Have you ever stayed at a hotel that was so dingy, dirty, and broken down that, when you returned home, you felt like you just had to take a shower? I did—last weekend, in fact. And this one bears the name of the GOP's nominee for president of the United States of America.

In celebration of my brother's coming nuptials, I took him to Atlantic City to see Buddy Guy and Jeff Beck (who were great) as well as Huey Lewis and the News (also great). Though both shows were at the Borgata, rooms at the Trump Taj Mahal were about half of what the other major casinos were charging. Being a #NeverTrump dead-ender, curiosity got the better of me.

If the Trump Taj Mahal isn't a metaphor for Trump and the Republican party, I don't know what is. He's made grand promises, but look closer and you'll see the whole thing is a scam. The hotel is not much of a "resort casino," just as Donald Trump is not really a successful businessman, and just as the GOP under his aegis is not a conservative political party. In truth, Trump is doing to the Republican party just what he did with the Taj Mahal: Make outlandish boasts about his brilliance, fail to follow through, leave a wreck for others to clean up, and walk away scot free.

When Donald Trump opened this behemoth of a casino in 1990, he claimed it was the eighth wonder of the world. This was a weirdly prescient boast: I would not want to attend a sporting event at the Roman Coliseum nowadays, and I would not recommend you vacation at the Trump Taj, either.

The decayed remnants of Trump's grandiose ambitions are everywhere. There's an elaborate entrance in desperate need of a paint job, leading straight to a lighted sign that must have looked nifty back when George H.W. Bush was president, but looks dated today. The broken lights enhance the antiquated effect.

When you walk into the casino, you're greeted by massive chandeliers that cost millions of dollars to be installed. But take a closer look, and you'll notice the carpet is dirty, the wallpaper is torn, and even the bottoms of the escalators are in disrepair.

The Trump Taj sports a seemingly endless casino floor—which mostly lies vacant.

Its emptiness is little wonder, as very few of the slot machines look like they were made in the last 20 years. It wouldn't surprise me if the majority of them have been in service since the casino opened.

In the hotel, the story is the same. A pink decor greets you when you arrive on your floor. It might have looked hip back in 1990—but today it looks, well, like the walls were smeared with Pepto-Bismol...a quarter century ago.

The rooms are hardly better. All the fixtures appear to be 25 years old. The paint is peeling, and so is the wallpaper. The stink of cigarettes is everywhere (on a non-smoking floor). The soap dispenser is broken. The mattresses are lumpy. The windows are obscenely dirty.

I half expected the Bible in the nightstand to be missing the Book of Proverbs, but the Gideons turned out to be the only people doing their jobs properly.

To be fair, Trump has not been chairman of Trump Entertainment Resorts since 2009. But the Trump Taj is far too run down to let him off the hook (never mind that Trump cut a deal last year with its current owner, Carl Icahn, to keep his name emblazoned all over it). The burnt-out bulbs and dirty windows may be pinned on the current ownership, but Trump otherwise left the new owners a mess.

For instance, here is the in-house television station.

These graphics would have looked low-budget twenty years ago. So it goes with the rest of the hotel. Trump seems never to have made a sufficient effort to maintain this place, yet he pocketed nearly $81 million from his casinos between 1995 and 2009 (even as they lost more than $1 billion).

The property feels like it is being squeezed for every last dime before it's finally shut down. It was impossible to get anything but lukewarm water from the shower head, and goodness knows it was not because the hotel was full (it could not have been at half capacity). That tells me they're cutting corners by not heating the water.

And they're cutting corners on staff, too. The Trump Taj Mahal was running on a skeleton crew because 1,000 workers—members of UNITE-HERE Local 54—are striking in protest of their measly benefits packages. The Tropicana and Caesars came to an agreement, but Trump Entertainment Resorts is holding out.

A bartender on the picket line complained that his knees were in bad shape because so many ice machines are broken, he had to run around the hotel finding ice to keep filling the drinks—yet another indication that the problems with this hotel are hardly cosmetic.

As a consequence of the strike, the room service was unavailable, the turndown service was terrible, and more than half the restaurants were closed.

Granted, Atlantic City is well past its halcyon days, but this is hardly an excuse for the Trump Taj Mahal. Caesar's is very nice. So is Resort's Casino. And the Borgata has the feel of a top-flight Vegas hotel to it. The Trump Taj, on the other hand, feels more like the ski lodge in Hot Tub Time Machine.

It offers, in sum, a decidedly Trumpy vibe. The casino opened a quarter-century ago with a huge splash. Financed by junk bonds, everything was over the top—Trump even brought Michael Jackson to perform at the grand opening. But Trump ran the place so terribly that the business fell apart. He walked away with a fortune and, thanks to the Apprentice, a reputation more or less intact. But Atlantic City is stuck with a fifty-floor eyesore—just like the GOP is stuck with a six-foot, two-inch boor.