“Our Company Could Not Coexist” with Trump as a Partner
Will the Republican party ever learn the lesson that people in the business world learned long ago?
THE MOST PRESCIENT AND POINTED WARNING about Donald Trump may have been raised by a Harrah’s executive. In 2016.
Phil Satre wasn’t a celebrity, but he stood out in at least two ways: He was Trump’s partner on an Atlantic City casino project in the 1980s. And he was willing to stick his neck out and write about it in the Reno Gazette Journal.
The column Satre wrote was so spot-on that in my role then as commentary editor of USA Today, I republished it in our newspaper in hopes it would influence voters throughout the land. That was back when the extent of the Teflon Don syndrome had not fully penetrated our brains—when we still thought, or hoped, that reason and facts could make a difference.
Here’s just one paragraph of Satre’s column:
In 1985 I filed an affidavit with the court over Trump’s claims of mismanagement: Referring to Trump I said, “His written response to my letter of May 10 is characteristic of the bluster, threats, intemperance and unsupported and unsupportable falsehoods that have permeated the correspondence we have received from him and his key management employees almost since the beginning of our partnership.” My opinion of Donald Trump from the 1980s has not changed. The negative publicity about Donald Trump during this campaign—his conduct toward women, his business failures and his explosive temperament—matches my dealings with him.
As we know, reason and facts did not prevail. Satre’s words, so blunt and vivid, probably had the most impact inside my own brain. They have come to mind repeatedly during the first two months of Trump’s return to office.
Call it the boomerang presidency. Or the whiplash or rug-pull presidency. The bottom line is the same, whether we’re talking about tariffs, Ukraine, Social Security, immigration, or anything else: You cannot count on Trump. You cannot trust him. Also, he knows nothing about the economy.
“I don’t have a changed view of him,” Satre told me in a phone call this week—the first time we’d ever talked. “His whole approach during the periods that I was involved with him in a partnership were examples of somebody who talked a lot about himself with a great deal of bombast. And there was no regard to accuracy of what he said or truthfulness. And as a consequence, ultimately, our company could not coexist with him as a partner.”
Negotiating with Trump then sounds a lot like negotiating with him now. “What was negotiated in those days was his name and how valuable his name was. We had lots of disagreements about that,” Satre said, deadpan, and we both chuckled. Were they resolved? “No, they weren’t,” he said.
In a way, though, they were. Satre and the rest of the Harrah’s team decided to sell their half-interest in the project back to Trump. They didn’t lose any money in the transaction, Satre said, but Trump nevertheless claimed it was “a great deal for him.”
Harrah’s went back to operating its “very successful” Marina District casino in Atlantic City, which had opened in 1980. And Trump went back to doing what he does best, or worst.
The Trump Plaza, as Trump called it after the partnership ended, “filed for bankruptcy in 1992. It closed in 2014 after additional bankruptcies,” Satre wrote in 2016. And lest you’re inclined to blame economic conditions, he made a point of noting that “in contrast, Harrah’s flourished during this same period, and I retired as Chairman in 2005.”
And furthermore: “I am convinced he simply does not have the temperament to be president, or more importantly, commander in chief: His hair-trigger temper, bluster, racial rhetoric and divisive domestic and international views will endanger our democracy and risk permanent damage to our society.”
Not surprisingly, both Satre and I thought immediately of his long-ago op-ed after the volcanic Oval Office meeting between Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. When Satre read about it and watched clips, he had flashbacks to some of his sessions with Trump. “We had several of those just really angry outbursts,” he told me.
Satre did not write anything about Trump last year. “I didn’t feel like I could say anything different than what I said then. I actually was quite shocked in 2024, shocked by the outcome,” he said.
The enduring mystery, for Satre and so many of us, is why Trump’s skills at selling and marketing himself have worked so well and for so long. They weren’t in evidence, nor was there any hint he had a political future, at the time Satre was trying to work with him.
That came later, he says, when Trump was riding high with The Apprentice: “He had become a media personality more than a developer personality, and he started talking about running for president and all that. I began to run into people who said we should elect him president. I said ‘Really?’ The Apprentice. People were attracted to that.”
Satre, now the non-executive chairman of the board of Wynn Resorts, has had a long and respected career in the gaming industry. But like millions of Americans, maybe tens of millions, he has failed at one big thing: Turning the electorate away from Donald Trump.
Years ago, when he and other Harrah’s executives contemplated a continued future with Trump, “We made the decision that we’d be well served by terminating our relationship with him,” he said during our call. “We decided to do it and we were very happy.”
If only Republicans could find the courage and will to do the same. If I were a betting woman, I’d say they, and their country, would be very happy.
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