KEY POINTS:
After years as perhaps the most recognisable face of capitalist success and excess, Donald Trump is suddenly bogged down in a string of legal and financial battles across his property and entertainment empire.
From Dubai to Chicago, from Atlantic City to Aberdeen, the host of the US version of The Apprentice is scaling back his ambitions for global domination, trying to fend off furious bankers and facing new questions from political opponents.
These are grim echoes of the past for a man who, during the recession of the early-1990s, was forced to put large chunks of his business into bankruptcy, and even teetered on the edge of financial ruin.
His re-emergence from that disaster is such a source of pride that he even sued the author of a book that estimated his wealth in millions, rather than billions, of dollars.
The tally - from Forbes magazine, the unofficial arbiter of these things - is that Trump was worth US$3 billion ($5.64 billion) at the last count, but that was before a string of disasters that is still unfolding.
It emerged that the Trump Organisation and its partners in Dubai were mothballing work on a 62-storey steel and glass skyscraper on one of the palm tree-shaped artificial islands in the Gulf.
The development was meant to be a hotel and residential complex boasting Norman Foster bathtubs and furniture by designer Poltrona Frau, and Trump had personally earmarked one of the penthouse suites. But demand has collapsed with the fortunes of the wealthy that had flocked to Dubai in the boom.
Yesterday was also the deadline for Trump's publicly quoted casinos business to make a US$53.1 million interest payment - a payment it said it would have to skip because of its mounting financial troubles.
Trump Entertainment Resorts' shares are pennies away from zero, the company having lost 99 per cent of value in two years, a sign investors think it will go bust - again.
The firm, which owns three of the most opulent casinos in Atlantic City, the East Coast's answer to Las Vegas, has been in and out of bankruptcy protection twice in the past 20 years, and Trump and the other directors have begun talks with bankers in the hope of saving it.
Such is the sensitivity that the company issued a statement declaring that its own death would hardly graze the Trump fortune. It represents just 1 per cent of his personal holdings.
The trouble is that those other real estate interests are also showing strain, given the crumbling property market across the US.
In Philadelphia, a Trump Tower with apartments slated to sell for US$700,000 and up has been halted until the economy improves. And there is an even bigger mess in Chicago, where Trump has half-built a hotel and condominium complex that will be taller than New York's Empire State Building.
He is being sued by Deutsche Bank, which provided loans for the project and says he missed a deadline this month to pay off the remaining US$334 million. Trump got his own suit in earlier, claiming Deutsche should have allowed an extension because the credit crisis counts as force majeure, equivalent to acts of God.
In Scotland, where he fought for two years to be allowed to build a controversial 1 billion ($2.8 billion) golf and luxury homes complex on an unspoiled stretch of the Aberdeenshire coast, members of the Scottish Parliament are questioning if the project will ever now get built.
The suggestion is nonsense, Trump's spokesman, George Soriel said, since all the tycoon's property interests are standalone businesses.
"Is Mr Trump still a billionaire?" asked Mr Soriel. "That's a silly question. Of course he is."
- INDEPENDENT
