At first, William Flint saw the huge banner bearing the face of Donald Trump fluttering at the side of a Mexican building site as a seal of quality.
Months later Mr Flint knew better. By then the retired financial planner had been duped out of a $160,000 deposit for a Trump-branded luxury holiday apartment.
“Trump played us for chumps,” Mr Flint, 77, said. “That’s what he did.”
Critics allege that Mr Flint’s misfortune was part of a pattern: that Mr Trump has a history of links with dubious businesses that preyed on people.
“He talks about them as if they were victimless events,” said Michael D’Antonio, who wrote Never Enough, a biography of the tycoon. “He believes: if you lost money because you counted on the Trump name, then too bad for you.”
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Yesterday Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, savaged Mr Trump’s business record. “Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud,” Mr Romney said. “He’s playing the American people for suckers.”
Mr Romney, whose criticisms are backed by John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, ridiculed the idea that Mr Trump was a huge business success. “His bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who worked for them.”
Mr Trump responded by calling Mr Romney a failed candidate. “He failed horribly,” he said yesterday. “He was begging for my endorsement [in 2012]. I could have said, ‘Mitt drop to your knees’. He would have.”
The list of Trump business failures, though, is long. In 2006, on the eve of an epochal property crash, the billionaire said. “I think it’s a great time to start a mortgage company.” Trump Mortgage Company shut in 2007.
GoTrump.com, which sold luxury holidays, lasted a year, and Trump Airlines was never profitable and defaulted on loans. Trump Entertainment Resorts filed for bankruptcy in 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014; The Trump Steakhouse in Las Vegas was closed in 2012 for 51 health code violations.
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Jennifer McGovern worked for Trump Mortgage Company and was owed $238,000 in wages when it collapsed. She was never paid, according to her lawyer, Raymond Nardo. “It is disreputable and dishonest that Trump Mortgage would cheat a hard-working middle-class mother out of hard-earned commission,” he said.
The banner that Mr Flint saw in Mexico was advertising yet-to-be-built luxury apartments on the coast of Baja California, a dream location overlooking the Pacific and the Coronado Islands. Mr Flint was looking to spend his savings on a holiday home. He had just had a bad experience with a Mexican developer who had tried to cheat him. He was looking for a reputable operator, and the famous New York property magnate seemed like a safe bet.
“We were sold on the fact that, hey, this is Donald Trump,” Mr Flint told The Times. “How could we possibly lose with Donald Trump?”
He was about to find out.
The sales pitch promised that Mr Trump was deeply involved, down to choosing the interior decor. Mr Flint attended a sales event at a luxury hotel, where he watched Donald Trump Jr, Mr Trump’s son, appear to buy one of the units. “We thought the Trumps had skin in the game,” Mr Flint said.
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In reality, Mr Trump had only licensed his name to the project and had no equity at risk — a business model the tycoon has embraced after a series of calamitous deals dragged him to the cusp of personal bankruptcy in the 1990s. Buyers would lose $130 million in the Mexican project.
Mr Flint said: “He made money licensing his name to a dubious Mexican project and walked away. Leaving his investors holding the bag.”
He added: “We kept on getting newsletters from Ivanka Trump [Mr Trump’s daughter], telling us that construction was proceeding nicely. Not so — there was nothing going on at all.”
Mr Flint sued Mr Trump’s company, which settled the case under undisclosed terms.
Other victims of alleged Trump scams include Bob Guillo, a retired office worker, who spent nearly $35,000 on seminars from Trump University, a venture created by Mr Trump in 2005 that is now the subject of legal action in New York and California. It is alleged to have duped some 5,000 people out of as much as $40 million.
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Mr Guillo, 76, thought he was going to be taught how to invest in property. At the end of the process, however, the only thing he had to show for his money was a picture of himself with a cardboard cut-out of Mr Trump.
People who signed up for Trump University were told that Mr Trump had “hand-picked” expert tutors. The first seminar that Mr Guillo attended was led by a motivational speaker who encouraged his class to call their credit card companies to raise their credit limit to $40,000 because they would soon by investing in property.
They were pressured, Mr Guillo says, to use the credit to buy more sessions from Trump University.
He quickly decided that he was being “scammed”. When he asked for a refund after the first of the sessions he had paid for, Trump University refused.
“I was trumped by Trump, duped by the Donald,” Mr Guillo said. “He’s a great showman but unfit to be president of the United States.”
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Mr Trump has said: “I'm the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far.” He claims that he is worth $10 billion, $3.3 billion of which is the value of the Trump brand and brand-related deals.
Experts say that those sums are wildly inflated. Mr Flint, for one, sees the Trump name as worthless. “Trump is making promises to gullible people that he cannot possibly deliver,” he said. “They want to believe him — they want it so badly that they’ll vote for him.”
