USA Today took a deep dive into the voluminous record of lawsuits against Donald Trump’s various companies and discovered a funny pattern: The man seems to have had a really nasty habit of stiffing the people and companies who work for him—especially contractors at his casinos and resorts. Here’s how the paper sums it up:
At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.
Obviously, this is not a great look for a man whose entire campaign is premised on assuaging the anxieties of white, working-class men—which is to say, people who often do things like painting and plumbing for a living. The article leads off with the tale of the Edward J. Friel Co., a Philadelphia family business that was hired to build cabinets for the bars and slot machines at Harrah’s at Trump Plaza back in the 1980s. According to Paul Friel, who worked for his father as the business’s accountant, Trump refused to pay the $83,600 bill because their execution was supposedly substandard. But then, perversely, he offered to let the company work on future Trump projects … which is not exactly the sort of thing developers typically do for contractors who just botched a project.
“That began the demise of the Edward J. Friel Company,” Paul Friel told the paper.
This is not the first time Trump’s record of refusing to pay companies for their services has come up. He also isn’t especially shy about it. When Reuters looked into the issue late last year, Trump was frank, explaining that he likes to “renegotiate” with “10 or 15 percent” of his contractors. According to USA Today, Trump and his daughter Ivanka “shrugged off the lawsuits and other claims of non-payment,” and said during an interview that if anybody wasn’t paid in full, it was because their work was faulty. “Let’s say that they do a job that’s not good, or a job that they didn’t finish, or a job that was way late. I’ll deduct from their contract, absolutely,” Trump said. “That’s what the country should be doing.”
Trump obviously isn’t the first developer to ever fight with his contractors over payment. But USA Today and Reuters’ reporting suggests that he’s probably more aggressive about it than most and takes advantage of the fact that many of the companies he works with are small businesses without the financial resources to fight him in court. When the Taj Mahal casino got into financial trouble shortly after it was completed, for instance, Trump asked a group of contractors to accept 30 cents on the dollar for their work. “It’s not that common to just come back and unilaterally start slicing off the big percentages of contracts and saying ‘we’ll settle out for this, you can take it or leave it,’ ” the president of one contractor involved told Reuters. It’s also hard to chalk up this pattern to the rough-and-tumble of real estate development when it extends to agents, lawyers, and waiters. USA Today notes that last month, Trump settled with 48 waiters at his Miami golf resort who said he’d failed to pay overtime after some of them worked 20-hour days.
In any event, I fully expect to see Paul Friel in an attack ad this fall.
