It didn’t take long for people offended by President Trump’s remark that African nations were “shithole countries” to turn the insult back around on his family-owned company’s properties. The Yelp page for the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue has been swamped since Thursday afternoon with one-star reviews calling the 263-room luxury hotel a “shithole.”
“It’s a shithole. The owner is a racist senile old man. Don’t waste your money. #shithole,” reads one review. Another tells readers, “But I hear you can get incredible ‘service’ if you bring in your own Russian hookers to give you the ‘golden treatment.'”
Similar reviews can be found on the Yelp pages of Trump-branded properties in New York, Las Vegas, Chicago, and elsewhere. Some comments appear to be posted across multiple pages. One reading, “This hotel is a real shithole. I don’t know why anyone would want to stay in a shithole hotel, when they could go on a Norwegian Cruise or something,” has been posted on the pages for the Trump hotels in Chicago and Las Vegas. It’s a reminder that one does not need to actually patronize a business to submit content to a crowd-sourced review site.
These reviews are unlikely to drag down the Trump Organization’s overall ratings, which otherwise range between four and five stars on Yelp and other consumer-review websites. Most likely, Yelp will take them down in accordance with its policy of monitoring pages of businesses that pop up in news events. The pages for the hotels currently state at the top that they are being monitored for for “content related to media reports.” It’s a situation Trump’s properties have run into since at least the beginning of his presidency.
Benjamin Freed joined Washingtonian in August 2013 and covers politics, business, and media. He was previously the editor of DCist and has also written for Washington City Paper, the New York Times, the New Republic, Slate, and BuzzFeed. He lives in Adams Morgan.
