The President's Gambling Buddy

Donald Trump Famously Failed in Atlantic City, but He’s Scored Big in Vegas, Courtesy of His Partner, Billionaire Phil Ruffin—who Is Taking Steps to Open a New Trump Casino There.

- Dan Alexander

It’s two days after Michael Flynn resigned as national security advisor, and the news is wall-to-wall Donald Trump, with a heavy emphasis on his relationship with Russia. Questions abound. What did Flynn discuss with a Russian ambassador weeks before Trump became president? Did he lie about the conversation to Vice President Mike Pence? Who told him to call Russian diplomats in the first place? Was Trump himself involved?

Phil Ruffin sits inside the DJT restaurant, named for Donald J. Trump, at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, and puts down a Trump-filled newspaper. “This stuff about him having financial investments all over Russia—that’s just pure crap,” he says. “I went to Russia with him. We took my airplane. We were having lunch with one of the oligarchs there. No business was discussed. Donald has no investment of any kind in Russia, nor has he borrowed any money from Russia. If he had a business deal there, he would have asked me to go join him.”

Ruffin’s unwavering trust in the president comes via 25 years of personal friendship and one very lucrative ongoing deal. Of Trump’s more than two dozen global business partners, none is closer to him than Ruffin. Most of Trump’s “partners” are more like customers, who pay to put his name on properties and then give him a percentage of revenues. The only person whom the president has invested alongside in a Trump-branded property? Phil Ruffin.