7 WTF Trump Businesses You Never Knew About

Eventually, in the depressingly prescient "Politically Corrected" episode, Trump would have had to take over the United States (in a "state of virtual collapse," no less) and fix all of its problems, presumably by retweeting hate speech and making war widows cry.

The Trump OrganizationPictured: more people than at his actual inauguration.

The closest this series ever came to airing was when some studio exec presumably threw the storyboards across the room in disgust. Artwork was drawn and episodes were drafted (including a bizarre romp involving aliens attacking NYC), but the project folded due to an overwhelming lack of interest. Times have changed, however, and with Stephen Colbert threatening to create a Trump cartoon, one of the bigwigs behind Trump Takeover recently said that they wouldn't mind a second crack at the title. But it's hard to see how the man itself could find the time to be involved, now that he spends all of his time getting publicly owned by the shadow government.

During the Trump Shuttle launch party in 1989, Trump, like any gracious host, started out by badmouthing the competition. In a jumbled rant, he told reporters that Pan Am (his closest competitor) was a danger to life, limb, and luggage, saying, "I wouldn't fly them; they're losing money and their planes are old." Unfortunately for Trump, a man who couldn't even strong-arm a baby for their candy, the airline business runs a little like the Mob. You don't start saying that other airlines are dangerous, or else you'll wake up with a propeller in your bed. Sure enough, three months later, a Trump Shuttle flying into Boston encountered mechanical problems and nearly crashed into the runaway, saved by the skills of the pilot.

Not that Pan Am had anything to do with that. Trump was more than capable of sabotaging himself. The cause of the crash was a problem with the landing gear, but we'd like to think the plane was struggling under the weight of all of Trump's modifications. After taking over, he redesigned the interior of his planes according to his, for lack of a better word, taste, installing everything from thick carpeting and leather seats to faux marble sinks and veneer paneling. The in-flight service was also expanded to include a three-drink service and a gourmet breakfast/lunch, which was incredibly difficult for the stewardesses to serve in the average time of each flight (approximately 45 minutes). Oh, and because it wouldn't be a Trump thing if it wasn't creepy to women, he also redesigned the stewardesses' outfits to show more cleavage. Overstuffed and sexist -- now you're flying with Trump!

Apparently, Trump wanted his airline to have "the look of old money," and to his credit, that was the only money the airline ever saw. With the costs of his amendments, the competitiveness of the service, and the reputation damage caused by the crash, Trump Shuttle lost $128 million within 18 months. It took two and a half years before Trump was forced to give up the airline because holy shit he sucked, after which it was bought out by U.S. Airways, who scrubbed their new planes so thoroughly of any and all evidence pertaining to Trump that you'd think they'd been the scene of a wood chipper massacre.

Within 18 months of opening its doors, Trump Mortgage was forced to close, leaving a wealth of unpaid bills, rafters of people cheated out of their homes, and zero chance that this failure would force some introspection on Trump's part. In subsequent interviews, Trump laid the blame for the failure at the feet of everyone but himself -- his executives, the financial climate, those damn homeowners having more foresight than him. He even went so far as to suggest that he was forced into this scheme, saying that the mortgage business wasn't one that he "particularly liked or wanted to be part of in a very big way." We're sure the feeling was mutual.

FundAnything was a collaboration between Trump and Bill Zanker, who ghostwrote the seminal masterpiece Think Big And Kick Ass In Business And Life. FundAnything wasn't a revolutionary concept, of course. Sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo were already dominating the field. So how did they try to stand out? Well, as they put it, "[crowdfunding] got traction with creatives and tech, but you go anywhere but the coasts and they don't get it yet," which is either calling the Midwest stupid or claiming that they don't have the internet yet in Iowa. And how did FundAnything seek to wrest crowdfunding away from the rich coastal elites? By charging the highest fees of any crowdfunding site. Vive la resistance!

The other draw, of course, was Donald Julius Trump himself. When the site launched, Trump promised to regularly promote campaigns on his Twitter and to regularly donate, like a modern-day Medici. And he did! Trump donated $92,000 to various campaigns -- of which a significant cut went back to Trump himself. He tweeted about FundAnything a whopping 27 times in eight months -- 21 of which were about campaigns by Penn Jillette and Adam Carolla, who were also conveniently appearing on Celebrity Apprentice. Were they members of the downtrodden underclass who can't sign up for Indiegogo?

Penn JilletteWe know that the Jill-Jet is really weird, but he's probably got saner ideas.

The launch of FundAnything also gave Trump the chance to hold another of his famously modest launch events. He brought various people in varying states of financial hardship and prompted them to beg for his cash by saying, and this is verbatim, "Do you need money? What's your problem?" He then chose the "best" ten and retreated to a nearby balcony as the assembled masses scooped money out of a tank while he watched / jerked off.

Barely a year later, Trump shut down FundAnything, saying that it "took too much of my time and too much time to raise the money." We just hope some people who did get some saved their money. It'll be useful when their healthcare disappears.

Despite the terrible name, the race proved pretty popular in the cycling community. Between the convenient schedule (wedged between the Giro and the Tour de France) and the eye-catching mountain of cash up for grabs, many high-ranking cycling teams signed up to race on the roads of lesser New York. There was no way that even Trump could fuck this up ... except for having a massive mountain of debt. Unable to both pay the prize money and convince the IRS he had any money left to give them, Trump dropped the tour after only two years.

Of course, Donald Trump had nothing to do with Trump. If it had, it would've been a pile of shit, like all the rest of his schlubby, awful publications.

The Trump OrganizationAlthough we know one person who found this sexy.

Between 1997 and 2009, Trump made four attempts at breaking into the world of print: Trump Style, Trump World, Trump World II: Red, White, And Blonde, and Trump Magazine. Like a shitty in-flight magazine, Trump Style was distributed around his condos and hotels from 1997 to 2002. Inside, there were countless photos of Trump and his then-wife Marla Marples, horoscopes, news about his burgeoning casino empire, and plugs for the place you were already richly dumb enough for staying in. In other words, they were advertisements for places that already had Trump's name on the building and his smug candle wax face in every lobby. Very stylish, indeed.

The content of Trump World (which folded after two editions) and Trump Magazine wasn't much different: one-third scintillating interviews with Trump and the trio of haunted ventriloquist dolls he calls children, and two-thirds glossy advertisements for personal canoes, luxury pocket squares, and diamond-studded gaming consoles to pay for it.

In the end, this mighty publishing dynasty was brought down by the same problem that destroys every business owned by a self-proclaimed billionaire: cash flow problems. Trump World had lost $3 million and almost bankrupted the publisher. When it regenerated into Trump Magazine, it lost a further $7 million, a shock to those people who'd heard Trump literally weeks beforehand say that they were "taking it to the next level," not knowing that he was talking about the bankruptcies.