The Trump family brand is toxic

On Election Day 2016, six residential buildings called “Trump Place” stood in a row on Manhattan’s Upper West Side — a legacy of Donald Trump’s efforts to develop that site, and a sign of the Trump name’s enduring value in New York.

Soon, Trump’s name will be gone from all of them.

On Friday, the last building holding on to the name “Trump Place” announced that it would take down the president’s name, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.

That email, sent out by the condo board at 220 Riverside Boulevard, said that it had held a vote of building owners, and that owners representing 83 percent of the building had cast votes.

“Of the 83 percent [that] voted, 74.7 percent voted to remove the signage, and 25.3 percent voted not to remove the signage,” the email said.

“Over the next several weeks, we will select a company to carry out the required work” of removing the signs, the board said.

This decision will not cost the Trump Organization any money. The condo board said that the president’s company still holds a contract to manage the building, and the contract was not affected by the removal of the sign.

The Trump Organization “continues to do an outstanding job in ensuring the financial and operational well being of the condominium,” the board’s email said.

Just one day earlier, the condo board at the second-to-last Trump Place building — at 120 Riverside — had announced its own decision to remove the president’s name from the building facade.

These decisions signal how Trump’s politics has become a weight on his brand in some of the foreign countries and liberal U.S. cities, particularly Manhattan, the city that gave him his start. At both of these buildings, residents were willing to spendmoney to remove any trace of Trump’s name from their facades.

In the early months of the Trump administration, with the president no longer running his family business, his eldest sons embarked on a plan to roll out two new hotel lines in dozens of American cities. It reflected the ambitions of “the next generation of the company,” President Trump’s son Eric said at the time.

Now, in a striking reversal, the Trump Organization is no longer pursuing the signature initiative, according to company officials.

Plans for the two hotel chains, Scion and American Idea, are to be shelved indefinitely, most likely for the remainder of the presidency. As a practical matter, that means calling off just one agreement, in Mississippi, though two years ago the Trump Organization said it had as many as 30 potential deals in the pipeline.

The retrenchment comes as the company faces growing scrutiny from federal prosecutors and congressional investigators, and as a former employee, Michael D. Cohen, heads to prison for multiple crimes. With Democrats now in control of the House of Representatives, any new hotel deals could have provided investigative fodder for critics of the president.

“We live in a climate where everything will be used against us, whether by the fake news or by Democrats who are only interested in presidential harassment and wasting everyone’s time, barraging us with nonsense letters,” Eric Trump said in a statement. “We already have the greatest properties in the world and if we have to slow down our growth for the time being, we are happy to do it.”