On Friday, I received a second set of comments on the second part of my autobiography, A Working Life. Two more copies are out to early readers who are close family members, yet I’m ready to move forward with the second big edit. I expect this work to begin as the garden winds down. There is a lot of outdoors work to do before the snow flies.

I don’t share the reality in which our president lives. While he floods the media zone with news, such information does not address any of the main problems we have as a society or any of my personal issues. I learned all I need to know about Donald Trump by visiting his Atlantic City casinos in the early part of this century.

Give the choice, I would not have gone there. I held a meeting for the five fleet managers who were my direct reports at the customer plant in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. We had a single night together and their vote was to go to Atlantic City because of the gambling. Bucks County was where George Washington crossed the Delaware River on Christmas night in 1776. My interests was in this history, yet I wanted my managers to enjoy themselves.

We walked the boardwalk after dinner and found our way into one of Trump’s casinos. Once inside, it connected to a second one, and I never really knew in which one we were. In the end, that was one of many Trump problems in that his casinos competed with each other for the same customers, with none of them differentiating themselves in the marketplace. He failed to make a market for new customers the way a normal business might. All I saw was endless rows of slot machines sparsely populated with gamblers. It was not a thriving business.

There were other problems. Financing hobbled the enterprise. He borrowed massive amounts of money using high-interest junk bonds to build and run his casinos. The interest payments became so high, he couldn’t make them. Trump also shifted some of his personal debt into the casinos. The casino business filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection four times.

We all know Trump’s reputation for stiffing vendors and contractors. With the casinos, it got so bad, he was required to pay cash up front for product and service delivery. This raised daily operating costs.

The other main problem was that as other nearby states legalized gambling, Trump’s Atlantic City Casinos did not address it. This was a textbook case of the idea that “build it and they will come” was no longer a viable business strategy. By the 2016 election, it was all over with Trump losing majority control in his namesake casino business.

What reasonable person wants a place where machines are lined up from wall to wall to collect money for the house? I budgeted $10 dollars for gambling that trip, figuring it was the value for the story. But to return? The casinos were torn down before there was any possibility of that.

We know better lives are possible. And so, the president represents a sideshow in a carnival we don’t seek to visit. A lot depends upon what happens in the November election. We know the president seeks to steal the election. If our candidates get elected, he has a movement not to seat them in the Congress. Will he be successful? I don’t know, but that is one reason I won’t be working on my book before the snow flies: politics can’t take a fall holiday.