Donald Trump

When Donald Trump was president, he threatened to deploy the U.S. military to Mexico to take out “bad hombres.” While that never happened, the now-convicted felon does have a business history south of the border.

And, like 99.99% of his business history, it’s just… bad.

A writer for The New Republic recently ventured to one of Trump’s many lost properties, the Ocean Resort Baja Mexico. Abandoned for years, the project collapsed financially in 2009, with Trump’s partners burning through $32 million worth of buyer deposits, even though little construction was ever actually completed.

Three years prior, Trump trumpeted his “first project on the Gulf of Mexico,” just south of Tijuana. But as it turns out, the failed resort was never Trump’s project at all. Like so many of his other real estate endeavors, he simply licensed his name to the project for a cool $4 million, plus a share of any profits.

But of course, there were no profits, because the resort was never completed.

“If at any point I had known this, I would have walked away,” a buyer for one of the nonexistent units, John Robbins, told the New York Times in 2011.

Despite putting down investments on condos well into the six figures, buyers never got their money back. One of them, Sandra Sapol, told her story to CNN in 2019.

“It’s hard when you feel like you’ve been ripped off by a big name. You just start to be like, ‘How could this have happened?,” she said while fighting back tears.

On a visit to the nonexistent property, she summed up her investment thusly: “That’s my hole,” she said.

New Republic writer Alexander Nazaryan offered a similar description after visiting the location this year. He called it a “huge, muddy hole” with “no bungalows or hotel rooms or even beach chairs.”

While the property does feature “glorious views of the Pacific,” there’s only a “chain-link fence” and “empty guard booth.”

“Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico cannot, it is my unfortunate duty to report, be called one of the more luxurious hideaways in the vicinity of the Punta Bandera wastewater treatment plant,” he writes.

That’s not the description Trump or his adult children were offering perspective buyers when the project was announced. Ivanka, for her part, said she actually purchased a unit herself.

“We are developing a world-class resort befitting of the Trump brand,” she said in the introduction video, per the LA Times. “I’m very excited about it. I actually chose to buy a unit in the first tower.”

A few weeks later, Don Jr. met potential buyers at an event in San Diego, though court documents show he never bought a unit.

It didn’t take long for Daddy Trump to desert the development entirely. He removed his name from the building in late 2008.

Like many Trump real estate failures, the saga ended in litigation. The disgraced ex-president settled the lawsuit against him in 2013 for an undisclosed amount.

Trump’s forays into overseas real estate have almost all ended in spectacular failure. One of his more infamous calamities is his golf club in Doonbeg, Ireland, which has lost an insane amount of money over the years. The resort, along with his other two properties in Ireland and Scotland, has never turned a profit.

For years, Trump raged about a wind farm being developed near his Scottish golf club, only to lose that battle, too. (He’s made a litany of outrageous claims about wind farms in his rallies and speeches, falsely claiming they kill whales and other forms of wildlife.)

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But if one wants to really delve into shady Trump-licensed properties, look no further than his tower in Azerbaijan.

The skyscraper underwent serious scrutiny in the years following Trump’s election, with the New Yorker reporting Trump “helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.” 

U.S. officials called Trump’s partner, Azerbaijani billionaire Anar Mammadov, “notoriously corrupt, even for Azerbaijan.”

In keeping with the theme, the tower was never completed. Trump eventually pulled his name from the building, which caught on fire in 2018.

A few years earlier, Ivanka hawked the doomed building on Instagram. (Hmmm. Anyone else noticing a pattern here?)

With Trump in the midst of his third presidential bid, and facing an additional three criminal cases along with his conviction for falsifying docs to cover up his hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, his fraudulent real estate dealings may be fading into the background.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not important. In fact, they may define Trump’s conman act more than anything else.

Barbara Res, a former high-level Trump Organization official, described her old boss to The New Republic in no uncertain terms: “When I worked with Trump, he was a P.T. Barnum. Trump is a fraud. He is a cheat. He is a thief. He is a criminal.”

We’re guessing the poor buyers who got ripped off in Mexico, and his other business failures, would almost certainly agree.

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