Which Trump-related companies filed Chapter 11 and what were the court case numbers and dates?
Executive summary
Public reporting agrees that multiple companies tied to Donald Trump sought Chapter 11 protection between 1991 and 2009, but the count and the granular court docket details vary across sources: some summaries list four high-profile casino filings while legal-trade reporting and court summaries identify as many as six Chapter 11 cases tied to Trump-controlled entities [1] [2] [3]. Available public records cited in the reporting give firm case numbers and dates for several filings but do not supply complete docket numbers and filing dates for every Trump-related entity, a limitation that must be acknowledged [2] [4].
1. The headline four — the commonly cited 1991–2009 casino filings
Many mainstream summaries focus on four major Chapter 11 filings: Trump Taj Mahal , Trump Plaza (early 1990s and later developments), Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts , and Trump Entertainment Resorts , and treat those as the core episodes in the bankruptcy narrative [1] [5] [3]. PolitiFact and contemporaneous campaign materials have repeatedly framed those four filings as the central events, noting that the corporate entities — not Donald Trump personally — filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 in order to restructure casino debt [1] [3].
2. Legal-trade reporting lists six Chapter 11 cases and provides docket entries where available
Bankruptcy-industry reporting compiled by the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI) and summarized legal feeds indicate that six Trump-related business entities filed Chapter 11 between 1991 and 2009 and that several of those filings offer concrete court case numbers: the Trump Taj Mahal (Trump Taj Mahal Associates) filed Chapter 11 on July 16, 1991 as Case No. 91-13321 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey, and Trump Castle Associates filed Chapter 11 in 1992 as Case No. 92-11191 in the same court [2]. ABI further identifies TER Development Co., LLC as Case No. 08-13664 (Chapter 11, D. N.J.) and lists TERH LP, Inc. as Case No. 14-12110 (Chapter 11, D. Del.), noting that multiple Trump-related bankruptcies were later consolidated into related proceedings [2].
3. Where the public record is specific — and where it is not
The ABI citations supply explicit case numbers for several proceedings (Taj Mahal — 91-13321; Trump Castle — 92-11191; TER Development Co., LLC — 08-13664; TERH LP, Inc. — 14-12110) and link those entries to the District of New Jersey or Delaware dockets as reported [2]. Other widely cited retellings (PolitiFact, ThoughtCo, Wikipedia) corroborate the timing and the fact of multiple Chapter 11 filings but do not uniformly reproduce every bankruptcy docket number or precise filing date in their summaries, which creates variance in how many separate filings are counted as “Trump bankruptcies” [3] [6] [4].
4. Why counts diverge: corporate structure, consolidations and naming
Part of the disagreement among sources stems from corporate technicalities: Trump’s business empire encompassed dozens of subsidiaries and co-owned entities, some Chapter 11 petitions were “prepackaged” or involved restructuring across related companies, and later filings consolidated multiple named entities into a single proceeding — all of which can produce counts of “four,” “six,” or other figures depending on whether reporters aggregate related dockets or treat each named debtor separately [2] [7]. Analysts and legal summaries note this structural complexity as the reason different fact-checks and law blogs arrive at different totals [2] [7].
5. Bottom line and reporting limitations
The authoritative public compilations cited identify specific Chapter 11 filings with docket numbers for at least four named proceedings (including Trump Taj Mahal Associates Case No. 91-13321 and Trump Castle Associates Case No. 92-11191) and list additional case numbers tied to later consolidated or related filings (TER Development Co., LLC Case No. 08-13664; TERH LP, Inc. Case No. 14-12110) [2]. Multiple reputable outlets also report a total of six Chapter 11 petitions tied to Trump entities between 1991 and 2009, while some political messaging and early summaries focus on four high-profile filings — both characterizations appear in the public record [3] [1] [6]. The reporting reviewed does not, however, provide a single definitive public table listing all six entity names paired with every bankruptcy docket number and exact filing date in one place; assembling that complete ledger would require consulting federal bankruptcy court dockets directly for each named debtor [2] [4].