He stepped on a lot of people

CNN on some of the small companies Donald Trump cheated.

“It was like we won the lottery,” Beth Rosser remembers. Her dad, Forest Jenkins, had just secured a $200,000 contract to work at the biggest prize in Atlantic City: Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal.

His company installed toilet partitions — not exactly glamorous, but important nonetheless. It was 1988, and a six-figure contract was huge.

They were all excited…but the check never arrived.

“We weren’t this big company,” remembers Rosser, who now runs the company with her brother, Steven. “We didn’t have tons of money in an account somewhere to cover things.”

Jenkins says his dad, who built the company from nothing, nearly lost everything.

The Taj Mahal, the most expensive casino ever built in Atlantic City filed for bankruptcy in 1991, just two years after its glitzy grand opening. The bankruptcy meant companies like Triad Building Specialties didn’t get paid.

After years of fighting through bankruptcy court, the Jenkins ended up with just 30 cents on the dollar. Their company was owed $231,000, according to the bankruptcy claim filed in the case. The Jenkins family received $70,000.

Dozens of contractors who worked on the project got stiffed.

“It’s 27 years later. I grit my teeth every time I see him on television blustering about what a wonderful businessman he is,” Rosser says. “He stepped on a lot of people.”

CNN reached out to the Trump campaign about each of the business deals mentioned in this story. Those calls went unanswered.

And that’s what we’re on the brink of electing president – a lying cheating thief and bully. A crook. The guy who ties the heroine to the railroad tracks.

The Edward J. Friel Company built cabinets for Trump’s first Atlantic City casino in the early 1980s. The company was awarded a $400,000 contract to build cabinets for the slot machines at Trump Plaza.

After the work was completed and approved by the general contractor, Friel expected a payment of $84,000, which would have covered the final expenses and all of the profit. But Friel says Trump bought out the construction contract from the general contractor, Perini Corporation, and then refused to make the payment.

His father tried to collect, but eventually gave up.

After struggling to stay afloat, the Edward J. Friel Company filed for bankruptcy several years later.

“He was devastated. The fact that we had seen such a huge future in Atlantic City for his business that all of a sudden because of one deal … his business in Atlantic City was done,” Friel says.

Done because of Trump. People want to make that scum president.

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