Trump's Brand Continues To Deteriorate In The Hotel Business

Trump's idea to go into welfare residential hotels fails

After visiting the never officially opened Trump Tower hotel in Baku, Azerbaijan-- before criminals Trump had partnered with tried burning it down for insurance money-- I fancied myself an expert in Trump's shady hotel business. "Expert" in the sense that I try keeping up on further news about how the business has continued-- like his brand in general-- to fall apart. Yesterday, Steve Eder, Ben Protess and Eric Lipton brought New York Times readers up to date on the continuing collapse. The Trumps blame the "political climate" for their failures.

Remember when they realized that they were dead in the water in normal places for hotels? They decided they would build hotels in backward, rural places where Trump in popular... like in shopping malls in Mississippi... albeit even there with brands that didn't include the now toxic Trump name-- like Scion. That whole idea has now been abandoned. Scion-- and another brand, "American Idea," have been "shelved indefinitely." The Times reported that "As a practical matter, that means calling off just one agreement, in Mississippi, though two years ago the Trump Organization said it had as many as 30 potential deals in the pipeline."

Why, if it was such a good idea as a way of exploiting the "fame" of the president-- albeit illegitimate president-- two years ago, has it been shit-canned today? "The retrenchment comes," writes Eder, Protess and Lipton, "as the company faces growing scrutiny from federal prosecutors and congressional investigators, and as a former employee, Michael Cohen, heads to prison for multiple crimes. With Democrats now in control of the House of Representatives, any new hotel deals could have provided investigative fodder for critics of the president."

The decision to walk away from the hotel plans is the latest and clearest sign of the perils of running a family business whose owner occupies the White House. As Eric Trump and his brother Donald Jr. downsize the Trump Organization’s hotel ambitions, the president has lamented the toll that elected office has taken on the company. “I lost massive amounts of money doing this job,” he told the New York Times in a recent interview. “This is one of the great losers of all time.”

Some of those losses stem from an ethics code that Mr. Trump was encouraged to adopt: It has prevented the company from doing new business abroad during his presidency, halting the global growth that for years brought in millions of dollars in fees. But other wounds have been more directly self-inflicted. In the United States, where the company intended to open the Scion and American Idea hotels, Mr. Trump’s divisive rhetoric and polarizing politics have turned his brand into a target for opponents.

The Trump Organization, which the president continues to own, faced local opposition to potential Scion deals in cities like Dallas and St. Louis. Some potential development partners were also scared away by the prospect of intense media coverage and legal and financial vetting from the company’s outside ethics adviser, people briefed on the matter said.

The people said that as of Thursday the Trump Organization was walking away from more than a dozen potential deals in Washington, D.C., and at least five states.

...[S]ome senior executives at the Trump Organization expressed concern that expanding the hotel operation could backfire and reflect poorly on the president, according to the people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it. The executives worried that any potential new deals could lead to accusations that the company-- and its owner-- were profiting from the presidency.

In late 2017, Eric Trump foreshadowed a shift in strategy, indicating in an interview that the company would concentrate on its existing golf, real estate and hotel properties.

“If we have to take a break for an eight-year period of time or a four-year period, then it is what it is,” he said, referring to new business opportunities.

At the outset of the presidency, Mr. Trump’s sons inherited a company that was coming off a decade of growth, having opened a slate of golf courses and luxury hotels from Chicago to Las Vegas. Marketing deals put the Trump name on properties around the world, as well as on suits, mattresses and a host of other products.

The presidency proved to be a game changer.

The Trump name became so toxic in some places that the company was paid to remove it from hotels in Toronto and New York. The majority owner of the Trump hotel in Panama took a more drastic step, ordering the T-R-U-M-P letters pried off the property with a crowbar.

In the last two years, the company has also been under scrutiny from federal investigators and Democrats in Congress, particularly after Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to arranging hush money payments during the presidential campaign to two women who said they had had affairs with Mr. Trump. The Trump Organization reimbursed Mr. Cohen for one of those payments, and is itself a focus of the ongoing investigation.

The company has also faced a torrent of negative media coverage, most recently over revelations, first reported in The Times about its employment of undocumented workers. The reports, which prompted a review of its properties’ staffs and the firing of more than two dozen workers, came at a time when Mr. Trump was denouncing illegal immigration as a threat to national security.

Still, the presidency has not put a damper on all aspects of Mr. Trump’s business. Some international deals that were in the works before the election have moved forward, including a Trump-branded hotel in Vancouver and a golf course in Dubai that opened in early 2017, and other plans that are still underway in India, Uruguay and the Philippines.

The Trump International Hotel in Washington, which opened in 2016, has surpassed expectations, with its lobby regularly packed with Republican officials and operatives. It has also caused headaches for the company, having prompted lawsuits claiming that Mr. Trump is illegally profiting from the presidency. Two cases now working their way through the courts focus on whether patrons of his hotels hail from overseas or state governments, a potential violation of the emoluments clauses of the Constitution.

Mr. Trump brushed off those concerns in the recent interview with The Times, suggesting that any new business dealings were more than offset by lost opportunities. During the presidential campaign, about six months before his surprising victory, Mr. Trump told The Times that he had about 120 deals in the pipeline. His executives had been working on hotel projects across the globe, including in Israel, Saudi Arabia and China.

After the election, the self-imposed prohibition on new development in foreign countries caused the Trump Organization to cancel some proposed deals and its pipeline to rapidly shrink, the company has said. Just before taking office, Mr. Trump said his company had turned down a potentially lucrative deal in Dubai.

Closer to home, where fewer restrictions applied, the company focused on the prospect of new hotel lines in cities such as Cincinnati, Nashville and Valley Forge, Pa.

The hotels were intended to target an audience different from the patrons of the existing five-star Trump properties. The Scion, a four-star line, would be a hipper boutique option. American Idea, a chain of budget-friendly hotels, would feature hints of Americana. Scion was announced before Mr. Trump’s election, and the concept for American Idea materialized after the Trumps spotted an opportunity during the campaign to expand into farther-flung markets with fewer hotel options.

Potential partners, though, were put under a microscope.

The company aborted a Scion deal that was under discussion in Dallas, after The Times reported that the prospective partner had ties to Russia and Kazakhstan and the Trumps’ outside ethics adviser raised questions about the potential deal. The Times also reported that the Chawlas, the partners in Mississippi, had turned to the state government for millions of dollars in support through a tax rebate program.

New business activity slowed even further last year, and the company announced no new hotel deals. The Trump Organization briefly managed a Livingston, N.J., hotel owned by the family of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, and were in talks to open a Scion on the Jersey Shore that the Kushners would have owned.

Still... absolutely sounds like a great SNL cold-opening skit. Perhaps the Trumps, the Chawlas and other partners from parts of the world where gangsters dominate the economy can try their hand at by-the-hour motels. Sounds right up Trump's alley.

Trump's Toxic Brand Is Now Less Than Worthless

Every time another Trump property is called out for being a major hub or criminal activity-- like in Baku and more recently, Panama City, the Trump's go to great lengths to explain that they don't own the hub and they don't know anything about it... all they do is rent the building Trump's name. In fact, all his bullshit about being a multibillionaire was always based on the "value" of his name as a brand. Before he moved into the White House, he owned about $940 million in real stuff you can sell but the $10 billion dollar claims about his worth were all based on his brand being worth any random number of billions of dollars.

Well, it turns out the nearly bankrupt Trump Soho is paying him for his name--paying him to take it down and end any association between the hotel and the toxic Trump brand. Back in April we mentioned that the Trump Soho's sushi restaurant, Koi, shut down. Grubstreet explained that "his controversial campaign’s harsh rhetoric and administration’s agenda have made many potential customers uneasy about giving their business to Trump’s properties. Residents of Manhattan’s Trump Place successfully changed their property’s name, two celebrity chefs famously backed out of D.C.’s Trump International Hotel and others were unwilling to replace them, and Trump’s new line of hotels won’t bear his name. Then last December, a month after three NBA teams announced they wouldn’t stay at his hotels, members of the Cleveland Cavaliers (including Black Lives Matter supporter LeBron James) refused to stay at the Trump Soho. Now, that hotel’s restaurant operator, Koi, an international chainlet of sushi spots for beautiful people, is shuttering its outpost there. But this isn’t a closing as usual. It’s collateral damage from the rise of Trump." Trump's name will come off the hotel and the Trump Organization will cease managing the property.

Trump SoHo has emerged as one of the clearest examples of how Trump's divisive politics have redefined his luxury hotel and real estate company, which spent years courting upscale customers in liberal urban centers where he is now deeply unpopular.

...The deal to remove the Trump name was made with the Trump SoHo condominium board and the property's majority owner, CIM Group, a California-based real estate investment firm. The hotel is divided into condominiums whose owners allowed them to be rented out as hotel rooms.

"We recognize and sincerely appreciate [the Trump Organization's] contributions to this exceptional asset," Bill Doak, CIM Group's first vice president of hotels, said in a statement.

The release did not specify what the building would be renamed or who would run it. Trump Organization and CIM Group officials declined to answer questions about the reasons for the move.

Officials described the transaction as a "buyout" but did not specify whether any money changed hands between the Trump Organization and the building's owners. The president's business now receives 5.75 percent of the hotel's operating revenue as a management fee, according to company documents posted online by Reuters.

This will be the third time since Trump's election that his name has been removed from a building. In July, the Trump name was taken off the Trump International Hotel in Toronto after the property's owner reached a similar buyout deal. The hotel will be reopened as a St. Regis, according to the Toronto Star.

And last year, the owners of three Trump Place apartment buildings in New York announced that those properties would be renamed after tenant complaints. Trump's company no longer had a business relationship with the buildings.

...[T]he Trump Organization has seen greens-fee revenue fall at its golf courses in Los Angeles and the Bronx, and it has lost dozens of customers who rented out banquet rooms for parties or golf courses for charity tournaments.

One of the biggest changes has happened at Mar-a-Lago, the president's for-profit social club, which doubles as the "winter White House" in Palm Beach, Florida. Last summer, 19 charities canceled galas or other fundraisers they had planned for this winter at Mar-a-Lago, costing the Trump Organization hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

The SoHo hotel was once a jewel of the Trump empire. Opened in 2010, it offered Hudson River views, a spa named after Ivanka Trump and a location in one of New York's most fashionable neighborhoods. Trump promoted the property on his reality show The Apprentice.



In 2012, prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney's office scrutinized the property's development as part of an investigation into whether Trump's children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. committed fraud by misleading condo buyers about the project, according to a report last month from ProPublica, WNYC and the New Yorker. District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. decided not to pursue charges.

In its early days, the hotel attracted Hollywood celebrities and many NBA teams. "When I stay here in New York, I'm at the Trump SoHo," Oklahoma City Thunder star Russell Westbrook told GQ in 2014, saying the hotel's luxe lobby had inspired his fashion designs.

But by this year, at least 11 of the 12 NBA teams that previously stayed at Trump SoHo had quit. Some cited logistical reasons. Others said they could not stay at a hotel with Trump's name on it.

"The president has seemingly made a point of dividing us as best he can," Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr told the Washington Post in an interview earlier this year. His team quit using Trump SoHo in 2016. "He continually offends people, and so people don't want to stay at his hotel," Kerr said. "It's pretty simple."

Trump SoHo hotel rates have fallen dramatically. Rooms are routinely offered online for below $300 a night. Luxury Manhattan hotels took in an average daily rate of $451 in the second quarter of this year, according to the accounting and consulting firm PWC.

The Trump Organization does have plans to expand its hotel business, targeting areas where Trump's political brand is more popular.

Those plans include two new, less-expensive brands of hotels called Scion and American Idea. But since those brands were announced in June, progress has been slow. The three discount hotels that were supposed to start the American Idea brand are still operating under their old names.

And at the site chosen for the first Scion hotel, in Cleveland, Mississippi, construction stopped weeks ago while Trump Organization and its partners reworked plans.

Another Trump Property Tarred With His Toxic Name Is Forced To Close-- Maybe Koi Could Reopen In Clay Co, Kentucky

I bet folks in McKee, Kentucky would LOVE a Trump-branded something in their town of 800. This one is available for moving

Just under a year ago I spent some time in Azerbaijan, mostly in Baku, the capital city. I went to see Trump Tower, which had opened and closed in a matter of days, and blogged about it a bit. Trump's Mafia business partners, the Mammadovs (AKA the Coreleones of the Caspian), were stuck holding the bag when the CIA insisted GOP nominee Trump extricate himself and Ivanka from a full-time criminal enterprise that was working as money launderers for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. After it was shuttered, people wondered in Baku wondered if it would be rebranded with a less toxic name-- like Motel 6-- or if the Mammadovs would just wait it out and see if Trump's name became less toxic or even, alluring on some level. It didn't and they tried to burn it down.

Today it's still standing-- empty and forlorn-- in a sketchy Baku neighborhood, sucking money. It's just there, all 33 stories that you can see from almost anywhere in the city. The concierge from a much more luxurious Baku hotel told me Trump's name is so toxic in Azerbaijan that its not likely the hotel will ever open. The Trump Organization has removed it from its website-- disappeared; never happened.

This week another Trump property succumbed to... all things Trump. The high end sushi restaurant at Trump Soho, Koi, shut down because of a lack of business. According to GrubStreet, "his controversial campaign’s harsh rhetoric and administration’s agenda have made many potential customers uneasy about giving their business to Trump’s properties. Residents of Manhattan’s Trump Place successfully changed their property’s name, two celebrity chefs famously backed out of D.C.’s Trump International Hotel and others were unwilling to replace them, and Trump’s new line of hotels won’t bear his name. Then last December, a month after three NBA teams announced they wouldn’t stay at his hotels, members of the Cleveland Cavaliers (including Black Lives Matter supporter LeBron James) refused to stay at the Trump Soho. Now, that hotel’s restaurant operator, Koi, an international chainlet of sushi spots for beautiful people, is shuttering its outpost there. But this isn’t a closing as usual. It’s collateral damage from the rise of Trump." [By the way, folks in Clay County, Kentucky might think of sushi as bait but they only gave Hillary 11% of their vote last year. Sounds like a perfect place for Uday and Kusay to open Trump-branded properties... or Jackson County, where Trump won 88.9% of the vote, but where everyone is a prescription drug zombie.]

“Obviously, the restaurant is closing because business is down. I don’t think anyone would volunteer to close a business if they were making money,” Suzanne Chou, Koi Group’s general counsel, says with a laugh. “Beyond that, I would prefer not to speculate as to why, but obviously since the election it’s gone down.”

A California import, Koi is a familiar style of pan-Asian restaurant: clubby, expensive, and popular with celebrities and professional athletes. It’s not in any food snob’s regular rotation, but the Los Angeles original (branches have opened in Bangkok, Las Vegas, and Dubai) has long been a destination for the rich and famous. When the Soho location opened in 2012, Forbes Travel Guide wrote, “where there’s a Koi dish, there’s a celebrity.” Though Chou declined to delve specifically into how much business had gone down, Koi staffers say that the election has had an impact on the restaurant’s bottom line, and their paychecks.

Now, references to the downtown branch have been scrubbed from both the Koi Trump Soho’s homepages. A limited menu (“30 to 40 percent of what we used to carry,” the reservationist says) will be served until June 18, when Koi and menu items like “She’s So LA” rolls will vacate the building for good. No one other locations will close, and Chou says that the group hopes to reopen somewhere else downtown.

“Before Trump won we were doing great. There were a lot of people we had, our regulars, who’d go to the hotel but are not affiliated with Trump,” says Jonathan Grullon, a busser and host who has worked at the restaurant for a year and a half. “And they were saying if he wins, we are not coming here anymore.”

Ricardo Aca, who worked at the restaurant for four years until this February, concurs, noting twice that “the Kardashians stopped coming.” Following the election, Aca says that business dipped so much that he had to take a second part-time job while he was still working there. As a server in the hotel’s Koi-managed lounge, he saw his hourly earnings fall from about $20 to $15 an hour. And Grullon says he’s making almost $200 dollars less each week and that he, too, has had to get a second job.

According to Grullon, Koi now has just ten service employees, including those in the kitchen. Some staff started walking away once business evaporated, and now that news of the closing is public, more have started to leave. The dining room is often 30 to 40 percent full and never gets past 50 to 60 percent capacity. During lunch, they’ll serve fewer than 30 people in a restaurant that can seat 140.

“We’ve been getting cut all the time. There is no reason for us to be there,” Grullon says. “They say they’re going to close June 18, but I think it’s going to be sooner.”

In the meantime, New York’s other location of Koi, near Bryant Park, is still open. In fact, a reservationist at the Soho location offered to book a table uptown instead, saying “it would be a much better experience for you.”

Would Trump Cut Coke With Rat Poison To Make A Nickel If He Was A Drug Dealer? Oh Yes

I’m not kosher; I’ve never tasted vodka and there was never a time in my life that I would have bought something branded “Trump.” The very idea is— and has always been— disgusting. I do eat organic food, however, and I know well about the scam-artists who claim something is organic, usually more attractive to discerning customers (as well as more expensive), when it isn’t organic at all. That;’s illegal. Shady merchants do it anyway… shady merchants like Trump. Only he doesn’t do it with stuff he claims is organic. The self-professed “great friend of Israel” does it with stuff he claims is kosher.

In 2011 Trump’s horrible brand of vodka, Trump Vodka went belly up— in the U.S. But not in Israel. There it sells, falsely labeled “kosher.” He’s fucking with something religious people— he’s never respected anyone’s religion, regardless of creed— take very seriously. And he got caught, re-enforcing his reputation as a lowlife scumbag.

The Chief Rabbinate of Israel has ordered bottles of Trump Vodka taken off shop shelves across the country amid fears one batch was not officially labelled as kosher-compliant.

In a statement issued earlier this week, the Chief Rabbinate, which must approve all food imports into the country regardless of whether it has been certified as kosher elsewhere, said that one shipment of the now-defunct vodka brand managed to get into Israel without the correct licences, and ordered a recall.

Trump Vodka, which was launched in 2006, was marketed as "the world's finest premium" spirit that would “demand the same respect and inspire the same awe as the international legacy and brand of Donald Trump himself.” It was discontinued in 2011.

The Times of Israel reports that although the gold bottles - which feature the tagline “success distilled”— are now not available anywhere else, they remain popular in Israel during the Jewish holiday Passover.

Trump Vodka is made from potato rather than grain, making it kosher to drink during the eight-day holiday. Passover this year was celebrated in April.

Since a rogue shipment of the vodka, which is sold under licence, did not get authorisation from the Chief Rabbinate’s import division, all bottles with the code L34211120 “should be removed from the shelves,” the authority said.

Flavoured and plain versions of the spirit can be found in the country, as well as Trump energy drinks.

In 2013, a production error meant that some Trump Vodka which was sold in Israel was made from grain rather than potatoes or molasses. Bottles were then sold with labels warning that their contents may not meet kosher requirements, the Jerusalem Post reported.

How Trump Is Planning To Rebound From The Electoral Catastrophe Making His Brand Toxic Worldwide

After winning the nomination in a ridiculous 16 ring circus of the weakest imaginable Republican primary contenders, Trump boasted how he would win deep blue states like New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Connecticut and California. He even wasted time and resources campaigning-- or at least holding his vanity rallies-- in this states. But he's losing all of them by huge margins. Yesterday the Public Policy Institute of California released a poll showing Trump with the lowest numbers in memory for any Republican nominee, just 28%. The only thing even close in the last century was Alf Landon's 31% against FDR in 1936, 80 years ago. Even Romney won 37% of California's votes. A Siena poll in New York last week, showed Trump with 30% and a Farleigh Dickenson poll of New Jersey voters last week had Trump at 40%. The latest poll from Oregon has him at 36% and the latest poll from Connecticut has him at 35%. So much for those predictions. (Trump is doing even worse in Vermont, where he's only polling 22%.)

Yesterday, Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, writing for Businessweek reported that "To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. 'We have three major voter suppression operations under way,' says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are 'super predators' is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls-- particularly in Florida."

Bannon, Mercer, Bossie, Stone and the other neo-Nazis and Alt-right true believers may believe the immense data bank the Trump campaign is amassing in San Antonio will be used to build an even further right and more extreme alternative to the Republican Party, Trump and his family, no doubt see it through the eyes of practiced grifters and swindlers-- a way to turn on a spigot of cash flow. And they may need it. The Trump brand is definitely in the toilet across the globe. This past summer I was visiting Azerbaijan, primarily Baku, I noticed that there was a huge hulking Trump Tower in the middle of the glittering skyline. But the ostentatious new property, heavily promoted by Trump and Ivanka, was empty. In fact, it was closed down, having only opened for a week before firing the entire staff and shutting down the operation. Presumably they'll remove the toxic logo that the local bandits who own the building, the notorious Mammadov family, paid Trump to use, and re-open it under less toxic name-- like Motel 6 Baku. They already tried burning it down for the insurance money. And Baku isn't the only city where the Trump name is keeping hotel rooms empty... even at heavily discounted prices.

The prestigious new hotel in DC that he's always trying to drum up business for is the cheapest 5-star in Washington-- and the most empty. And the Trump Towers in Istanbul, where the president of the country demanded the name be changed, is desperate to sell over a dozen luxury apartments that no one will buy even at very deep discounts.

Property Turkey is privileged to offer to its clients 15 luxury apartments available for sale below market value within Istanbul's prestigious Trump Towers. This is a one-off offer for a limited period only and on a limited number of apartments.

Trump Towers located in between Sisli and Mecidiyekoy is one of Istanbul's landmark mix-use complexes, where residences and commercial units always command a premium. The complex is one of Istanbul's most prestigious.

CNN reported that travel agents and events planners are avoiding the Trump brand entirely. In DC, "room rates also indicate the hotel may be lagging behind its competition. A Tuesday night stay at the Trump hotel was priced at $505 on Hotels.com, more than $200 cheaper than five-star alternatives like the Four Seasons and the Jefferson. Comparable hotels like the downtown Ritz-Carlton and Hay-Adams, meanwhile, had no open rooms." The new hotel "has been the target of protests and vandalism since it opened last month. And its namesake's presidential campaign has made the Trump name awkward at best and toxic at worst for those who specialize in the hotel industry. 'There certainly are people who are concerned about the message they send by spending money in Trump-branded hotels,' said David Loeb, a senior hotel analyst at the Robert W. Baird private equity firm. Brand research studies suggest those concerns are taking hold. A Foursquare analysis showed foot traffic at Trump's hotels, casinos and golf clubs is down 16% this year. And a Young & Rubicam report released Tuesday shows consumers think Trump himself is less fun, trendy and stylish than he was three months ago. That's bad news for Trump, who claims his name is worth more than $3 billion in real estate licensing and branding deals. Industry analysts say that number is exaggerated."

Travel + Leisure doesn't, as a rule, slag off potential advertisers, but the news is all over the hospitality industry: Trump Hotels Ditching Name For New Hotels. I don't know if Trump plans on having Barron run the business, but his new hotel ventures will be called "Scion."

Amidst reports that occupancy rates at Trump Hotels have slipped this election season, the company has announced that new brand hotels will no longer bear the Trump name.

The newest line of luxury hotels, geared towards millennials, will be called Scion, the company said.

...Although Trump Hotels has said the new name has nothing to do with the eponymous businessman’s presidential campaign, empty rooms at the hotels have caused officials “to reduce rates during the peak season," according to New York Magazine.

...According to Hipmunk, bookings at Trump Hotels plummeted 59 percent during the first half of 2016 and data from Foursquare shows a 17 percent drop in foot traffic at Trump properties since June 2015, when the reality TV star announced his presidential bid.

Yesterday Toronto's Financial Post announced what amounts to a bankruptcy for that city's Trump International Hotel & Tower. The Trump Organization licensed Trump's name to the building and manages it.

JCF Capital ULC, a closely held firm, recently bought the construction loan on the 65-story hotel and condominium building, and claims developer Talon International Inc. and related companies defaulted on making payments since last year. JCF Capital is seeking a court-supervised sales process for the property to recoup the outstanding $301 million on the debt, according to court filings made Tuesday under Canada’s bankruptcy and insolvency act.

...The court filing is the latest in the decade-long saga of the building, Trump’s first branded hotel in Canada. Since construction began in 2007, the tower has been subject to lawsuits against Donald Trump’s firm and Talon from investors who say they were duped; a court battle to end Trump’s management agreement; and protests after the U.S. presidential candidate made comments about Mexicans, Muslims, and women during his campaign.

Earlier this year, Talon attempted to sell the property after defaulting on the loan, originally given by Raiffeisen Bank International AG in 2007, the court documents show. JCF Capital acquired the loan on Oct. 3 and sent a notice to Talon twice this month asking for repayment.

The debt matured in December of last year and Talon has been in default since July 2, 2015, JCF Capital said.

The owners of the property are firms associated with Russian-born billionaire Alex Shnaider and his former business partner on the project, Val Levitan, and include Midland Development Inc. and a few numbered companies. These entities are the only shareholders of Talon, according to the court documents. Midland has already agreed to appoint a receiver, the documents show. Levitan didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Now back to the Businessweek report we started with-- the data that will be very meaningful and valuable after we find out in 11 days whether Trump manages to get above 40% or not and now many Republican office holders he drags down into the toilet with him.

Since Trump paid to build this audience with his own campaign funds, he alone will own it after Nov. 8 and can deploy it to whatever purpose he chooses. He can sell access to other campaigns or use it as the basis for a 2020 presidential run. It could become the audience for a Trump TV network. As Bannon puts it: “Trump is an entrepreneur.”

Whatever Trump decides, this group will influence Republican politics going forward. These voters, whom Cambridge Analytica has categorized as “disenfranchised new Republicans,” are younger, more populist and rural-- and also angry, active, and fiercely loyal to Trump. Capturing their loyalty was the campaign’s goal all along. It’s why, even if Trump loses, his team thinks it’s smarter than political professionals. “We knew how valuable this would be from the outset,” says Parscale. “We own the future of the Republican Party.”

...Soon after Trump secured the nomination, a team from the RNC flew to San Antonio to meet Parscale at his favorite Mexican restaurant and discuss what party officials began describing as “the merger.” Priebus boasted then of having put “more than $100 million into data and infrastructure” since Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. More than 10 percent of that cash went solely to beefing up the RNC’s e-mail list, which now has a dedicated department of a dozen people managing a list of more than 6 million supporters. To win access to them, Trump negotiated a partnership. The party’s online fundraising specialists would use his name and keep 80 percent of the revenue, while Trump’s campaign would get the remainder. “This is exactly what the party needed the RNC to do—building assets and infrastructure and the nominee gets to benefit from it,” says Chief Digital Officer Gerrit Lansing.

Trump’s team, which hadn’t actively raised money during the primaries, was unprepared. “I was put in the position of ‘We need to start fundraising tomorrow,’ ” says Parscale. That turn was so hasty that when, in late June, Trump sent out his first e-mail solicitation, it ended up in recipients’ spam folders 60 percent of the time. Typically marketers in that situation would have begun quietly blasting less important messages from a new server to familiarize spam filters with the sender’s address. Parscale shrugs off the ensuing criticism from technologists. “Should I have set up an e-mail server a month earlier? Possibly,” he says. “We also raised $40 million in two weeks. Woo-hoo, spam rating.”

Parscale was building his own list of Trump supporters, beyond the RNC’s reach. Cambridge Analytica’s statistical models isolated likely supporters whom Parscale bombarded with ads on Facebook, while the campaign bought up e-mail lists from the likes of Gingrich and Tea Party groups to prospect for others. Some of the ads linked directly to a payment page, others-- with buttons marked “Stand with Trump” or “Support Trump”-- to a sign-up page that asked for a name, address, and online contact information. While his team at Giles-Parscale designed the ads, Parscale invited a variety of companies to set up shop in San Antonio to help determine which social media ads were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another-- the campaign has ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content-- and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences. At the same time, Parscale made the vendors, tech companies with names such as Sprinklr and Kenshoo, compete Apprentice-style; those whose algorithms fared worst in drumming up donors lost their contracts. Each time Parscale returned to San Antonio from Trump Tower, he would find that some vendors had been booted from their offices.

Parscale’s department not only paid for itself but also was the largest source of campaign revenue. That endeared it to a candidate stingy with other parts of the budget. When Trump fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, Parscale’s responsibilities grew, then further still when Lewandowski’s replacement, Paul Manafort, flamed out. In June, Parscale, whose prior political experience was a Bexar County tax assessor’s race (his client lost), became Trump’s digital director and, in many ways, the linchpin of his unusual run.

By the time Bannon became chief executive officer, Parscale had balanced the competition between the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, with different sources of data being tapped for the campaign’s fundraising appeals, persuasive communication, and get-out-the-vote contacts. “I’m the only one that hasn’t gained from any of this,” he says pointedly about the data rivalry.

In June, Parscale granted his first national interview, to Wired, to preemptively explain why the Federal Election Commission was about to report that an unknown agency in San Antonio was the Trump campaign’s largest vendor. In August, Giles-Parscale handled $9 million in business from Trump’s campaign; two months later, the company’s total haul had cleared $50 million, most of it money passing through to online ad networks at little markup. Parscale was delivering his services at such a discount that Kushner even worried that the agency’s efforts might have to be classified as an in-kind contribution. “Jared’s a big part of what gave me my power and ability to do what I’ve been doing,” says Parscale, who sees himself as more than just a staffer. “Because you know what I was willing to do? I was willing to do it like family.”

There are signs that Trump’s presidential run has dealt a serious blow to his brand. His inflammatory comments about Mexican “rapists” and demeaning comments about women triggered a flood of busted deals and lost partnerships. Macy’s stopped making Trump-branded menswear, Serta halted its line of mattresses emblazoned with his logo, and celebrity chefs fled his new luxury hotel in Washington. Booking websites show that visits to Trump-branded hotels are down. Win or lose, Trump’s future may well lie in capitalizing on the intense, if limited, political support he has cultivated over the past year.

According to a source close to Trump, the idea of a Trump TV network originated during the Republican primaries as a threat Kushner issued to Roger Ailes when Trump’s inner circle was unhappy with the tenor of Fox News’s coverage. The warring factions eventually reconciled. But Trump became enamored by the power of his draw after five media companies expressed interest. “One thing Jared always tells Donald is that if the New York Times and cable news mattered, he would be at 1 percent in the polls,” says the source. “Trump supporters really don’t have a media outlet where they feel they’re represented-- CNN has gone fully against Trump, MSNBC is assumed to be against Trump, and Fox is somewhere in the middle. What we found is that our people have organized incredibly well on the web. Reddit literally had to change their rules because it was becoming all Trump. Growing the digital footprint has really allowed us to take his message directly to the people.”

It’s not clear how much of this digital audience will remain in Trump’s thrall if he loses. But the number should be substantial. “Trump will get 40 percent of the vote, and half that number at least will buy into his claim that the election was rigged and stolen from him,” says Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign chief and an outspoken Trump critic. “That is more than enough people to support a multibillion-dollar media business and a powerful presence in American politics.”

Digital strategists typically value contact lists at $3 to $8 per e-mail, which would price Trump’s list of supporters anywhere from $36 million to $112 million. The Trump enterprise could benefit from it in any number of ways. The easiest move would be for Trump to partner with Bannon’s global Breitbart News Network, which already has a grip on the rising generation of populist Republicans. Along with a new venture, Trump would gain a platform from which to carry on his movement, built upon the millions of names housed in Project Alamo. “This is the pipe that makes the connection between Trump and the people,” says Bannon. “He has an apparatus that connects him to an ever-expanding audience of followers.”

As it happens, this cross-pollination of right-wing populist media and politics is already occurring overseas-- and Trump’s influence on it is unmistakable. In early October, the editor-in-chief of Breitbart London, Raheem Kassam, a former adviser to Nigel Farage, announced he would run for leader of UKIP. His slogan: “Make UKIP Great Again.”

The final ignominy for a Republican Party brought low by Trump is that its own digital efforts may undermine its future. The data operation in which Priebus and the RNC invested so heavily has fed into Project Alamo, helping Parscale build Trump’s base. “They brought to the table this movement and people who were willing to donate and activate, and we brought to the table a four-year investment and said we can process that for you,” says Sean Spicer, the RNC’s chief strategist. “That willingness to embrace what the RNC built allowed them to harness that movement.”

If the election results cause the party to fracture, Trump will be better positioned than the RNC to reach this mass of voters because he’ll own the list himself-- and Priebus, after all he’s endured, will become just the latest to invest with Trump and wind up poorer for the experience.