But he was also the first developer to run into trouble when competition sucked away customers and profits with them. “Bruce Springsteen Hates Both of You” read a sign at a recent rally Trump held in New Jersey to raise money for Christie’s presidential campaign debt, a twist on the placard that has for years dogged Christie, a devoted fan of the Boss.Īs Trump and Christie forged an unlikely political alliance-one of them a brash outsider promising to bring lost American jobs back home and the other an uneasy sidekick whose career has been both propelled and derailed by a similar petulance-Atlantic City is the one place in America that has been most clearly shaped by the both of them.Ītlantic City, as much as his native New York, was the place where Trump staked his career and made his reputation-opening three casinos in the 80s and early 90s, and establishing himself as the biggest name on the Boardwalk. For that matter, few in Atlantic City would disagree. All the focus on the unions, he said, is just a way for Christie and politically connected developers to take control of coveted assets, like the city’s Water Works, and to divvy up those yawning parcels of undeveloped waterfront land. “We’re the smokescreen,” Dilorenzo, president of the firefighters Local 198, which has been fighting a bill that would give the state the right to terminate union contracts, said over a turkey club and an iced tea. It escaped no one’s attention that two of the men most enmeshed in the near death spiral of the seaside resort town-the debt-saddled casino owner whose multiple corporate bankruptcies had foretold if not hastened the city’s financial misfortune and the governor whose latest plan to rescue the city sounded to many like a politically driven death warrant-had found common cause on the national political stage.

Now the Ducktown was packed with cops and firefighters. The Friday before, city workers had gotten paid for the first time in a month.

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