Donald Trump’s ... campaign’s harsh rhetoric and administration’s agenda have made many potential customers uneasy about giving their business to Trump’s properties. Residents of Manhattan’s Trump Place successfully changed their property’s name, two celebrity chefs famously backed out of D.C.’s Trump International Hotel and others were unwilling to replace them, and Trump’s new line of hotels won’t bear his name.
Then last December, a month after three NBA teams announced they wouldn’t stay at his hotels, members of the Cleveland Cavaliers (including Black Lives Matter supporter LeBron James) refused to stay at the Trump Soho. Now, that hotel’s restaurant operator, Koi, an international chainlet of sushi spots for beautiful people, is shuttering its outpost there. But this isn’t a closing as usual. It’s collateral damage from the rise of Trump.
Koi has already removed its SoHo restaurant from its website.
It's not the only venue with Trump's name to be having difficulty. There are an "unusually large" number of condos for sale at Trump Tower in Chicago:
Appraisal Research Counselors says the number of Trump Tower condos for sale is almost three times higher than at similar buildings downtown. The 100-story John Hancock building has 26 out of 703 condos for sale.
Ajay Goel says he negotiated a 7.5 percent decrease in his Trump Tower condo rent when his lease came up, adding 36 units are currently available for rent.
(Original story at Chicago Tribune, no link due to auto-play video.)
My take: Not only is Donald Trump abhorrent to many people, but his sons, who are in charge of the business, aren't able to protect his brand. As the value of Trump's name falls in the U.S. due to boycotts, protests and general dislike for and distrust of the man, domestic licensing deals could dry up. Trump said his business wouldn't do any new international deals while President, but what if that is only way for the business to survive? He's already using foreign investors for his new, non-luxury hotel brand called Scion, according to the New York Times, which reports:
An examination by The New York Times of records including corporation registrations, private emails and archived websites found that Alterra Worldwide, the real estate firm that would own the hotel and be partners with the Trumps, has business ties in Russia, Kazakhstan and at least two dozen other countries. Ordinarily, such international experience would be a selling point for the firm, but it is a complicating factor when dealing with Mr. Trump’s company, where concerns already have been raised internally about some of Alterra’s foreign connections.
These revelations show that as the Trump Organization rolls out its new hotel line across the country — properties that the Trumps will manage and their partners will own — a partnership with Alterra may invite the foreign entanglements and potential conflicts of interest that the company said it sought to avoid in its international dealings.
Trump Org. is planning 17 Scion hotels.
Some industry veterans are skeptical that a hotel developer would want to become involved with Trump, whose comments have spawned protests. “He’s going to piss people off,” said Laurence Geller, who owns several luxury hotels including The Conrad in Chicago and said he voted for Trump. “Why would a developer want that as part of his brand? Why would you take the risk?”
Meanwhile, New Yorkers are bracing themselves for Trump's first return to New York since he got his desk in the oval office. Traffic will be a nightmare.
The NYPD says it will cost $308k a day to protect him. There are a lot of planned protests.
At 5:56 p.m. on Tuesday, organizers for the Working Families Party got word of the visit via Twitter. By 6:02 they had agreed to hold a protest the day he returns, said Nelini Stamp, the party’s national membership director. In less than 24 hours since the event was posted on the group’s Facebook page and with protest plans still being figured out, more than 2,000 people had expressed interest in going.
“We want to make it as difficult as possible for him to be able to just walk onto the Intrepid and give this speech,” Ms. Stamp said.
“We want to make sure he knows he can’t just come back again,” she added. “It’s not a homecoming.”
Trump may not stay at Trump Tower, opting to stay at his golf hotel in New Jersey instead.
But, there's hope, or at least a place for compadre anti-Trumpers to gather in Manhattan: a new bar called Coup, that has an anti-Trump theme and is donating its profits to progressive causes like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU.
The founders of Coup say the space is a response to Republican President Donald Trump's administration. It has protest-themed decor. There are rolls of paper on the walls inscribed with slogans like "The Pilgrims were undocumented".
Coup opened on April 15 and has been doing great business according to restaurateur Founder Ravi DeRossi, who came up with the idea.
Coup is at 64 Cooper Sq. (now called NoHo, formerly known as Bergen Park) and is open seven days a week at from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. It promises to stay open as long as Trump has a desk in the oval office. Trump supporters are welcome, say the owners, so long as they are polite and understand their money will be going to one of the six progressive causes. In addition to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, donations also go to the ASPCA, Human Rights Watch, the Human Rights Campaign and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Patrons get to choose which one they want their drink money to go to by putting tokens in a jar with that organization's name.
