just another measure of how his power has declined.”

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Mr Trump is ‘so reputationally toxic that a lot of financial institutions won’t want to do business with him’, one Georgetown professor said. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

While in the past Mr Trump could pull himself out of similar binds by banking on his mainstream marketability and television stardom, the chaotic, final months of his presidency have eroded any of the charm or gravitas he once held.

“Donald Trump will be remembered as the first president to be impeached twice,” Matthew Continetti, journalist fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the BBC.

“He fed the myth that the election was stolen, summoned his supporters to Washington to protest the certification of the Electoral College vote, told them that only through strength could they take back their country, and stood by as they stormed the US Capitol and interfered in the operation of constitutional government.

“When historians write about his presidency, they will do so through the lens of the riot.”

Had he “followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader”, Continetti said.

But the “attack on democracy” that was January 6 – when Mr Trump’s reputation was already on a knife’s edge – saw his “last-ditch lenders vow to cut him off”.

As Georgetown University’s Professor Adam J Levinton, who focuses on finance and bankruptcy, told The Times, “Trump is so reputationally toxic that a lot of financial institutions won’t want to do business with him.”