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Obummer is, at this moment, holding a rally in Gary, IN (located due southeast of Chicago on the shores of Lake Michigan). Said he's glad to be back in his home area - note that Chicago despises Gary, which is a shithole in itself. Currently has lots of black flight into the white suburban areas due to high crime rate and blight. Mainstays of the economy are US Steel and the BP oil refinery.
Anyway, POTUS actually has some history with Gary himself. He operated a casino there for a few years and held his Miss USA pageant there a couple of times. Note that the contestants and attendees would take their life in their hands the moment they stepped out of the pageant building, not to mention trying to go eating or shopping in the city itself. The suburbs are mostly Patriot second- and third-generation immigrant descendants who are primarily working class and middle class that also despise Gary.
https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/lake/trump-fired-up-gary-with-casino-beauty-pageant/article_00452ec6-61de-5d5c-b722-3cf8bcff9fdd.html
GARY | Billionaire and television personality Donald Trump has earned more liberal scorn and attention than the rest of the Republican presidential herd combined, by declaring that most Mexican immigrants bring only drugs and crime to America.
He also is vowing to win the Hispanic vote in his 2016 bid for president.
It should be remembered Trump made a fearless prediction a quarter of a century ago that casino gambling would never succeed in Gary.
He disregarded his verbal torpedo a few years later and sailed the Trump Princess into Gary's Buffington Harbor and packed it with thousands of gaming tables and slot machines. He also brought a nationally televised beauty pageant and his trademark merchandizing sizzle to Gary.
Today, his billboards and banners are long gone, and his floating casino was taken over by a rival gambling concern now dubbed Majestic Star II. But The Donald was second to none in early 1993 when Gary was newly awarded the right to host two casinos on Lake Michigan and gaming concerns were wooing City Hall.
"There was a big buzz about Trump coming to town," remembers Chuck Hughes, executive director of the Gary Chamber of Commerce. Hughes, then a city councilman, said he was one of the few to sit in on meetings between Trump and former Mayor Thomas Barnes. ...
It wasn't all smooth. Trump told the gaming commission he would try to arrange professional boxing matches in Gary like one of the casinos had hosted with former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson, then quickly recalled Tyson was serving time in an Indiana prison for rape. "I guess he might not be fighting in this state," Trump said.
Nevertheless, the Indiana Gaming Commission issued a license to Trump, who promised to draw millions of customers to the city with a $153 million project complex that would include a 15-story luxury hotel, and an entertainment center that would generate an estimated $90 million in taxes and fees to Gary and the state in the fifth year.
Trump's Princess Casino opened June 11, 1996 -- the same day as the Majestic Star moored nearby -- and it eclipsed attendance of other riverboats in the state's fledgling gambling industry in its first three weeks, admitting 135,917 gamblers who dropped $107 million there on its table games and slot machines. It generated nearly $13 million in taxes that year.
But that flourish was short-lived. By 2000, Trump was having trouble competing for customers, market share and profits with larger casinos in Hammond, East Chicago and Michigan City as well as those in suburban Illinois and southern Michigan.
That same year, city officials announced they had struck a deal with officials from the Miss USA pageant to host its 2001 event. The pageant was owned jointly then by CBS and Trump. Then-Mayor Scott King said the television exposure could go a long way toward portraying the city in a positive light.
"Everyone was saying the eyes of the world would be on us," Hughes said. "I was against the pageant; the city had many more needs to be addressed. When Trump hosted the pageant here in partnership with the city, Trump didn't put up a dime."
"We paid for the crews assembling the stage at the Genesis Center. They didn't eat at local eateries. We paid for the pageant contestants to go on shopping sprees, not in Gary or Northwest Indiana, but on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, sky boxes at the United Center. We paid for everything, because we had casino taxes." ...
The televised pageant went on in 2001 and again in 2002. The city opted out of a third year, citing the multimillion-dollar public cost. ...
Majestic Star bought the Trump Casino in a $250 million deal uniting the two Buffington Harbor riverboat casinos under single ownership. The Trump name went off in 2006.
[Moar at website]