*Donald Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr., are reportedly investing in luxury resorts in one of the poorest regions of America: the Mississippi Delta. The area happens to be in the heart of Trump’s base.
The brothers claim the towers, which are part of a program that the Trump Organization is calling an “American Idea,” will start with a four-star, 100-room Scion hotel designed to look like an antebellum plantation, Newsweek reports.
The actual “American Idea” is that Eric and Don Jr. will be reopening two Comfort Inns and Rodeway Inns, but will bring them up to “Trump standards,” according to The Washington Post.
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“It is nearly unheard of for a national hotel company to debut hotel lines in one of America’s poorest corners, surrounded by cotton and soybean fields and lacking a commercial airport or even an easily accessed interstate,” The Post wrote of the project.
Trump’s “antebellum plantation” hotels will tower in a predominantly African-American area near Cleveland. Raw Story notes that the town’s population is just barely over 12,000 people and 53.3 percent of children there are living in poverty. Citizens have been desperate for work since the closure of factories during the recession.
The Trump brothers’ luxury hotel project is “being pitched as a place where The blues can be celebrated.”
“A plan that some black residents view as Trump’s effort to monetize the threadbare music invented by slaves in the Mississippi cotton fields.”
Investors for the project haven’t been revealed, but it will reportedly receive city and county tax breaks over seven years.
“It shows he really doesn’t have a conscience. It’s about money,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told The Post.
“I think if the Trumps’ bottom-line profits for a hotel in the Mississippi Delta are predicated on black people coming and spending money, I think they are in serious trouble,” said Rep. Thompson.
