It comes down to the kind of idiot. There were a number of factors involved with the Taj Mahal going belly-up, but one was how Dolt-45 handled the resort part of the casino resort.*
After over-paying Merv Griffin for the unfinished property to satisfy his ego, he followed up by over-spending (as is his wont) on gaudy excess, allowing his then-wife Ivana to go wild. After all, he had to have the best, really the most luxurious (believe me) hotel rooms, restrooms, hallways, ballrooms, restaurants, bars, theatres, acts, etc. so he could brag about them in the tabloids and on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”
Now in Vegas or Macau that kind of investment can work, because the idiots who go there to blow their money away are affluent idiots who like to be pampered during the short periods when they’re not gambling. It makes sense to go overboard on the resort part because the casino is bringing in big money.
The typical Atlantic City degenerate gambler, on the other hand, is like the slob in the video. The Taj Mahal could have demolished the hotel and restaurants and the theatre, set up army cots and porta-potties in the parking garage and offered leftovers from the local McD’s and expired kegs of PBR and this skell (assuming he slept there overnight instead of on the train) would have been happy as a clam long as he could play the nickel slots and (if he was feeling really lucky) the $5 blackjack tables for hours on end.
So you had a casino catering to extremely low-stakes low-lifes (who were not getting comped on rooms and food and shows) and an expensively renovated and maintained hotel/resort that none of them were using. AC hasn’t been a tourist destination either, not for a long time.
And that is part of the story of how the biggest idiot of them all accomplished the amazing feat of driving a casino-resort into bankruptcy slightly over a year after it opened.
[* The casino itself had other issues: Donny once again didn’t do his homework, this time about the new native-American casinos being built in the tri-state area (whoops!); and he also lost the entire casino management team in a single air crash (keyman? what’s that?). There was also the matter of the unsustainable junk bond financing]
