How bad a businessman do you have to be to bankrupt casinos in Atlantic City, when you have ZERO competition?

 

It Is Trump’s Casino Economy Now. You’ll Probably Lose.

Oct. 26, 2025, 6:00 a.m. ET

Step into the casino that now passes for the American economy. 

Donald Trump campaigned on bringing back American manufacturing and rebuilding what America once was — factories, workers in hard hats — from the ground up. But the investment needed to get there, in both the factories and the workers, hasn’t happened.

What he has ushered in instead is a casino economy, built on speculation and risk. Across markets and policy, wagers on the future are being made with other people’s money at a cost that could prove catastrophic.

This economy is largely defined by froth.

Look and you will see gambling throughout the economy — in markets, policy and how we talk about the future:

• The tech giants spending billions on A.I. data centers and the power grid to sustain them.

• A government shutdown over Americans’ ability to keep their health care.

• Tariffs used like poker chips to try to shrink the trade deficit.

• The increasingly erratic treatment of the U.S. dollar.

• The rise of over 13 million memecoins

• JPMorgan now allowing institutional clients to use Bitcoin and Ether as loan collateral

• Venture capital funding companies that let people “bet against their bills”

• And the recent rumblings of bad loans from regional banks.