Atlantic City has had an issue since the 90's in that the real high-roller clientele will just pay a little extra on top of whatever they were gonna blow to jet to Vegas to do it where the glitz and cache' for gamblers is a bit better. AC casinos, meanwhile, attract the kind of person like Aunt Maybel from Wildwood, NJ who drives her Buick down to the beach for slots and coffee every weekend, but never is going to drop seven figures at the craps table to impress her friends, she doesn't have that kind of wealth anyway.
Yeah, money is money, but, it's a "blue collar" gambler's town. There was a big push to bring Vegas-style gambling to AC in the 90' and early 00's around the time "Old Vegas" was being redeveloped and the last of the old "Mob" casinos and Mom n' Pop ones that offered ball pits for the kiddies were being bulldozed for a more VIP focused model. As it turned out, the high operating costs of luxury casinos with floor shows and the like meant they never had a chance to recoup their sky-high initial investments from just seniors playing the slots. The Great Recession killed a lot of them, just took a few years for them to bleed out.
Trump coming on board in AC was seen as a last ditch attempt to make what was a fundamentally unworkable business model work. And even at the time, it was doubted it would
So, trying to pin the shuttered joints on the boardwalk on Trump ignores the fact they were dying when he came to town and just failed to resuscitate them.
Did he take a chance to dump bad money in a hole that was about to be tagged "Bankruptcy"? Probably
Was that scummy? Probably
But those casinos were never going to live and to this day large chunks of AC's gambling industry is slowly going away as it's novelty as the place other than Vegas that you can gamble isn't enough to support a Vegas-style model.
