Trump’s ace in the hole: the man likely to fight a US presidential election this year once came to Hong Kong looking for help

A long time ago when its famous edifice rose just seven storeys and William Jefferson Clinton was a rookie first-term President of the United States, an uncharacteristically quiet American checked into The Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong.

As he settled into the then HK$20,000-a-night Marco Polo suite – around HK$100,000 in today’s money – the man with a big mouth and bigger hair cut a curiously reserved figure. He had an empire to save and Hong Kong, as it turned out, was to be his ace in the hole.

The year was 1993 and the top-floor suite resident was Donald Trump, the man who has turned US politics on its head as his opponents in the race to become the Republican Party’s presidential candidate fall by the wayside and an apparently complacent political establishment begins to wake up to a phenomenon it singularly failed to predict.

Back then, Trump was in financial trouble and was definitely in the market for investors . The chips were down on his casino empire and a landmark New York development project, Riverside South, on Manhattan’s West Side was in dire need of a cash injection.

In other words, then, as now, Trump was news, so I joined the rest of the Hong Kong media pack in the lobby of the Peninsula hoping for a quote or two from “The Donald”. But he wasn’t talking and – much the photographers’ annoyance – there was no sign of his then glamorous girlfriend, Marla Maples.