The Making of Donald Trump (2 page)

“First, let’s explain to people at home what the triad is,” Rubio said. “The triad is our ability in the United States to conduct nuclear attacks using airplanes, using missiles launched from silos or from the ground, or from our nuclear subs.”

This was not the first time Trump had been asked about how he would allocate money among the three different methods by which the United States military can deliver nuclear bombs. Four months earlier, Hewitt had asked Trump the same question on his radio show. Trump gave an answer indicating he had no idea what Hewitt was asking about. He had clearly made no effort in the intervening months to learn.

“I think one of the most important things that we have to worry about is nuclear generally speaking,” Trump said on Hewitt’s radio show. “The power of nuclear, the power of the weapons that we have today—and that is, by the way, the deal with Iran—the concept of it is so important that you have to make a good deal and what they should have done is that they should have doubled up and tripled up the sanctions …”

This book is a presentation of the facts as I have witnessed them and as the public record shows. They are facts reported with the same flint-eyed diligence as everything else I have written about in the past half century.

Many have asked why I’m not writing a book about Hillary Clinton instead of, or as well as, writing a book about Donald Trump. The answer is that in 1988 I wound up in Atlantic City instead of Arkansas. I know Trump; I have never spoken to Clinton or her husband. However, as first lady she was furious over my
New York Times
articles revealing that she and her husband paid more than twice as much income tax as the law required because, despite paying almost $10,000 a year to have their tax returns prepared, they got bad tax advice.

One last thing to keep in mind as you read this book: those applauding crowds of young people who filled the Trump Tower auditorium in June 2015 when Trump announced his campaign with vicious denunciations of Mexicans, Muslims, and the media. At the time, I thought that was incongruous for midtown Manhattan, a place not exactly known for xenophobia or applause for racist tirades. Indeed, that crowd was not the voluntary outpouring that television viewers would reasonably have believed they were seeing. Many of those clapping were actors paid fifty bucks apiece.

T
he Trump family’s deep roots in Germany stretch back to the war-ravaged seventeenth century, when the family name was Drumpf. In 1648, they simplified the name to one that would prove to be a powerful brand for their latter-day descendants.

Looking back from the twenty-first century, it turns out to have been an interesting choice. Donald no doubt enjoys the bridge player’s definition of
trump
: a winning play by a card that outranks all others. But other definitions include “a thing of small value, a trifle” and “to deceive or cheat” as well as “to blow or sound a trumpet.” As a verb,
trump
means “to devise in an unscrupulous way” and “to forge, fabricate or invent,” as in “trumped-up” charges.

Donald Trump never knew his grandfather, Friedrich, who died when Donald’s father, Fred, was only twelve years old. As a rogue entrepreneur, however, Friedrich cast a century-long shadow over the Trump family with his passion for money
and the flouting of legal niceties—such as erecting buildings on land he did not own.

Friedrich Trump grew up in the winemaking region of southwest Germany, in the town of Kallstadt, where hard work meant a roof over one’s head, not riches. His father had died when Friedrich was only eight years old. In 1885, at the age of sixteen and facing mandatory military service, Friedrich left his mother a note and did what millions of other Europeans with few prospects at home were doing: fled Germany for the United States.

Enduring a surely difficult North Atlantic crossing in a packed steamship, Friedrich eventually landed in New York, where he moved in with an older sister, Katherine, and her husband, both of whom had immigrated earlier.

Before long, the young man decided to go west, eventually settling in Seattle, where he opened The Dairy Restaurant. It also had a curtained-off area that most likely served as a low-rent whorehouse, according to Gwenda Blair, who had the family’s cooperation in her history of the Trumps.

In 1892, Friedrich became a citizen, lying about his age in the process by saying he’d landed in New York two years before he actually had. Two friends accompanied him to the proceedings to attest to his good character. One was a laborer, the other a man whose occupations included providing accommodations for what Blair politely called “female boarding.”

Friedrich was the genesis of many Trump family traditions in America, but voting was not among them. In fact, his grandson Donald would run for president after failing to vote in the 2002 general election and, as records indicate, in any Republican primary from 1989 until he voted for himself in 2016. Friedrich’s great-grandchildren were even less diligent in their civic duties. When Donald Trump’s name appeared
on the New York State primary ballot in 2016, his daughter Ivanka and son Eric, both in their thirties, could not cast ballots because they had neglected to register as Republicans. They blamed the government, saying they should have been allowed to change from independent to Republican at the last minute. But the primary voting rules, however outmoded, had been law in the Empire State for many years. The siblings had months in which to change their registration so they could vote for their father.

A family tradition Friedrich Trump did start in America, however, was the art of prospering but wanting more. Friedrich sold his restaurant/bordello and set up a new business about thirty miles north. Rumor had it that the oil-rich Rockefellers planned a big mining operation in the area. On a piece of land he didn’t own, right across from the train station, Friedrich built a hotel of sorts—one intended mostly for, shall we say, active short stays, not overnight visits. Building on land he did not own foreshadowed the terms under which his grandson Donald would acquire the Florida mansion Mar-a-Lago: with a mortgage that Chase Bank agreed in writing not to record at the courthouse.

In the end, the mining project fizzled and only a few got out better off than they were when they arrived. Among them was Friedrich Trump, who had, by that point, Americanized his name to Frederick. He went by Fred.

Hearing about the Klondike gold rush, Frederick headed for Canada’s Yukon Territory. He had no interest in the hard physical labor of panning for gold in frigid streams; Frederick mined the miners. He built a sort of bar and grill, calling the joint The Arctic. It offered hard liquor and “sporting ladies,” as the prostitutes were called. Again his timing was impeccable. He arrived when the gold rush was at its height. By the time
the gold was running out and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were riding in, Fred Trump had made a small fortune to take with him as he skedaddled back to America.

In 1901, at age thirty-two, Frederick Trump returned to Germany, where his mother introduced her now-rich son to eligible young ladies. Frederick, however, took a liking to a woman his mother did not care for, a twenty-year-old blonde named Elizabeth Christ. Just six years old when her husband-to-be had slipped away to America to avoid the German draft, Elizabeth had grown into a well-endowed adulthood. Trump men favoring busty blondes would become a family pattern.

Frederick took his new bride to America and scouted for opportunities to increase his fortune, by then worth a half million dollars or so in today’s money. But Elizabeth had no love for bustling New York and its stark contrasts between wealth and want. She desperately wanted to go home. In 1904, Frederick, with his young wife and their infant daughter, sailed back to Germany.

Once there, however, he had to convince the authorities to overlook his draft dodging.
Hoping the fortune he brought into the country would impress the authorities, in September 1904 he explained his absence to the government in writing: “I did not immigrate to America in order to avoid military service, but to establish for myself a profitable livelihood and to enable myself to support my mother” in Kallstadt. German authorities didn’t buy it; they ordered him to leave.

Donald Trump has not yet been asked whether this episode of family history plays any role in his unconstitutional proposals to deport an estimated eleven million immigrants who entered the country illegally, including those whose children are American citizens, or if he thinks of it when suggesting that
the United States block soldiers and sailors who are Muslim from returning to America.

Back in New York City, Frederick continued to prosper. In her richly detailed biography, Gwenda Blair suggests Frederick worked as a barber, a low-paid occupation that seems odd for a man so focused on making money. She notes that barbershops also sold tobacco in those days, but that was still a low-paying opportunity. However, they were often fronts for illegal businesses and—because men of dubious means could come in for a daily shave or just to hang out—they could also have been opportune places to gather business intelligence and engage in sub rosa transactions with the many ethnic criminal elements in the big city.

Whatever he was up to, Frederick’s fortune couldn’t buy him more time: he became one of the more than twenty million people around the world who died during the 1918 influenza pandemic. He was followed by another industrious Trump: Donald’s father, Fred.

T
hough
only twelve years old when his father died in 1918, a mere two years later Frederick Christ Trump took after his father by starting a residential garage–building company with his mother: Elizabeth Trump & Son. Elizabeth had to sign all the checks and documents because her ambitious boy was still a teenager not legally allowed to enter into contracts.

Fred Trump entered his majority by
getting himself arrested at age twenty-one for his involvement in a battle between about a hundred New York City police officers and a thousand Ku Klux Klan members and supporters, many of them in white robes. The riot took place in Jamaica, the Queens neighborhood where Fred Trump lived. Police booked him for failure to disperse, but prosecutors later declined to try him and many of the others arrested that day. It was the first of many indications of Fred Trump’s racial enmity.

Almost nine decades later, his son Donald, running for president, tried to deny the whole thing, claiming his father never lived at the address the newspapers had obtained from police records. Other public records verify that it was indeed his father’s address. They also show only one Fred Trump living in Queens during that period.

Cornered in a 2015 interview with
The New York Times
, Donald Trump bobbed, weaved, and tried to persuade the paper to ignore the arrest, which the website
boingboing.​net
had written about after uncovering a 1927
New York Times
article about it. Trump’s comments went like this:

That last line is important to understanding the gap between what is widely reported about Trump and what the public record indisputably shows: that events not resulting in criminal
charges should not be mentioned in the news has been a major theme in Donald Trump’s careful and consistent efforts to limit inquiries into his conduct. His wealth and public prominence are closely tied to his success in focusing the attention of journalists where he wants it and his skill in deflecting inquiries by law enforcement and people suing him for alleged civil fraud or failure to make payments, as we shall see.

In any event, as the Roaring Twenties came to an end, Fred Trump was building single-family houses in Queens. When the Great Depression began in 1929, he switched to opening a self-service grocery. It was a precursor to the modern supermarket, cutting costs because people picked their own goods off the shelf, eliminating the need for most clerks. The business was a smashing success, and Trump sold it for a substantial profit after a year.

During World War II, Fred Trump landed government contracts for apartments and barracks to be built near Navy shipyards in Pennsylvania and Virginia. From this he learned the ins and outs of government procurement, a skill he would put to profitable use after the war ended. When the federal government started financing postwar housing for returning GIs, Fred Trump was said to have been the first builder to show up with his papers at the Federal Housing Administration loan counter in Washington. In the years that followed, he would build many thousands of apartments in Brooklyn and Queens and would buy other apartments as far away as Ohio.

Fred Trump was known neither for quality buildings nor for being a good landlord. He bought the cheapest materials to build more than 27,000 subsidized apartments and row houses, on many of which his family continues to collect rent decades later.

He was also something of a showman, displaying the panache his son would later take to dazzling extremes. Fred the Brooklyn Builder knew just how to spin the kind of simple, telling tale that newspapers often embrace without deep fact-checking. For example, in 1946 he told the
Brooklyn Eagle
that because building supplies were so hard to come by after the war, he’d had his men visit hardware stores across the city and beyond to buy all the nails they could find, even if they could only procure a handful. Later, he became known for a frugal habit: when he showed up at his construction sites (always dressed in a tailored suit and tie), he would bend down to pickup loose nails and hand them to carpenters.