Six years after Donnie gave his music teacher a black eye, Fred Trump moved his thirteen-year-old son out of school and enrolled him at New York Military Academy in Cornwall, New York, an institution founded in 1889 and situated about fifty miles north of the city. What finally pushed Fred to send his son upstate was that Donald, by then a young teen, would sneak away from the family’s middle-class Jamaica home in Queens to accompany buddies to a guys’ day out in the Times Square area of Manhattan. Somewhere along the way, Donald got his hands on switchblade knives he brought home, where they eventually would be discovered by Mom and Dad. Fred expected better from his five children, but his long hours working at his job sites kept him away from home much of the time, hindering his ability to properly discipline the energetic and sometimes unruly and obstinate Donnie. Fred would provide that discipline via surrogate. So, military school it was.
Young Donald was in eighth grade at the time, and his dad believed the change to a more disciplined environment would do his son good. It did, putting young Trump in a structured, albeit harsh setting where he could channel his aggression into achievement and eventually graduate in 1964 with the rank of cadet captain. A National Public Radio (NPR) report republished by O’Reilly in The United States of Trump sheds more light on the strict experience: “Back in Trump’s day, cadets would wake up near the crack of dawn, hurry into uniforms, and march in formation to breakfast. First-year cadets had to eat their meals squared-off—lifting their forks in a right angle into their mouths. And after breakfast they’d scurry back to clean their rooms for inspection.” 1
Trump’s competitive persona had begun with his fascination with brick and mortar. From an early age, he would tag along with his father to construction sites, where Trump the elder was both boss and handyman, getting down and dirty with his men working construction, demonstrating a 1950s version of servant-leadership. Of the five Trump children, Donnie was the only one to show a strong interest in following in his father’s footsteps in the construction business. It would fuel his competitive fires from an early age—the charge being to “build it bigger and better than anyone else.”
One day when Donald was eight years old—around the same time he was making his music teacher a knuckle sandwich—he grabbed his younger brother Robert’s toy blocks and constructed a giant skyscraper out of them, gluing them together and never returning them. This was Donnie’s way of constructing a fantasy that would guide his life for the next fifty-plus years—ultimately changing Manhattan’s skyline in the process. 2
Fighting the good fight, but on his own terms, is what drives Donald Trump. To borrow a pet phrase from O’Reilly—one of the few in the media to make a friendly connection to Trump—“bold and fresh” is an accurate depiction of Trump. In his own words, he might say, “I did, and do, things my way.” During precious free time away from the rigors of academic studies and military drills at the military academy, Trump loved to hang out in his dorm room and “hit the beach.” He would insert an ultraviolet light bulb into the ceiling light fixture, then lie down on his bunk and kick back, pretending he was soaking up Florida sunshine. Author Gwenda Blair writes, “Dropping the usual Trump family reticence about their wealth, (Trump) pegged his father’s worth at $30 million and bragged that the number doubled every year. ‘Donald had a sense of how he wanted to be viewed,’ (senior-year roommate David Smith) said. ‘He really wanted to be a success. He was already focused on the future, thinking long-term more than present. He used to talk about his dad’s business, how he would use him as a role model but go one step further.’” 3
Fred Trump Sr. was a mentor as much as a father figure to Donald, the latter an eager—how else can you say it—apprentice. There wasn’t noticeable tension or contention between the two, but it was evident that Donald was not reluctant about standing up to his old man, by his late teens refusing to be intimidated by Fred Sr. All the while he was cultivating skills that would serve him well in the business world, the world of reality-TV entertainment (The Apprentice, which ran eleven seasons on NBC) and, finally, the cutthroat, life-on-the-edge world of politics—presidential politics. Note that Trump was the first person ever elected U.S. president without having previously served in elective office or the military.
Michael D’Antonio, author of Never Enough, described Donald Trump’s relationship with his dad in saying, “Learning from what he saw, Donald resolved to stand up to anyone who challenged him, including his father. Years later, he would say, ‘I used to fight back all the time. My father was one tough son of a gun.’ However, he added, ‘My father respects me because I stood up to him.’” 4
It wasn’t just Manhattan skyscrapers that rocket-fueled Trump’s imagination, pumped helium into his oversized ego, and positioned him in full fight mode. Bigger and better could manifest itself in other ways in a manner keeping with what he did best—develop real estate. He wanted to be famous. We know how that worked out—literally, stamped in twenty-foot letters on more than one big city skyscraper.
Trump undertook his first major construction project, on his own and out from under Fred Sr.’s wings, in his mid-twenties. It started out in his head as ostentatious plans for a 30,000-unit apartment complex, spread over two properties in Manhattan. If successfully completed, it would be the world’s largest such apartment project, containing more units than all of the projects his father’s Trump Organization had built over the years. It would be one confident boy/man’s hubris executed to the nth degree.
Trump had procured an option on the old Penn Central railyards, and that’s where he would build. Before breaking ground, though, he needed the properties to be rezoned from industrial to residential—encompassing two sites; one at 60th Street and the other at 34th Street. He also needed to persuade banks to help finance the massive construction. Before he could plow his way through either of those obstacles, though, he would need to come up with a design for the complex project conforming to codes. At times it seemed he would’ve had better luck building an escalator worthy of replacing Jack’s beanstalk. A lot to ask for.
Trump’s pie-in-the-sky plan called for 20,000 units to be built at the 60th Street yards and another 10,000 at 34th Street, with no railroads running beneath them. There were other hurdles to negotiate as well. First, the only way to pay for basic (yet exorbitant) infrastructure items such as streets, sewers, and waterlines would be to build thousands more units than community residents and leaders would be amenable to. Second, without community support, the odds of getting the zoning change were essentially nil. Undeterred, Trump hired one of the city’s most prestigious architectural firms to design the companion complexes, even with financing issues threatening to put a halt to his plans. There wasn’t much money available to invest in such a gargantuan endeavor, especially one conceived by a relative neophyte new to how the game was played in Manhattan. In terms of construction costs, the city and the State of New York were close to broke. Plus, federal housing subsidies that had once been the financial lifeblood for Fred Trump’s ventures a generation earlier had dried up due to cutbacks from the Richard Nixon administration. 5
Trump with his entourage of architects, attorneys, and consultants—a publicity manager, too—stayed in formation and continued to march through a phalanx of countless meetings, phone calls, letters, naysayers, and communities in opposition. But there was only so much they could do. Gradually, he had to scale down his construction plans in order to keep cracking open doors. His architects’ renderings got down to 5,000 units—significantly less than the original 30,000, yet that was still too many for local community approval, as meetings between Trump and the community board grew more antagonistic.
At times, Fred Trump would attend the community meetings, sitting in the back of the auditorium while watching his son give a buoyant presentation complete with colorful slides of parks and trees fronting shadowy groups of yet-to-be-built buildings, his presentation skills becoming more polished with each occurrence. 6
Still, Trump’s fresh tactics were going nowhere. He needed a viable Plan B for the development of the railyards to get some sort of return on his investment. Almost magically, Plan B materialized in the form of the city’s desire to build a new convention center to replace a 1950s-constructed facility that now, in the 1970s, was obsolete with its multifloor design. City planners, with Mayor Abe (short for Abraham) Beame’s approval, had chosen a 44th Street site near Times Square. The city’s blueprint showed a modern convention center with a projected $231 million price tag, featuring a bold, futuristic design. Once completed, the space age facility would be supported by a spaceport platform extending out hundreds of feet over the Hudson River.
Recognizing opportunity, and making use of new connections he had made chasing his 30,000-unit dream, Trump made the paradigm shift. His new dream: a convention center, built on a significantly reduced budget, knowing the 34th Street railyards would easily accommodate his team’s own design. No longer would there be a need for annoying zoning alterations. Adaptability at work. Now he had a fight he could win. His design associates told Donald they could design and build a magnificent two-story, bronze-colored-glass structure at about half the cost of the city’s 44th Street plan. It would all be on land, and it would feature ample space for trucks to load and unload without causing traffic snarls.
Listening closely to his adviser’s input, Trump devised a bold marketing and publicity plan for what he called “The Miracle on 34th Street,” in homage to the classic Christmas movie. Soon he was giving pitches and presentations to private audiences of influential community leaders. Beame, however, at one point threw a monkey wrench into Trump’s construction plans, switching his support from the 44th Street site now being labeled untenable to an alternate site at Battery Park City. Trump stubbornly pushed ahead on his 34th Street proposal, keenly and aggressively drumming up public support to elevate his conception above Beame’s. He got word out through the media that Battery Park City (BPC) was a bad choice, one of his newsworthy press releases calling BPC a “rip-off.” Further support came from a prominent labor negotiator’s telling The New York Times that a convention center built in Battery Park City would be like “putting a nightclub in a graveyard.” 7
He won the fight! Trump got his convention center at 34th Street, creating thousands of jobs in the process. Blair put it this way: “The real ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ was not the actual convention center design that was unveiled that day. It was how Donald Trump had managed to combine his father’s political connections, his advisers’ collective wisdom, and his own budding development acumen to outmaneuver his competitors.” 8
(To be continued…)
Notes:
1. O’Reilly, The United States of Trump, 16–17.
2. Glenn Plaskin, “The Playboy Interview with Donald Trump,”
Playboy, March 1990, https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interviewdonald-
trump-1990, viewed March 3, 2020.
3. Gwenda Blair, The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 238.
4. Michael D’Antonio, Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of
Success (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015), 59.
5. Blair, The Trumps, 270–71.
6. Blair, 272.
7. Blair, 275–77.
8. Blair, 277.