Believe it or not, Donald Trump doesn’t relish answering questions about himself, his upbringing, or his ancestry. In one account, he writes, “Contrary to what a lot of people think, I don’t enjoy doing press. I’ve been asked the same questions a million times now, and I don’t particularly like talking about my personal life. Nonetheless, I understand that getting press can be very helpful in making deals, and I don’t mind talking about them. I just try to be very selective.” 1 Trump also says that people who watched him on The Apprentice, read his books, or attended his Learning Annex seminars, might think they know him, but they know only part of him—his business side. “I usually don’t speak much about my personal life or about my personal values or about how I came to be who I am today,” he points out. 2
The story of an immigrant family leaving the homeland for new and wider horizons in America did not necessarily foster pride immediately in the Trump family. Fred Trump, Donald’s dad, who was forty-one years Donald’s senior, had concerns about his family’s heritage. He became what was described as self-conscious, perhaps even ashamed, of his German lineage, instead telling people that he was Swedish—that his father, Friedrich, had come to the United States from Sweden and not Germany, a claim that Donald Trump has repeated in at least one book. 3
His father Fred’s confident persona in the world of business and construction unnerved competitors, but not his son. Donald Trump wasn’t intimidated by his dad and had no fear of standing up to him because younger Trump said so: “Fortunately for me, I was drawn to business very early, and I was never intimidated by my father, the way most people were. I stood up to him, and he respected that. We had a relationship that was almost businesslike. I sometimes wonder if we’d have gotten along so well if I hadn’t been as business-oriented as I am.” 4
It was that Trump nose for business and Fred Trump’s business acumen and ambition that set him apart from the world of modest means for others. By age twenty-one, Fred Trump was already diving headfirst into New York City real estate, joining forces with his mother Elisabeth in doing business with E. Trump and Son. Where Donald and his father veered sharply was a penchant for playing it safe when it came to business. Fred Trump and his mother Elisabeth chose the outer boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens for their business ventures rather than fighting it out with cutthroat developers in the fierce (and expensive!) competitive fires of Manhattan, a skyline Donald would change forever in the future.5
Donald may seem a poster child for “excess,” but frugality was actually a hallmark of the Trump household. His father Fred Trump had few peers when it came to his version of frugality and being a model caretaker of finances and goods. There are many stories about his penny-pinching, such as picking up stray nails at a job site and returning them to the workers the next day—saving money and setting an example for his son Donald simultaneously. To cut down on supply costs, he had chemists research the formula for the floor disinfectant he purchased in large quantities, then had workers mix up batches of the disinfectant at a cost significantly less than what he had been paying to a vendor. If he felt there were any lights that could be turned off without affecting the overall lighting, he would think nothing of getting up on a stepladder and removing any light bulbs he thought were unnecessary. 6 How many Trumps did it take to change a light bulb? One, apparently.
Fred Trump typically worked twelve-hour workdays (also known as “half-days” to the world’s most devoted workaholics), sometimes busting it right alongside his construction workers. Fred didn’t always click with Donald when it came to business matters, but he respected his son’s robust work ethic and his knack for producing great results, at one point telling a business magazine, “Everything Donald touches turns to gold!” There are also those times when proud papa would pull out a photo of Donald in a tuxedo and show it around to others and they would already know who the young Trump was, a sure sign of the impact Donald was making in the business world at an early age.
Trump the elder also made it a point to know what was going on in the world around him, especially when it might involve business matters, for better or worse. Following in his own father’s business footsteps, Fred discovered something in the mid-1930s that would provide a sustained lifeblood of opportunities in the construction business—all of this coming to light when Fred was hitting his thirties and Donald was still ten years away from being born. His newfound ticket; the government. Thanks to a number of New Deal programs pushed into existence by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, new heavily financed opportunities were being offered to help float businesses such as Fred’s, and he proved skilled at determining how to take full advantage of these programs. In so doing, Fred Trump “joined the ranks of entrepreneurs who constitute one of the oldest fraternities in the Republic: multimillionaires who owe their fortune to subsidies from a grateful government.” 7 Donald learned early that using the system to full advantage would serve him at times in climbing his own ladder of success.
Notes:
1. Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal (New York: Ballantine Books,
1987), 33.
2. Donald J. Trump, Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America
(New York: Threshold Editions, 2015), 128.
3. Michael D’Antonio, Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit
of Success (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015), 52.
4. Dinesh D’Souza, Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the
Making of the Democratic Party (New York: All Points Books, 2018), 71.
5. D’Antonio, Never Enough, 23.
6. David Brody and Scott Lamb, The Faith of Donald J. Trump: A
Spiritual Biography. (New York: Broadside Books, 2018), 14–15.
7. Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump (New York: Center Street,
2017), 133.