Fred Trump

• 1. Introduction

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  Frederick Christ Trump was an American real estate developer who built more than 27,000 apartments in New York. He was born in the Bronx on the 11th of October 1905 to German immigrant parents, and he died in 1999. One of his five children was Donald Trump, who became the 45th and 47th president of the United States. Fred's own life story was packed with polished legends, and some of them were stories he invented about himself. This documentary asks how a boy from Queens became one of the city's most successful builders, and how federal housing money made that possible. It asks what senators, state investigators and a Justice Department lawsuit made of his methods. Finally, it asks why he disguised his ancestry, and how a vast fortune passed to his children with so little tax paid.

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• 2. Roots and Beginnings

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  A restaurant and brothel for gold miners in the Klondike made Fred's father, Friedrich Trump, wealthy before Fred was born. Friedrich returned to the German village of Kallstadt in 1901 and married Elizabeth Christ the following year. The couple moved to New York City, where their daughter Elizabeth was born in 1904, then went back to Kallstadt later that year. They hoped to re-establish residency in Bavaria, but Friedrich was banished for dodging the draft. The family returned to New York on the 1st of July 1905. Fred's younger brother John G. was born in 1907, and all three children grew up speaking German at home. In September 1908 the family moved to Woodhaven, Queens.

  By the age of 10, Fred was delivering for a butcher. Many details of his childhood come from autobiographical accounts, which stress independence, learning and above all hard work, to the point of being somewhat fictionalized. About two years later, on Memorial Day, his father died in the 1918 flu pandemic, quite suddenly according to Fred. His mother carried on the real-estate business Friedrich had begun.

  From 1918 to 1923 Fred attended Richmond Hill High School in Queens while working as a caddy, a curb whitewasher, a delivery boy and a newspaper hawker. He wanted to become a builder, so he put up a garage for a neighbor and took night classes in carpentry and blueprint reading. By one account he also studied plumbing, masonry and electrical wiring through correspondence courses. Other biographers limit his construction education to the years after high school, when he was already working in the field.

  After graduating in January 1923, Fred found full-time work pulling lumber to construction sites, then trained as a carpenter's assistant. His mother held the business in her own name until he reached 21, the age of majority. The name "E. Trump & Son" appeared in advertising by 1924. In that year, supposedly, he used an $800 loan from his mother to finish and sell his first house. Public records, however, show no building by him until 1927, the year the company was incorporated and after his 21st birthday. He purportedly built 19 more homes in Hollis, Queens by 1926, selling some before completion to pay for others.

  Investigative journalist Wayne Barrett argues that Fred exaggerated the length of his career in 1934. At the time, Fred was telling a federal court why he deserved to obtain a dissolved company's mortgage servicer and its assets. The outcome of that case would make his name.

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• 3. Government-Backed Boom

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  In 1933 Fred opened Trump Market in Woodhaven, Queens, one of the first modern supermarkets in New York City. He copied the self-service model of Long Island's King Kullen chain and advertised with the slogan "Serve Yourself and Save!" The store was popular almost at once. After six months, though, Fred sold it to King Kullen itself.

  The following year, in federal court, Fred and a partner took over the mortgage-servicing arm of Brooklyn's J. Lehrenkrauss Corporation, a company that had gone bankrupt and been broken up. The deal gave him access to the titles of properties close to foreclosure. He bought them cheaply and resold them at a profit. Ventures like this soon made him famous as one of the city's most successful businessmen.

  By 1936 Fred had 400 workers digging foundations for houses priced between $3,000 and $6,250. He made use of loan subsidies from the Federal Housing Administration, a program launched soon after the National Housing Act of 1934. That same law also enabled the discriminatory practice of redlining. Fred borrowed a pricing trick from his father and listed properties at prices ending in 9.99.

  In the late 1930s Fred used a boat off the shore of Coney Island to advertise his houses. It played patriotic music and released swordfish-shaped balloons that could be redeemed for $25 or $250 toward one of his properties. In 1938 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called him "the Henry Ford of the home building industry." Fred predicted that he would profit from World War II. By 1942 he had built 2,000 homes in Brooklyn using FHA funds.

  A defense-housing plan in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, was meant to be his biggest project yet, with 700 houses near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The federal Office of Production Management, set up in 1941, had allowed FHA money to be used there. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war on Japan, the plan was dissolved in favor of defense housing at Hampton Roads, near Norfolk, Virginia. Fred was already working on an apartment complex there. Congress added a provision to the National Housing Act that insured mortgages on defense apartments, which let Fred own the properties he built for war workers. By 1944 he had constructed 1,360 wartime apartments, almost 10% of all those built in Norfolk. He also built barracks and garden apartments for Navy personnel near shipyards in Norfolk, Newport News and Chester, Pennsylvania.

  Following the war, Fred moved into middle-income housing for the families of returning veterans. From 1947 to 1949 he built Shore Haven in Bensonhurst, with 32 six-story buildings and a shopping center across some 30 acres, backed by $9 million in FHA funding. In 1950 he built the 23-building Beach Haven Apartments on 40 acres near Coney Island, with $16 million in FHA funds. Between them, the two projects held more than 2,700 apartments. Beach Haven would soon draw the attention of Washington.

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• 4. Profiteering Inquiries

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  In early 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower and other federal leaders began denouncing real-estate profiteers. That June, The New York Times listed Fred among 35 city builders accused of profiteering from government contracts. A U.S. Senate banking committee investigated him and others for windfall gains.

  Fred and his partner William Tomasello were held up as examples of how builders profited from FHA backing. They paid $34,200 for a plot of land, then rented it to their own corporation for $76,960 a year under a 99-year lease. If the apartments built there ever defaulted, the FHA would owe them $1.924 million. They also appeared to have obtained loans for Beach Haven Apartments that exceeded its cost by $3.5 million. Fred answered that he had not withdrawn the money, so he had not literally pocketed the profits. He added that rising costs would have forced him to invest more than the 10% of the mortgage that the FHA did not cover, which would have meant a loss.

  In 1961 Fred donated $2,500 to the re-election campaign of New York mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. The gift helped win favor for Trump Village, a large Coney Island apartment complex built in 1963-64 for $70 million. It was among his last major projects and the only one to carry his name. His other low-income apartments and row houses stretched across neighborhoods from Sheepshead Bay and Flatbush to Flushing and Jamaica Estates.

  In 1966 New York State investigators looked at him again. After Fred overestimated building costs sponsored by a state program, he made $598,000 from equipment rentals on Trump Village, and the money went into other projects. He testified on the 27th of January 1966 that he had personally done nothing wrong, and he praised the success of the project. The commission called him "a pretty shrewd character" with a "talent for getting every ounce of profit out of his housing project." No indictments followed. Instead, the commission suggested that the state housing program needed tighter administration and accountability. Before a deposition set for the 31st of March 1966, a deputy attorney general had also asked the FBI what reports it held on him.

  On the 1st of July 1965 Fred bought Coney Island's recently closed Steeplechase Park for $2.3 million, planning luxury apartments. The next year he announced a 160-foot enclosed dome with recreational facilities and a convention center. At a highly publicized ceremony in September 1966, he demolished the park's Pavilion of Fun, a large glass-enclosed amusement center. He reportedly sold bricks to guests so they could smash the remaining glass panels. Those panels included an iconic image of the park's mascot, the "Funny Face."

  The following month, New York City announced plans to acquire the grounds for recreational use. Fred filed a series of court cases over the proposed rezoning and ultimately won $1.3 million. The site sat vacant for several years, and then he began subleasing it to a manager of fairground rides. The city took another decade to reclaim the property. In July 2016 the Coney Island History Project marked the 50th anniversary of the demolition with a special exhibit.

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• 5. Housing Discrimination Case

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  In July 1972 the New York City Commission on Human Rights and the Urban League sent test applicants to apartment complexes owned by Fred. The testers found that white applicants were offered apartments, while black applicants were generally turned away and told nothing was vacant. The superintendent of Beach Haven Apartments said this happened at the direction of his boss. Both groups took the matter to the U.S. Justice Department. In October 1973 its Civil Rights Division sued the Trump Organization, naming Fred and his son Donald, for violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Trump attorney Roy Cohn answered by countersuing the government for $100 million, accusing it of false accusations.

  The FBI interviewed about three dozen former Trump employees. Some testified that they knew of no racial profiling and that a small percentage of the apartments were rented to black or Puerto Rican tenants. Others described a different picture. A former doorman said his supervisor told him to quote prospective black tenants a rent double the real figure. Four landlords or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the head office for approval were coded by the applicant's race.

  One former employee described a code, which he believed was used across the company's Brooklyn branch, for "low lifes." He said it covered "blacks, Puerto Ricans, apparent drug users, or any other type of undesirable applicant," and that nine times out of ten it meant the applicant was black. A rental agent who worked for the company for two weeks said he asked Fred whether he should rent to black applicants. At first he was told it was "absolutely against the law to discriminate." When he asked again, he was instructed not to rent to blacks, and he was advised not to rent to people on welfare.

  Meanwhile, Fred acquired up to 20% of Starrett City, a large, federally subsidized housing complex in Brooklyn. It opened in 1974 with a stated desegregation goal of renting 70% of its units to white people and the rest to minorities.

  A consent decree between the Justice Department and the Trump Organization was signed on the 10th of June 1975, and both sides claimed victory. The company pointed out that the settlement did not require it to accept people on welfare as tenants. The head of the Justice Department's housing division called the decree one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated. It barred the Trumps, personally and as a company, from discriminating in the sale or rental of a dwelling. It also required them to advertise vacancies in minority newspapers for two years, promote minorities to professional jobs, and list vacancies on a preferential basis. Finally, it ordered them to acquaint themselves personally and in detail with the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

  Tenant complaints followed in the same decade. In 1975 residents of two Trump tower complexes in Norfolk held a monthlong rent strike over rodent and insect infestations, along with failing water heating, air conditioning and elevators. In early 1976 a county judge ordered Fred to correct code violations at a 504-unit property in Seat Pleasant, Maryland. The county's housing investigator listed broken windows, dilapidated gutters and missing fire extinguishers. After a court date and a series of phone calls, Fred was invited to the property in September 1976 to meet county officials, and he was arrested on the spot. He was released on $1,000 bail.

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• 6. Family and Faith

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  At a dance in the early to mid-1930s, Fred met Mary Anne MacLeod, an immigrant from Tong, Lewis, Scotland. He told his mother that same evening that he had met his future wife. Fred was a Lutheran and Mary a Presbyterian, and they married on the 11th of January 1936 at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. George Arthur Buttrick officiated. The reception was held at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, followed by a single-night honeymoon in Atlantic City. They settled in Jamaica, Queens.

  The couple had five children. Maryanne was born in 1937 and Fred Jr. in 1938, followed by Elizabeth in 1942, Donald in 1946 and Robert in 1948. Fred Jr. became an airline pilot with Trans World Airlines. Elizabeth later retired as an executive of Chase Manhattan Bank, and Robert became a top executive of his father's property management company.

  As the United States edged toward war after Elizabeth's birth, Fred moved the family to Virginia Beach in Hampton Roads. In 1944, as his FHA funding slowed, they returned to Jamaica Estates in Queens, where Mary suffered a miscarriage. By 1946 they lived in a five-bedroom Tudor-style house Fred had built. He bought the neighboring half-acre lot and built a mansion of 23 rooms and 9 bathrooms. The family moved in during 1950-51, and Fred and Mary stayed there until their deaths. Decades later they were given an apartment on the 55th floor of Donald's Trump Tower, labelled the 63rd, which they rarely if ever used.

  Fred did not drink, and he ran his household with a firm hand. He imposed strict table manners and curfews, and he forbade cursing, lipstick and snacking between meals. At the end of each day Mary reported on the children's behavior, and Fred decided on any discipline. The mansion had a surveillance system and an intercom, which he used to scold his children. He took them to building sites to collect empty bottles for the deposits. The boys had paper routes, though in bad weather he let them make their deliveries in a limousine. He discouraged interests such as playing music.

  According to Fred Jr.'s daughter, Mary L. Trump, Fred wanted his oldest son to be "invulnerable" so he could take over the business. Fred Jr. was the opposite, she says, and his father "dismantled Fred Jr. by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality." She adds that Fred mocked his son's decision to become an airline pilot. Fred coached Donald to be the heir instead, telling him to "be a killer" and "You are a king." Fred Jr. died in 1981 at the age of 42 from complications of alcoholism.

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• 7. Fortune and Final Years

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  Around 1968 Fred's son Donald joined the family firm, starting out in Brooklyn. That year Fred reputedly secured Donald a deferment from the Vietnam War by giving priority maintenance to a tenant, who supposedly in return diagnosed Donald with bone spurs. In 1971 Donald became president of the company and Fred became chairman. Around 1973 Donald began calling it the Trump Organization. Donald took Manhattan, while his father worked mainly in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. Donald later said, "It was good for me. You know, being the son of somebody, it could have been competition to me. This way, I got Manhattan all to myself." Fred reputedly said, "I gave Donald free rein. He has great vision and everything he touches seems to turn to gold.... He is the smartest person I know."

  Some sources say Fred himself planned the Manhattan expansion. His granddaughter Mary L. Trump says he was "intimately involved in all aspects of Donald's early forays into the Manhattan market." Louise Sunshine, an organization vice president from 1973 to 1985, claims Fred was "behind Donald in every way, shape and form including financing." Barbara Res, a construction vice president, recalled that Fred seated business guests in an off-balance chair. She also said he advised Donald to arrange his office so that adversaries had to face the sun.

  In the mid-1970s Donald received loans from his father that exceeded $14 million. During his 2015-16 presidential campaign, Donald described the help as "a small loan of a million dollars" that he turned into "a company that's worth more than $10 billion." In October 2018 The New York Times reported that Fred created 295 income streams for Donald. The paper concluded that Donald "was a millionaire by age 8." Over his lifetime he received $413 million in inflation-adjusted terms from his father's business empire. That total included over $60.7 million in unadjusted loans, largely unreimbursed.

  In 1976 Fred set up trust funds of $1 million for each of his five children and three grandchildren, which paid yearly dividends. In 1982 he appeared on the first Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, with an estimated $200 million fortune split with Donald. That same year he sold two Norfolk towers and some Hampton Roads military housing, the latter for $8-9 million, with perhaps $6.6 million pledged in promissory notes. In 1998, while Fred had Alzheimer's disease and his son Robert held power of attorney, the notes were transferred to limited liability companies connected to Trump Organization subsidiaries.

  By 1987 Donald's loan debt to his father exceeded $11 million, and Fred invested $15.5 million in Trump Palace Condominiums. In 1991 he sold those shares to his son for $10,000, which appeared to evade millions of dollars in gift taxes by masking a hidden donation. In late 1990 an $18.4 million bond payment came due for Trump's Castle in Atlantic City. Fred sent a bookkeeper to buy $3.5 million in casino chips, which were never used. The casino made its bond payment, and the state's Casino Control Commission judged the transaction an illegal loan and fined the casino $65,000.

  In December 1990 Donald sought to amend his father's will. His sister Maryanne Trump Barry said the change "was basically taking the whole estate and giving it to Donald," so that he could "sell, do anything he wants... with the properties." The Washington Post wrote that it was meant to shield Donald's inheritance from creditors and from Ivana, whom he divorced that month. Fred rejected the proposal. In 1991 he wrote his own will, naming Donald, Maryanne and Robert as co-executors. His lawyer warned that Fred Jr.'s children, Fred III and Mary L. Trump, would not receive their late father's share. "Given the size of your estate, this is tantamount to disinheriting them. You may wish to increase their participation in your estate to avoid ill will in the future."

  In October 1991 a physician diagnosed Fred with "mild senile dementia," citing "obvious memory decline in recent years." A few months later another physician reported that he "did not know his birth date or age." Mary L. Trump recounted that as the illness advanced, her grandfather failed to recognize people he had known for decades, including her and Donald. Fred III said his grandfather had to be reminded why he was at Donald's 1993 wedding to Marla Maples, even though he was the best man. Donald said he first noticed signs of Alzheimer's in the mid-1990s.

  In 1992 Fred and Donald set up a subsidiary company in which each of Fred's living children owned a 20% stake. As detailed by The New York Times in 2018, it had no apparent legitimate purpose. It was used to funnel millions of dollars to the children without gift taxes, by billing Fred far more than the real cost of maintenance work and goods such as boilers. In 1993 the shares of Fred's estate were expected to be worth $35 million for each surviving child. Most of his buildings went into two grantor-retained annuity trusts, which passed about two-thirds of the assets to his four surviving children. They bought the remaining third through annuity payments from 1995 to November 1997. The assets carried a declared value of only $41.4 million, yet they were sold in 2004 for over 16 times that figure. A group led by Rubin Schron agreed to pay $600 million for the apartments in December 2003, and the sale closed in May 2004.

  The Times reported that Fred and Mary gave their children over $1 billion in all. Gifts and inheritances above $550 million should have been taxed at 55%, but records show only $52.2 million, about 5%, was paid. New York law allows prosecution for intentional tax evasion when a fraudulent return can be produced, and no statute of limitations applies. By the 1st of February 1919 Maryanne Trump Barry was being investigated for possible judicial misconduct over the schemes, but the matter was mooted that month by her retirement.

  Fred fell ill with pneumonia and spent a few weeks at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, where he died at the age of 93 on the 25th of June 1999. A wake was held at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel, and more than 600 people attended his funeral at Marble Collegiate Church. He was buried in a family plot at the Lutheran-Christian All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens. His family estimated his estate at $250 million to $300 million, though he held only $1.9 million in cash. His will divided over $20 million after taxes among his surviving children and grandchildren. Mary died on the 7th of August 2000, also at the medical center, aged 88, and the couple's combined estate was valued at $51.8 million.

  After his death, Fred Jr.'s children contested the will, citing their grandfather's dementia. They claimed it was "procured by fraud and undue influence" by Donald, Maryanne and Robert. In depositions, those three said Fred was "sharp as a tack" until just before he died, but also stated that they knew of his cognitive decline.

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• 8. Image and Legacy

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  Decades after hiring the public relations man Howard Rubenstein to publicize a life story that echoed the rags-to-riches novels of Horatio Alger, Fred received the Horatio Alger Award in 1985. Radio and television personality Art Linkletter introduced him, and Ruth Peale, wife of the minister Norman Vincent Peale, presented the award. In his speech Fred said enthusiasm for his work was the key to his success. He also said he had watched other successful people, good and bad, and copied their good qualities. He then, apparently wrongly, credited William Shakespeare with the saying "Never follow an empty wagon because", pointing to his head, "nothing ever falls off". In 2020 a political action committee called MeidasTouch used that line to argue that Donald had squandered his inheritance.

  During World War II Fred began concealing his German ancestry. Despite his German accent, which a New York one later replaced, he denied speaking the language. He dropped the "h" from his middle name, which sidestepped a possible suggestion that a man named Christ could be anti-Semitic. Partly because of the prominence of Jews in New York, he supported Jewish causes, apparently starting in 1941, two weeks after the United States entered the war. The gifts convinced some people that he practiced Judaism, though Mary L. Trump later claimed her grandfather was "quite anti-Semitic." Fred later falsely claimed Swedish descent, and in 1973 he wrongly stated that he was born in New Jersey.

  Those deceptions outlived him. Jerome Tuccille's 1985 biography of Donald repeated the New Jersey birthplace and gave Fred's middle name as Charles. Donald's 1987 book The Art of the Deal described Fred as the son of an immigrant from Sweden, and the New York Post repeated that claim in its eulogy. As president, Donald incorrectly said several times that his father was born in Germany. In the 1980s Fred became friends with Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel's ambassador to the United Nations.

  In May 1927 over 1,000 robed members of the Ku Klux Klan and 400 non-robed supporters infiltrated a Memorial Day parade in Queens, prompting stern police intervention. Eight men were arrested, including the 21-year-old Fred. His charge of "refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so" was dismissed. Another man arrested on the same charge was released because he had been a bystander. Newspaper articles on the incident listed Fred's address in Jamaica, Queens. There is no incontrovertible evidence that he supported the Klan.

  Fred and Mary also gave away buildings. After Mary received care at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, they donated its Trump Pavilion rehabilitation building, and Fred became a trustee. They gave a two-building Brooklyn complex as a home for adults with disabilities, and a New Jersey building valued at $4.75 million to United Cerebral Palsy, for which Donald took credit. They also gave buildings to the National Kidney Foundation. One of Fred's least profitable properties went to the foundation, which The New York Times called one of the largest charitable donations he ever made. His 1992 tax return claimed a deduction based on a stated value of $34 million.

  Fred backed Jewish and Israeli causes, especially after the United States entered the war. Around 1951 he donated the land for the Beach Haven Jewish Center, a synagogue in Flatbush, Brooklyn. He bought Israel Bonds, which were introduced in 1951, and in 1952 he served as treasurer of a benefit concert for Israel. He sat on the board of the Kew-Forest School, where his children studied, and the Trumps were active in The Salvation Army and the Boy Scouts of America. Fred was a registered Republican, yet he cultivated ties with New York Democrats. With Donald in the 1980s, he gave over $350,000 to city politicians, among them Mayor Ed Koch. In October 2018 The New York Times reported finding no evidence that he had made any significant financial contributions to charities.

  The folk singer Woody Guthrie lived at Beach Haven Apartments from 1950 to 1951. In his unrecorded song "Old Man Trump," he complains about the rent and accuses his landlord of stirring up racial hate "in the bloodpot of human hearts." Fred's reputation kept resurfacing. During Donald's 2016 presidential campaign, the 1927 arrest returned to the news. In 2017 the FBI declassified 389 pages from its early 1970s investigation of alleged racial discrimination by the Trump Organization.

  Portraits of Fred's character have been harsh. Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal, called Fred "brutal" and lacking in emotional intelligence. In her 2020 book Too Much and Never Enough, Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist, argues that Fred was a high-functioning sociopath who stunted Donald's emotional development. A 2024 article in the psychohistorical journal Clio's Psyche likewise called Fred "cruel" and deceptive. Claims that Fred sympathized with Nazism are less settled. In 2020 the fact-checking company Logically found no clear evidence of it. During his 2024 campaign, Donald said his father had told him never to say the word "Nazi" or mention Adolf Hitler.

  When Donald Trump was arrested in New York in 2023, some media outlets noted that his father had been arrested twice. Those were the 1927 parade and the 1976 Maryland property meeting.

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