Donald Trump’s father Fred was described as a man of grit, someone who embodied discipline, consistency, and a determination to get the job done right. If it wasn’t right, he would make sure it got fixed, often taking care of it himself. He was not one to give up easily on a matter, even when friends and colleagues suggested to him that he take another course of action, a quality of stubbornness often associated with Donald. About Fred Trump, attorney Sydney Young once said, “You could never tell Fred Trump what to do. You could tell him how to do it, but not what to do. He was very strong-willed.” 1
Fred insured that his son was better educated than he. While Trump grew up surrounded by his father’s wealth, little was given to him during his schooling years. He was put to work, and it was hard work, long hours; there was no coasting for anything work-related for the five Trump siblings. Trump’s mother, Mary Anne (MacLeod), was part of that hard-work ethic as well, working fulltime in various ways alongside her husband and children.
Many times when his father, Fred, went to collect rent from tenants in tough sections of Brooklyn, he would bring young Donald along, as much to learn the business as to be exposed to seedier parts of the city he otherwise would not have cause to visit. At times, Donald would see his dad ring the doorbell at a tenant’s residence, then stand off to the side of the door, knowing there an angry tenant might shoot through the door in lieu of paying rent; better to stand out of the way, just in case. “My work ethic came from my father,” Donald said. “I don’t know anybody who works harder than I do. I’m working all the time. It’s not about money—I just don’t know a different way of life, and I love it.” 2
Life inside the Trump home on Midland Parkway in Queens was caring but strict, complete with rules and curfews. For Donald’s sister, Maryanne, that meant no lipstick. Sweets and snacks between meals were not allowed, and when Fred, the dad (there was also a Fred Jr., Donald’s older brother) came home from work at night, Mom would dutifully inform her husband about what the kids had done that day and how they had behaved, then he would mete out whatever punishments were called for. In that sense, Donald was subject to the same sort of discipline, to include physical measures—such as paddling misbehaved children with a wooden spoon—that his presidential predecessor Abraham had been subject to as a child and later an adolescent. “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”
All five of the Trump children—there also was another older sister, Elizabeth, as well as younger brother, Robert—were taught to be frugal and respect the value of a dollar. That meant turning out all the lights in rooms not being used, cleaning their plates at every meal, and being aware and attentive to starving children around the world. Each of them worked summer jobs, which for the three boys included paper routes, the only concession being that when it rained or snowed, they had use of a limousine for getting to all of their delivery destinations along the way. “The first time I ever realized that my father was successful,” Maryanne said,” was when I was fifteen and a friend said to me, ‘Your father is rich.’ I was stunned. We were privileged, but I didn’t know it.” 3
There was a real determinative connection between Trump and his mom. Donald’s relationship with his mother involved a shared competitive streak, a virtue when it came to dealing with the vagaries of the competitive business in which they worked—real estate, alongside Fred. Indeed, Mrs. Trump had a strong bearing and confidence about her, a commanding feminine presence influenced by the fact that she was fair, tall, and slender with blue eyes and blonde hair, and she spoke with a slight Scottish brogue (she had been born in the Scottish village of Tong, closer to Iceland than London).
Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was a most impressive woman of her era, almost regal in countenance and appearance. She was definitely “queen” of her castle—she made a home useful and modern, and she made sure it was ruled by order, competence, love, and with as much added splendor as she could muster. “My mother was silently competitive,” Donald said, long after she had passed away (at age eighty-eight, in 2000). “She was a very competitive person, but you wouldn’t know that. She had a great fighting spirit, like Braveheart.” 4
Over the years, Donald Trump has been given hundreds of Bibles by admirers who no doubt have hoped and prayed for his faith and his salvation, and he says that he has kept all of them, safely stowed away in a safe place in Trump Tower. When he took the oath of office as U.S. president in January 2017, he placed his hand on two Bibles—one given to him by his mother upon his confirmation as a boy, which he counts as the one most special to him—and the other a Bible that had belonged to a former U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln’s.
Notes:
1. Gwenda Blair, The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000),218.
2. Donald J. Trump, Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America
(New York: Threshold Editions, 2015), 128.
3. Blair, 228–29.
4. Michael D’Antonio, Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit
of Success (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015), 36.