Trump Airlines story

I have an email buddy who keeps on sending me all kind of internet gossip that he takes for granted. Once I receive it, off online I go researching about each one.

This time he sends me this. A long story short, back in 1991 a US soldier who had just spent 8 months at war in Saudi Arabia, is sitting on his duffel bag for several days waiting for a bus to take him to the airport so he could go home. Of course, there’s a shortage of buses and politicians are the ones to blame.

When the buses finally came, they took him to the airport where the planes waiting for him were from Tower Air, an airline supposedly owned by Donald Trump, who volunteered to bring the soldiers home for the cost of fuel only. Therefore, a happy end.

The private’s name is stated as one Ron Knouse who uses the above pretext to explain why he votes for Trump. The email also tells me that if I missed it on a few TV stations such as NBC, CBS, ABC etc, here it comes rather conveniently by email.

Oh well. Sounds like a fairy tale.

Image Credit: http://www.time.com

My research yielded the following. First off, Trump has never owned Tower Air. In 1988 he purchased Eastern Air Shuttle for over $300 million and renamed it Trump Airlines. But this venture of his has never turned a profit. In 1990, Trump has defaulted on his loan and ownership of the company was turned over to the creditors. Consequently, he was unable to do any airline business after having lost it to the bank.

And even if this took place while D Trump still owned an airline, he could do domestic flights only. There is no way that he could make an international flight to Saudi Arabia.

I wonder who concocted this story. A few sources confirm that it originated on the TrumpTimes website but the link to it produces a 404 error. This one apparently has shared the fate of Trump’s deleted tweets.

Said email contains no links or images, only text, for the obvious reason: they don’t exist.

Anyway, someone out there realized that this story doesn’t click, so another one was promptly concocted. Later on, I received a variation of this email with all of the above activities taking place in the U.S. But again, there’s a time conflict! Trump had no way to fly an airplane at the time he didn’t own it. And how in the world would he hear about the soldiers problems, is everybody’s guess.

Man-made stories about Trump are all over the net. Someone is a busy bee on that TrumpTimes website.