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Making the man: to understand Trump, look at his relationship with his dad
The
art of understanding Donald Trump is much in demand right now. What is
his appeal? Why does he talk in that very recognizable cadence? What is
his relationship with truth, exactly? And how does he manage to spout
out such gibberish – especially in front of the editorial board of the Washington Post – and get away with it? There are many possible angles of attack. We get op-eds about his
alleged similarities with Hitler, about the era of Republican decadence,
about how the media gives him too much attention. But one angle that
largely goes unexamined is the place even the dimmest of therapists
would start: his dad. And of course, there’s more to heredity than
money. For example, there’s hair. Everyone agrees that Frederick Christ Trump (the biblical middle name
came from his mother’s family) was a more retiring sort than his son,
Donald. But he was not immune to the siren song of hair dye. According
to Gwenda Blair’s book The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate,
he was, late in life, particularly fond of a shade of red that bore a
hint of magenta. Photographs also reveal that Fred liked to wear his
hair a little longer than the average man, combed up into a smooth wave
away from the head. Stop me if this starts sounding familiar. And then there’s the myth of the self-made man. In his autobiography,
The Art of the Deal, Donald claims that he learned a strong work ethic
from his father. “I never threw money around,” he also wrote with a
straight face in those innocent days before his first bankruptcy, and
before the Apprentice let America get a view of the inside of his
apartment. “I learned from my father that every penny counts, because
before too long your pennies turn into dollars.” That sounds nice. Unfortunately, The Art of the Deal is a
difficult book to trust, not least because it contains at least one
giant whopper with respect to Fred: it claims that the Trumps were of
Swedish ancestry, when in fact they were German. As the world knows now,
courtesy of John Oliver,
the family’s original name was Drumpf and Fred even spoke German. But
he, too, worked to conceal this, in part because at the height of his
working life it wasn’t such a good idea to be a German in America. In
the late 1940s and 1950s, it gave off entirely the wrong impression.
Though perhaps, in the end, it would not have been a wrong impression: last fall,
reports surfaced that Fred Trump may have had ties to the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1927, the New York Times reported that a Fred Trump was arrested in
Queens during a Klan rally of about 1,000 people. The address matched
the address of Fred Trump’s childhood home. To the New York Times itself,
Donald Trump replied, “It’s unfair to mention it, to be honest, because
there were no charges. They said there were charges against other
people, but there were absolutely no charges, totally false.” And although Fred Trump’s fortune was made mostly in building
low-income housing, he had repeated run-ins with civil rights groups
about racial discrimination in his housing allocations. In fact, in
Donald Trump’s first New York Times mention
in 1973, he’s defending his father and his company, Trump Management,
from charges that they discriminated against potential black tenants,
outright refusing them apartments because they were black. (The matter
was settled without the Trumps admitting to any guilt.) “His story is classic Horatio Alger,” Donald Trump
said, bulldozing right over that narrative in The Art of the Deal. But
as reported in the Blair book and numerous articles about Trump over the
years, Fred Trump actually didn’t start out in poverty. Fred Trump’s endeavors were much less flashy than his son’s, of
course, and Donald benefited from the fact that the Trump family’s
eldest son, Freddy Jr, never wanted to be part of the family business
and died at 43.
But few men of Donald Trump’s age and virility are eager to see
themselves as the beneficiaries of privilege. To prove you were a man,
you were supposed to come out of your (mansion-like) cave and eat only
what you killed yourself.
But Trump bent those rules for himself, taking his father’s money to get himself established. The Washington Post tried to do the math
on that recently, and they came up with no clear answer. Trump says he
simply took out a small million-dollar loan when he was getting started,
and numerous articles over the years suggest Donald Trump took out
several other loans from the Bank of Dad. Once, to evade bankruptcy law,
Fred Trump lent his son $3.5m in casino chips. And that’s not to mention his actual inheritance when Fred Trump died in 1999. Trump’s grandfather Frederick Trump, who also invested in real
estate, left behind an estate of just over $30,000 when he died in 1918,
according to Blair. It would be the equivalent of just under $500,000
in today’s dollars. And Trump’s grandmother, Elizabeth Christ Trump, was
actually the one who set up the family business. According to Blair’s
book, 15-year-old Fred Trump simply slipped into the role he named for
her. He made the best of the situation, for sure. But it was more like a
cheap-suit-to-riches story. It is true that Fred Trump kept things going by penny-pinching. A
1940 interview in American Builder and Building Age compared him to
Henry Ford, the car magnate, because Fred Trump hated to borrow money.
He was also cheap on the overhead. “The stories that are told about Fred
Trump are legion,” the profile said. “For example, until last year he never had an office, and carried all
his bookkeeping records around in his pocket. The ‘office’ he now has
is a little structure of about 90 square feet of space in which the only
occupant is a girl to write letters and answer the telephone. He still
does most of his office work on the breakfast table at home. He keeps
most of his records, including payroll and material disbursements, in a
little black book carried in his inside pocket.”
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This information certainly makes Trump’s giant towers and mahogany boardroom tables look like a kind of overcompensation. The one area where father and son never seem to have competed was
over the sexual love of a woman, or more specifically over the love of
Mary Trump, Fred’s wife and Donald’s mother. Mary Trump actually seems
to have been at best a marginal figure in the Trump family altogether,
rarely meriting much time in any of the articles about Trump over the
years. Instead, business was father-and-son’s Jocasta. “I was never intimidated by my father, the way most people were,”
Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal. “I stood up to him, and he respected
that.” It probably says something that, in Trump’s world, this amounted
to a close relationship. Other friends, to Blair, described the pair as
friendly but not precisely working together. “The two of them together
in the same room was very strange,” she quotes one of them saying. “They
were both talking, supposedly to each other, but I was sure neither
heard what the other was saying. They talked right past each other.”
In fact, every aggressive word Donald Trump ever directed at his
father seems to have been about business. When Fred died, Donald Trump
gave a cheerful quote for his father’s New York Times obituary,
focusing on the way his dad had never wanted to expand into Manhattan.
“It was good for me,” he said. “You know, being the son of somebody, it
could have been competition to me. This way, I got Manhattan all to
myself!” That might seem like a weird thing to say when your father has just
died. But then, the family Trump didn’t do things the ordinary way.
For Donald Trump, Lessons From a Brother’s Suffering
The Trump siblings — from
left, Robert, Elizabeth, Freddy, Donald and Maryanne — in an undated
photo. Freddy Trump, who died in 1981, was eight years older than
Donald.
One evening in the 1960s, Donald J. Trump,
still in college but eager to make it big, met his older brother,
Freddy, for dinner in a Queens apartment complex built by their father.
Things went bad fast.
As
Freddy, a fun-loving airline pilot with a gift for imitating W. C.
Fields, joked with his best friend at the table, his younger brother
grew impatient. Grow up, get serious and make something of yourself in
the family business, Donald scolded.
“Donald
put Freddy down quite a bit,” said Annamaria Schifano, then the
girlfriend of Freddy’s best friend, who was at the dinner and recalled
Donald’s tendency to pick fights and storm out. “There was a lot of
combustion.”
For
Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate whose appeal is predicated on an
aura of toughness, personal achievement and perpetual success, the story
of Freddy, a handsome, gregarious and self-destructive figure who died
as an alcoholic in 1981 at the age of 43, is bleak and seldom told.
In
a telephone interview last week, Mr. Trump said he had learned by
watching his brother how bad choices could drag down even those who
seemed destined to rise. Seeing his brother suffering led him to avoid
ever trying alcohol or cigarettes, he said.
But
the painful case of Freddy Trump, eight years his brother’s senior and
once the heir apparent to their father’s real estate empire, also serves
as an example of the dangers of failing to conform in a family
dominated by a driven, perfectionist patriarch and an aggressive younger
brother.
In
the upwardly mobile Trump family, Donald was the second and favorite
son, the one who got into the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School, relished the combat of New York real estate and ultimately made
the Trump name an international brand. Freddy was the disappointment,
who lacked the killer instinct and drifted so far from his father’s
ambitions that his children were largely cut out of the patriarch’s
will.
Freddy,
as he was known, “was caught sort of in the middle as somebody who
didn’t really love it, and only because he didn’t really love it, he
wasn’t particularly good at it,” Mr. Trump said. “My father had great
confidence in me, which maybe even put pressure on Fred.”
Asked
whether Freddy’s experience in the family business, which friends
described as miserable, contributed to the drinking that ultimately
killed him, Mr. Trump said: “I hope not. I hope not.”
From
the beginning, Freddy stood out as different from his authoritarian,
workaholic father. As Fred Sr. became one of the master builders of the
New York boroughs, his mischievous son drank Cokes, and eventually
beers, with friends in the family recreation room.
Less quick-witted than his older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, now a federal judge, he was also more welcoming of outsiders than his father.
When
Ms. Schifano moved to Jamaica Estates, Queens, the wealthy enclave
where the Trumps lived, Freddy confided to her that his parents had
panicked because, as Italians, the Schifanos were “the first ethnic
family to move into the neighborhood.” But Freddy was less concerned
with ethnic distinctions. When he enrolled at Lehigh University in
Pennsylvania, the boy with blond hair who had attended an Episcopalian
boys’ preparatory school on Long Island joined a Jewish fraternity.
“It
may have been Freddy’s first attempt to make his own statement to his
father,” said his best friend at Lehigh, Bruce Turry, who, like several
other former fraternity brothers, remembered Freddy claiming that his
father, the son of German immigrants, was Jewish. (He was not.) “Freddy
was a classic illustration of someone who had a father complex.”
The
Jewish fraternity brothers kidded Freddy about his middle name, Christ.
He found the ribbing, like much else in life, hysterical.
Freddy Trump circa 1965. He would die at age 43. “I watched him,” his brother Donald said. “And I learned from him.”Credit
via Annamaria Schifano
In
his junior year, he and Mr. Turry called themselves the “mysterious
two” and went through the fraternity house short-sheeting beds. But
Freddy was also generous to his fraternity brothers.
He
gave Mr. Turry, who was saving to buy his girlfriend an engagement
ring, a stock tip and left notes for him about his improving investment.
“Your eighth of a carat is up to a quarter-carat,” he wrote.
It
eventually became apparent to his fraternity brothers that Freddy, who
wore Brooks Brothers clothes that draped his thin frame, was wealthy. He
drove a Corvette and owned a Century speedboat. Sometimes he would take
his little brother Donald, then a student at an upstate military
academy, onboard for summer fishing expeditions off Long Island.
“I
hope you don’t mind, I have to take my pain-in-the-ass brother Donald
along,” another fraternity brother, Stuart Oltchick, recalled him
saying.
At
the time, Donald looked up to his brother and kept a photograph of him,
standing next to an airplane, in his dorm room at military school.
But
he also looked toward a future without him in the way. According to
“The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire,” by Gwenda Blair,
Donald told his roommate that Freddy’s decision to be a pilot rather
than run the family business had cleared a path for him to succeed his
father.
Freddy
developed his passion for aviation at Lehigh’s flying club, where he
flew under electrical lines and raced storms home. But as his 1960
graduation neared, his father began building Trump Village, an enormous development on Coney Island and the first to bear the family name. Freddy was eager to make his mark.
“He
was going to make the Trump name known,” as his father dreamed, Mr.
Turry said. “We were going to live in one of his father’s apartments and
have a ringside seat at the Copacabana.”
It
didn’t work out. While working on Trump Village, Freddy was berated by
his father for installing expensive new windows instead of repairing old
ones. Mr. Trump said that their father “could be unyielding,” and that
Freddy had struggled with his abundant criticism and stinginess with
praise.
“For me, it worked very well,” Mr. Trump said. “For Fred, it wasn’t something that was going to work.”
Mr. Oltchick said Freddy had “complained that he didn’t get his appreciation.”
As Freddy stumbled, Mr. Trump said, “I watched him. And I learned from him.”
Freddy
left real estate to pursue his passion for flying, working for Trans
World Airlines, which gave him some good years. In 1962, at age 23, he
married Linda Clapp, a stewardess. They had two children, whom they
named Fred and Mary, after Freddy’s parents.
The
family settled in Queens and spent free time with Freddy’s childhood
best friend, William Drake, also a pilot, and his wife, Ms. Schifano.
The
couples went deep-sea fishing and ate clams on the half shell. Once,
when they spotted a Soviet trawler in international waters off the coast
of Montauk, Freddy circled it as his friends jeered, “Do svidaniya!” —
Russian for “goodbye.”
But as he reached his mid-20s, he began drinking heavily. And Donald, then
in college, did not approve, haranguing his older brother about wasting
his time on frivolous pursuits and telling him to come back to real
estate.
“I
was too young; I didn’t realize,” he said. “Now I give speeches on
success, and I tell people, ‘You’ve got to love what you’re doing.’ ”
Mr.
Trump said he had eventually come to recognize that his brother was a
talented pilot and belonged in the clouds, not amid bricks and mortar.
But by the time Donald had graduated from college in 1968 and had begun
ascending at Trump headquarters on Coney Island, Freddy’s drinking was
out of control.
Ms.
Schifano recalled that the last time she saw Freddy, one night in the
late 1960s, he looked gaunt. Even though she prepared his favorite food,
roast beef, he barely ate.
The
years that followed were unkind. He got divorced, quit flying because
he knew his drinking presented a danger and failed at commercial fishing
in Florida. By the late 1970s, he was living back in his parents’ house
in Jamaica Estates, working on one of his father’s maintenance crews.
By
then, Donald had broken into the Manhattan real estate market and the
city’s celebrity culture. A younger brother, Robert, had followed in
Donald’s footsteps, joining the family company and eventually becoming a
top executive there.
In
1977, Donald asked Freddy to be the best man at his first wedding, to
the Czech model Ivana Winklmayr, an honor Donald said he hoped would be
“a good thing for him.” But the drinking continued, and four years
later, Freddy was dead.
Over the next decades, Donald put the Trump name on skyscrapers, casinos and planes.
In 1999, the family patriarch died,
and 650 people, including many real estate executives and politicians,
crowded his funeral at Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue.
But
the drama was hardly put to rest. Freddy’s son, Fred III, spoke at the
funeral, and that night, his wife went into labor with their son, who
developed seizures that led to cerebral palsy. The Trump family promised
that it would take care of the medical bills.
Then
came the unveiling of Fred Sr.’s will, which Donald had helped draft.
It divided the bulk of the inheritance, at least $20 million, among his
children and their descendants, “other than my son Fred C. Trump Jr.”
Freddy’s
children sued, claiming that an earlier version of the will had
entitled them to their father’s share of the estate, but that Donald and
his siblings had used “undue influence” over their grandfather, who had
dementia, to cut them out.
A week later, Mr. Trump retaliated by withdrawing the medical benefits critical to his nephew’s infant child.
“I was angry because they sued,” he explained during last week’s interview.
At
the time, he attributed their exclusion from the will to his father’s
“tremendous dislike” for Freddy’s ex-wife, Linda. She and Fred III
declined to comment on the dispute.
Mr.
Trump said that the litigation had been settled “very amicably” and
that he was fond of Fred III, who works in real estate, though not for
the Trump organization. He also said that, at 69, he had grown to
appreciate his brother’s free spirit.
“He
would have been an amazing peacemaker if he didn’t have the problem,
because everybody loved him,” he said. “He’s like the opposite of me.”
The cross is a symbol of love because it resembles geometrically the form of a man with arms outstretched, about to embrace, ready to love. Psychoanalysis
has demonstrated man's inability and fear to love. Crucifixion,
therefore, represents a warning. It shows the man who terrified mankind
by loving and demanding complete love, with outstretched arms, ready to
embrace, but tied and nailed in such a way that he could no longer do
so. (...) -Bernard Meyerson and Louis Stollar
