Unable to compete with fresher resorts and with deteriorating facilities, the city seemed doomed. Since its founding in 1854, Atlantic City had enjoyed several incarnations - high-end health resort, entertainment mecca, Prohibition playground, wartime recuperation center - before falling on hard times in the 1960s.

Trying to base your economy on gambling alone, it turns out, is a lot like gambling itself: The odds, long term, are against you. Even when the city was the hottest gambling destination in the world, it never built a sustainable path from its past to a prosperous future.

But Trump isn’t responsible for the union/management imbroglio that led majority owner Carl Icahn to shutter the property the Republican presidential nominee lost control of the casino more than a decade ago and tried unsuccessfully to get his name taken off the property.īehind the campaign-related headlines, though, the end of the Taj - a tragedy to its nearly 3,000 employees and an economic drag on an already struggling resort town - underscores the mistakes that too many, including Trump, have made in Atlantic City. The closing on Monday morning of the Trump Taj Mahal, the last of four Atlantic City casinos that once bore Donald Trump’s name, is big news, mostly because of its namesake’s notoriety.

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