Fred Trump

Fred Trump was an enormously successful and wealthy real estate developer who played a pivotal role in shaping the 20th-century landscape of residential housing in New York City and its surrounding areas. His influence on the 21st century, however, may have been more profound, when the son he groomed to take over his business empire, Donald J. Trump, became president of the United States.

Early years

Frederick Christ (pronounced with a short i) Trump was the middle child of Elizabeth and Friedrich Trump, who had settled in the United States after Friedrich Trump was ordered out of their native Germany on charges that an earlier expedition to the United States was a scheme to avoid military service. Elizabeth and Friedrich Trump ultimately settled in New York City in 1905; Frederick was born three months later.

Friedrich Trump had originally come to the United States in the 1880s as a teenager who identified himself as Friedrich Trumpf and listed his occupation as a farmer. He built hotels during the gold rush of the 1890s, and by the time his family settled in New York he was a wealthy man and the final f had disappeared from his name. In 1918 Friedrich Trump was struck ill while walking through New York with his then 12-year-old son Frederick. He died shortly thereafter, a victim of the global flu pandemic of 1918–19. Friedrich Trump chafed at the anti-German sentiment that arose in the country during World War I. He would pass the concern on to his son, who would feel it more acutely as a businessman during World War II. Fred Trump claimed repeatedly that the family was from Sweden, not Germany. (Donald Trump has, at times, repeated that falsehood.)

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Friedrich Trump left his widow a wealthy woman, and she created a company named E. Trump & Son, which would be the precursor to a building empire that would continue well into the next century. Her son—who would later remember his childhood passion for building, saying, “When I was a kid I used to play with blocks, erector sets and things like that”—built the first of his many homes when he was just 17 years old.

Building boom and Depression

As the boom years of the 1920s got underway, Fred Trump saw nothing but opportunity. He would focus his attention on the largely undeveloped New York City borough of Queens, which saw its population more than double in the decade to more than one million people, almost all of them white.

In 1927 Trump found himself in the middle of a Memorial Day parade in his Queens neighborhood at which the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) marched and stirred up anti-Catholic sentiment. When fighting broke out among police, the KKK, and those at the parade, Trump wound up arrested for “refusing to disperse…when ordered to do so.” The charge was eventually dropped.

Although the stock market crash of 1929 and resulting Great Depression spelled doom for many New York businessmen, Trump saw nothing but opportunity, buying up vacant land, investing in grocery stores, and even building an upscale housing development. By the mid-1930s he was one of New York City’s most prominent young business leaders, with one local newspaper hailing him as “the Henry Ford of the home-building industry.” He had also just met a 23-year-old named Mary Anne MacLeod; they would marry in 1936 and remain together until Trump’s death in 1999.

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By this time Trump’s approach to business had become legendary throughout New York. He was seen as a relentlessly hard worker, but he was also notoriously cheap. As he walked his building projects, he stopped to pick up nails from the ground so that they could be reused. He mixed his own cleaning solutions rather than buying them commercially. And his housing projects reflected his frugality. One development was called “Trump’s dumps on stumps” by some New Yorkers. His ability to see opportunities to make and save money—even when they were dubious in nature—would continue throughout his life.

Father Fred

Fred and Mary Trump would go on to have five children: Maryanne; Fred, Jr.; Elizabeth; Donald; and Robert. As the Trump family grew, so did the family business; Fred Trump correctly saw the return of veterans from World War II as an enormous housing opportunity. The family of seven lived in a 23-room mansion that Trump built and resembled a Southern plantation. The house, in an upscale neighborhood of professionals, boasted a limousine with a vanity license plate that read FCT.

Still, by all accounts, Fred and Mary Trump were strict parents, raising their children with high expectations for upright behavior. Despite growing up in wealth, the Trump children were expected to do chores and earn money by delivering newspapers. (Fred Trump apparently drove them to make their deliveries in bad weather.)

Trump initially saw his eldest son as the heir apparent to the family business, but Fred Trump, Jr., had dreams of becoming a pilot, and so the paternal attention turned to Donald, who was a bit of a rebel and chafed at the parental rules. Still Fred Trump seemed to encourage that streak in his son, telling him that he was a “king” and urging him to become a “killer” in anything that he pursued. Soon Donald Trump was working for his father, including the summer between high school and college when his father had him do yard work and maintenance at a Cincinnati, Ohio, apartment complex Fred Trump had purchased.

Later business empire

In the early 1960s Trump embarked on the largest construction project of his career, a 3,800-apartment complex in Coney Island. Called Trump Village, it was one of the very few projects in his career that Trump put his name on. As was his nature, he ordered it built as cheaply as possible and was the recipient of a state grant to help build it. But when he recorded a profit of $1.8 million on the project, he was accused of inflating the costs he reported to the government. It was not the first time Trump had been accused of misusing government funds to pad his profits.

In 1954 Trump was investigated by the Senate Banking Committee for allegedly abusing the loan-guarantee program by deliberately overestimating the costs of his construction projects to secure larger loans, allowing him to keep the difference between the loan amounts and his construction costs. In testimony before the Senate committee, Trump admitted that he had built a Brooklyn apartment complex for $3.7 million less than the amount of his government-insured loan. In both instances Trump denied wrongdoing, and no charges were filed.

That was not the only controversy that Trump faced regarding how he operated his business. As early as the 1950s Trump was accused—by no less than the legendary Woody Guthrie—of discouraging Black residents from living at Trump properties. Guthrie penned lyrics accusing “old man Trump” of stirring up “racial hate…when he drawed that color line.”

Later, in the early 1970s, after Donald Trump had become the president of the Trump company with Fred Trump as chair, the company faced additional allegations of racial discrimination in its rental practices. Two former Trump employees told the Justice Department that “Fred Trump and other agents” had “discouraged rental to blacks” and outlined a numbering system for identifying Black tenants. The result was a federal lawsuit, United States of America v. Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump, and Trump Management, Inc. On October 16, 1973, The New York Times ran a front-page story about the case headlined, “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City.” The suit was settled two years later with no admission of wrongdoing on the part of the Trumps but with the agreement that they would publish advertisements in newspapers making clear they welcomed Black tenants at their properties.

In 1976 Fred Trump set up eight trusts, one for each of his children and grandchildren. He deposited $1 million into each of the accounts. This was not the only time Trump had helped out his children financially. Perhaps none was more creative than when he bought $3.5 million in chips at a Donald Trump-owned casino and then never gambled with them. The 1990 purchase came at a time when his son had missed loan payments on the casino, and the chips served as an under-the-table infusion of cash to the business.

Fred Trump remained involved on varying levels in the Trump organization until 1997, when the family took control of the vast majority of Fred Trump’s holdings in a move that The New York Times reported in 2018 was hugely advantageous in terms of tax payments. By that time he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer disease and could not recognize family members. He would not live to see the son he had called a king be elected president. When he died in 1999, at the age of 93, his net worth was estimated at between $250 million and $300 million.

Donald Trump on his father

Donald Trump called his father’s funeral “by far the toughest day of my life” and described himself as being “really close to my father.” In fact, in his offices—both at Trump Tower and in the White House—the family photo that was displayed prominently was of Fred Trump.

But the two had notable and noticeable differences. In his book The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump wrote of his relationship with his father, “I was never intimidated by my father, the way most people were. I stood up to him, and he respected that.” And Trump came to loathe his father’s business strategy of building cheaply in New York’s outer boroughs; Trump wanted to build glass and steel skyscrapers in Manhattan.

But despite the stylistic differences, Fred Trump seemed to acknowledge the merit of his son’s desire for glitz and glitter. In 1983, as he overlooked one of his son’s gleaming projects, Trump said:

I told Donald to stay out of Manhattan and now look at him.