Two weeks ago, another Trump business went down in flames. Caught in the whirlpool of her father’s presidency, with major department stores and other retail distributors continuing to drop her brand under pressure from consumer boycotts here and in Canada, daughter Ivanka shut down her line of clothes. This should have surprised no one. When it comes to her family, it’s the oldest story in the world. Think of it this way: Donald Trump’s greatest con in election 2016 was to convince a majority of Americans (and they remain convinced) that he was a “successful businessman.”

Here’s a simple portrait of his business acumen, as Michael Kruse summed it up at Politico last year:

“He flopped as an owner of a professional football team, effectively killing not only his own franchise but the league as a whole… He bankrupted his casinos five times over the course of nearly 20 years. His eponymous airline existed for less than three years and ended up almost a quarter of a billion dollars in debt. And he has slapped his surname on a practically never-ending sequence of duds and scams (Trump Ice bottled water, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump University — for which he settled a class-action fraud lawsuit earlier this year for $25 million).”

And Kruse didn’t even mention The Donald’s sixth bankruptcy, the one he filed for the debt-ridden Plaza Hotel in 1992.

But I don’t want to imply that Donald Trump wasn’t successful. He has a skill that needs to be understood, if you want to grasp the nature of his presidency. You can see it in his five Atlantic City casino bankruptcies. They proved to be business disasters, but as the New York Times reported, his true skill was in jumping ship, money in hand, and leaving his financial catastrophes in the laps of “investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.” Think of this as his “art.” (It will undoubtedly be his daughter’s, too.) And as you read the latest piece by TomDispatch regular Nomi Prins, author most recently of Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, keep that art of his in mind. Right now, the economy is popping along at an “amazing” 4.1% growth rate for this last quarter and he’s a “successful” businessman-president. But when those bills start coming due (as Prins suggests today), when those bankruptcies start coming in, count on one thing — call it the art of the Trump — he and his family will jump ship, money in hand, and the rest of us will be left holding the bag.

• The Entropy Wars
  Five Financial Uncertainties of 2018 (So Far)
  Nomi Prins • August 2, 2018 • 2,800 Words