Flashback 1985: Trump Buys a Building and Immediately Tries to Evict Tenants

If Trump is such a "champion of the forgotten men and women," how come he's spent his life stiffing workers and evicting tenants?

Trump is a grifter and his supporters are either dupes of the billionaires who ride said dupes mercilessly to the bank.

Here's an excerpt of a news report from 1985 about Trump's attempts to evict tenants of a rent-controlled building he bought - with the full knowledge that it was rent-controlled and rent-stabilized. No matter. Trump wanted to tear the building down an erect one of his tacky hotels.

Upon purchasing the building, Trump embarked on a systematic campaign of harassment against the tenants, which included negligent upkeep that endangered the safety of the tenants and, bombarding them with slap suits from an army of lawyers.

From the NYTimes: "Leaks went unfixed, tenants alleged, and broken appliances went unrepaired. Aluminum foil was placed over windows in empty apartments, giving the building a run-down appearance. (Mr. Trump defended the action as standard procedure for vacant units.)

More dramatic were the eviction notices from Mr. Trump’s lawyers, on a variety of grounds. One tenant was told that he had not paid his rent on time. (He presented a canceled check in court to prove that he had.)

Others who had done construction on their apartments, with the approval of prior landlords, were told that they had 10 days to restore them to their original conditions.

Suzanne Blackmer, a B-movie actress and one of the original Rockettes, was ordered to vacate her two-bedroom unit, for which she paid $203.59 a month, because it was not her primary residence, meaning she was not entitled to rent protections. Ms. Blackmer insisted that it was; after a legal battle that lasted more than a decade, she prevailed.

Mr. Trump made his opponents out to be millionaire plutocrats, “people of great wealth.”

And also whiners.

“Let me tell you something about the rich,” he said in one interview in the midst of the battle. “They have a very low threshold for pain.”

Recounting the story later in his memoir “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump acknowledged that he had deliberately tried to drive out tenants, but he said that most of them were exploiting an undeserved government subsidy. He recalled getting rid of a free telephone in the building’s lobby that he claimed tenants were using “to call their friends in Gstaad and St. Moritz.”

Ms. Rubinstein and two other residents from the time said they remembered only a pay phone in the building. And while its roll of renters included a successful fashion designer and an architect, it also included a number of older people living on fixed incomes."

Read the story here

Read the 1985 story about the court battle

BTW - the TENANTS WON. Many of whom STILL live in these apartments. But that doesn't stop the lying grifter from declaring "victory."

Support independent liberal media!

Sign up for the RDTdaily newsletter, here:

RDTdaily Social Media:

Google Plus

-~-~~-~~~-~~-~-

Please watch: "TARABUSTER CLIP: Tara Rails Against Corporate Media Elite Incessantly Badgering Us About Capitalism"

-~-~~-~~~-~~-~-