The final mystery, though, is why other people continued doing business with Trump, long after it was clear his endeavors tended to fail miserably. Time and again, Trump has been saved by injections of fresh money from eager investors, and especially from major banks to which he was deeply indebted.
The late 1990s were around the time when Trump shifted his business model from direct real estate development to essentially providing a brand name that could be placed on everything from buildings to books to TV shows to steaks to private universities. Once Trump’s value lay in his brand and his self-promotion, rather than any actual real estate, his creditors may have felt they had to salvage him to keep the money flowing in.
That’s one explanation. But as Davidson observed, another explanation for why Trump’s partners kept coming back is that they weren’t in the real-estate business to actually succeed at real estate: “Perhaps, the evidence suggests, some of Trump’s partners are in the money-laundering and financial-fraud industries.”
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