Cruise Control

Worker exploitation. Illegal dumping. Cover-ups. Tax dodging. How the Trumpiest industry on Earth stays afloat.

- By Tim Murphy

IF DONALD TRUMP could build a city from scratch, it would have a casino and a golf course and all the cheeseburgers you could eat. The city’s residents would be old, with money to spend and nothing but free time. The workers would be poor, foreign, and always on the clock. They would literally live beneath you. There would be doctors, but not very many, and there would be cops, sort of, but who exactly they were there to protect and serve would remain ambiguous. There would be no proper government to speak of. The city and its services would be run by a corporation, and you would sign away your rights to a billionaire in his 70s with a tan and bad hair, in exchange for a promise of a good time—art auctions, live music, waterfalls of champagne. The city would pay no taxes but avail itself of the services funded by those who do.

It would look, in other words, a lot like the Carnival Corporation’s 18story, 952-foot-long Diamond Princess as it entered Yokohama Bay in early February after a voyage through Southeast Asia for the Chinese New Year. Some people would find this city tacky. But it would be an altogether pleasant place for many people, much of the time. However, you would not want to be there during a pandemic.