As it turns out, carrying on with a campaign of hatred against marginalized communities while in office as president of the United States isn’t exactly good for business. In recent days, it’s emerged that President Donald Trump’s business the Trump Organization had been removing and concealing instances of Trump’s name at two ice skating rinks he owns in New York City. Although removing Trump’s name from his businesses has happened numerous times before while he’s been in office, ordinarily it’s been other partners or new owners doing the removal.
In this case, the two rinks in question include Wollman Rink in the area of the southern part of Central Park and Lasker Rink around the park’s northern side. At these locales, Trump’s name has disappeared from the boards around the inside edge of the rink, and in at least one case, an instance of the president’s name above a desk where visitors can rent ice skates has been covered up with a white tarp, although the “T” is apparently still visible. Still — talk about desperation. They didn’t even wait until they had some more lasting means to accomplish the concealment and removal.
The city — from whom Trump took over the rinks after they’d been working on renovating them in the 1980s — insists that the signage change wasn’t their idea. Rather, parks department spokeswoman Crystal Howard notes simply:
‘The Trump organization notified us in late August that they planned to change the on-rink branding.’
Removing Trump’s name from his own business is certainly a change!
Other notable removals have ranged from a property in Panama where other stakeholders forcibly ejected Trump staff from the building to buildings in the Manhattan area where residents voted to remove the “Trump Place” signage from their buildings. In another case, the Trump Organization itself tried to branch out and launch two new “discount” or whatever hotel chains that did not bear the Trump name, but those didn’t work out, and leaders Eric and Donald Trump Jr. eventually formally pulled the plug on that project.
Trump’s businesses overall have been struggling while he’s been in office. The Trump Doral resort in the Miami area’s income fell off a cliff. Net income there declined by a full 69 percent going from 2015 to 2017. Trump has somewhat acknowledged these trends, although he’s vastly inflated the amount of money he’s losing, claiming it’s in the billions when it’s unclear he even has that to lose in the first place. The cavernous income trends give a reason why Trump was previously so insistent on holding next year’s G7 summit of world leaders there, despite Trump and his cronies’ false claims he’d do it without earning money.
Trump insists that there’s no issue to be seen here, taking the position of his former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who this week on Fox News insisted, in these words:
‘Abuse of power is not a crime!’
What stance could better define the Trump administration as a whole at this point, really? The corruption continues!
