Why did Donald Trump give his name to the worst park in America?
The entire idea behind the Donald Trump brand is that it gives any old shite the POTUS wants to make a buck off a “touch of class”.
That’s the big idea behind the brand: that the Trump name is a seal of approval. You can see this in the branding of his hilariously awful venture into making steaks. The copy surrounding the failed venture (one of his vast number of them) hammers home the idea that buying these slabs of meat gives people a window into his “billionaire lifestyle”. Considering that those steaks were comfortably worse than your average Porterhouse, this is a bold take.
One made even bolder by the fact that you can get a pretty decent look into his “billionaire lifestyle” by yamming Big Macs three times a day. That’s the buy-in, though. Whether it’s true or not, people seem to believe things that have Trump written on them are the best that the world has to offer. Real estate, rib-eyes, red hats, you name it, if they’ve got the anglicisation of the name Drumpf on them, then you can’t get better.
This is despite the fact that not only are these things often not successful, but they’re also almost always low-quality products as well. Nowhere is this more apparent than if you look at the one place in the United States of America that Trump lent his name to not as a business venture, but as a display of civic pride. That’s right, tucked away in Westchester, New York, is the Donald J Trump State Park, generally considered to be one of the worst parks in the entire United States of America.
In a twist of fate that encapsulates everything about the President of the United States as a businessman, it’s a product that’s shoddy to the point of being defective, which is the direct result of a failed business venture. Two great tastes that taste great together.
Why is the Donald Trump park so bad?
In 1998, Trump paid two and a half million dollars for 436 acres of land in upstate New York.
The idea was originally to turn it into a golf course that Trump crowed to anyone unfortunate enough to listen to him would be worth $10million when it opened. Did this golf course open? Did it fuck. The “real estate genius” that is the current President of the United States couldn’t work out development permits because the land he had, again, paid millions of dollars for, was mainly wetlands. Real. Estate. Genius.
Thus, the project died a horrible death, and Trump donated the land back to the state in 2006. If you think that this was some kind of L for the Commander in Chief, then you haven’t been paying attention. The Trump Organization claimed a $100m tax write-off from the project, which is a bitter pill to swallow when the park that the land was going to be changed into got an annual budget of $2,500. That’s ANNUAL. The park lasted four years before it was closed and left to rot in 2010, but that’s the thing: you can’t really close a park.
Thus, anyone who wants a bleak metaphor for the state of the country in 2026 can still go up to Westchester. There, you’ll see a dilapidated, overgrown mess of asbestos-filled, abandoned buildings, weed-choked pathways, muddy fields and a general feeling that, despite the natural beauty on offer, this is a site that will never recover from the man whose name adorns every sign in the place. Donald J Trump.
Here’s hoping I’m wrong, but I doubt that I am.