ATLANTIC CITY — Walk the boards or drive the main roads approaching any of the city's nine casinos, and you'd never know President Donald Trump was involved closely with the resort's gaming-hotel industry for decades.

Levi Fox, a public historian, feels a part of local history is fading away. And it'll be even further gone once the shuttered Trump Plaza is demolished.

So he's doing his part to preserve Trump's roller-coaster legacy in Atlantic City.

Each Sunday in August, from 2 to 4 p.m. on the boardwalk outside the Plaza, Fox is staging a pop-up Trump museum, which is likely the only spot in the city you can still find the Trump name — and it's on a whole bunch of things.

More than 50 artifacts from Trump's Atlantic City casino days are on display at the exhibit — to see or handle. The items come from all over the world — a Taj Mahal bathrobe made in Pakistan, a World's Fair magnet made in Mexico, and a Marina T-shirt made in El Salvador, to name a few.

Trump Plaza wallet
A wallet from the now-shuttered Trump Plaza is one of dozens of artifacts on display at a pop-up Trump museum on the Atlantic City boardwalk. (Levi Fox)
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"Some of the items were donated to the project or me directly," Fox told New Jersey 101.5. "Others I purchased at local antique stores, thrift stores, as well as eBay and Etsy."

The pop-up exhibit is a small piece of a larger effort to collect artifacts, stories and images from casinos once owned by Trump, Fox said. Ideally, these items and more would be on display one day at a true exhibit in Atlantic City or nearby, he said.

And this effort should not be misinterpreted as shrine to the President, Fox said. In fact, the current exhibit includes a two-sided sign, with one side promoting it as a Trump museum and the other promoting it as an anti-Trump museum.

In addition to allowing visitors to interact with the artifacts, Fox said, the pop-up exhibit also explores relationships between local history and national politics.

"One of the main drives behind this is to offer folks who might be visiting the Atlantic City area some sort of context, that folks who are from this area have, that is now relevant to all of us across the country and across the world," Fox said.

 

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