Gwenda Blair - The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire

CONTENTS

TO MY CHILDREN, SASHA AND NEWELL, AND TO MY PARENTS,

NEWELL AND GRETA BLAIR

PREFACE

O n Tuesday, June 16, 2015, two days after Donald Trumps 69th birthday, his daughter Ivanka, wearing a tailored sleeveless white dress, stepped onto a temporary stage in the lobby of Trump Tower. Eight American flags stood at attention along the back of the stage, which had a speakers podium faced with bright blue and edged with red. Across the front of the podium, in large white all-capital letters, was the name Trump , a website address, and a presidential campaign slogan, Make America Great Again!, recycled from the 1980 campaign of the nations last celebrity candidate, Ronald Reagan.

It was the culminating moment in an only-in-America story, the three-generational rise of a family dynasty based on doing whatever it took to win, never hesitating to push the envelope, and never giving up.

Donald Trumps grandfather Friedrich, who came to New York from Germany as a 16-year-old in 1885, amassed a nest eggthe first Trump fortuneby mining the miners during the gold rush era. Starting in Seattle, where he became a U.S. citizen, and ending up in the Yukon, he established the Trump MO: scope out the best location (his tended to be in the red-light district); open a business (in his case, restaurants, at times on land to which he had no legal right); and offer customers (most of his were rootless newcomers who had yet to see their first nugget) some right-now comfort in the form of booze and easy access to women. When he later attempted to repatriate to Germany, he massaged this history, insisting that he was a quiet sort who avoided bars and that he had been in the United States during the years he would have been subject to compulsory German military service solely because he wanted to support his widowed mother. But German authorities saw him as a draft dodger and sent him back to the country of his current citizenship the same fate his grandson would propose for undocumented immigrants more than century later.

Donalds father, Fred, became a multimillionaire by exploiting every loophole when constructing government-backed housing in Queens and Brooklyn. When payment for federal projects was by the unit instead of the room, he upped the number of efficiencies and one bedrooms, even though the architects had intended larger apartments and the buyers, many of them GIs returning from World War II, needed more space for their growing families. Later, when building apartments subsidized by New York State, Fred set up shell equipment companies and billed the state for trucks and cement mixers he rented from himself at inflated prices.

A generation later, Donald refined the family formula by adding new techniques, including celebrity branding and extreme self-praise. While he heeded classic business basics like location, location, location, his personal mantra would be exaggerate, exaggerate, exaggerateand he used it to become a billionaire through high-end building; casino gambling; and his reality TV show, The Apprentice . As fresh-faced young contestants competed for a job with the Trump Organization, he played the archetypal boss, pouncing on mistakes and dismissing excuses, ever aware of the bottom line.

But what few contestants or viewers knew was that behind this role lay a life story with more twists and turns than any television producer could possibly imagine. Nor did they know that Donald himself had been a lifelong apprentice to a powerful man whom he admired, rebelled against, studied, competed with, and eventually surpassedhis father, Fred.

Donald, the erstwhile apprentice and one of the most celebrated figures of his time, lived in the center of photographers cameras, but his own master existed outside the medias glare. The two mens lives were vastly differentas different as business in the middle of the twentieth century from that of the early decades of the twenty-first, as different as America during and after World War II from what the country became in the postcold war era.

Perhaps the biggest difference between this apprentice and his master was that Fred put his name on only one development: Trump Village, a cluster of 23-story middle-income apartment buildings in Coney Island. It was his tallest project as well as his last.

Everything Donald built was far taller; and every pitch for every venture hyped not just the project at hand but the Trump name itself, which a prescient ancestor had changed from Drumpf. Starting with Trump Tower, Donalds signature building in Manhattan, everythingfrom the 12-inch-tall Apprentice Talking Donald Trump Doll, a pint-sized personal mentor with the real-estate magnates pursed mouth and bushy eyebrows, to the 98-story Trump Tower Chicago, the 16th-tallest structure in the worldwould bear the Trump name front and center in large, shiny letters, seemingly a guarantee of success when attached to any business undertaking.

This apprentice did not always follow his masters advice. When Donald ignored his fathers old-fashioned all-brick aesthetic in favor of modern glass-walled skyscrapers, he achieved great success; when he disobeyed his fathers financial precepts and signed personal financial guarantees for nearly $1 billion, he brought about a near disaster.

But unlike other magnates of the time, Donald emerged from financial turmoil to create a second, virtual empire. From the start, he had marketed himself as the embodiment of the American dream of wealth and fame, and to claw his way back from the brink, he would cash in on that achievement. Rather than restricting his name to buildings, products, and other enterprises which he actually owned, he would license the use of his name, a practice that would produce a tidy income in fees, insulate him from financial risk, and allow the world at large to think that he held title to far more than was the case.

Now, as TV cameras and reporters clustered in front of the podium, Donald and the rest of the country were about to find out whether the same magic that was presumed to attach to his name in business would carry over to the political realm.

And who better to hand him off to the public than his daughter Ivanka, a former model with her own line of jewelry, perfume, and clothing? Now 33 and the mother of two children, she was also an executive at the Trump Organization, as were her two brothers from Donald Trumps first marriage, Donald Jr., 37, and the father of five children, and Eric, 31.

With her brown eyes and her long blond hair tucked up in a neat chignon, Ivanka bore a marked resemblance to her mother, Ivana, also a former model. But when Ivanka began speaking, she was her fathers daughter. Radiating self-confidence, she said she was introducing a man who needed no introduction; nonetheless, she spent five minutes lauding his success, vision, brilliance, passion, strength, boldness, and independence. When she finally finished, a recording of Canadian singer Neil Youngs rendition of Rockin in the Free World reverberated from the cavernous lobbys peach-colored marble walls.

Then, as is customary at the announcement of a candidacy, the contender appeared. But rather than enter from the wings, as is traditional, Donald Trump stood at the top of a gilded multi-story escalator with his third wife, Melania, yet another former model, also wearing a white dress. Gazing out, they seemed for a moment like a royal couple viewing subjects from the balcony of the palace.