DONALD TRUMP
(1946 to today)

Trump's youth and business startup

Ivana and family

Trump's financial crisis

Marla Maples

Trump climbs back

Melania enters the picture

Trump as a TV personality

And the building projects (and other
        projects as well) continue

Grandfather:  Friedrich (or Frederick) Trump Donald Trump was the grandson of a German-born (Kallstadt, in southwestern Germany) entrepreneur, Friedrich Trump, who as a youth escaped German military service by moving to America in 1885.  He found work for the next six years in New York City as a barber ... before moving to Seattle in the new state of Washington.  Here he opened up a restaurant in the Red Light District, offering clients booze and sex as well as food.  Three years later he sold his business and purchased 40 acres of real estate in the Seattle suburbs and built a boarding house there for the local miners.  Soon, by clever maneuvering, he was able to acquire even more valuable property in the gold mining town of Monte Christo.  But sensing a bust coming in the gold mining at Monte Christo and pulling out of the town before the bubble burst, he acquired property in the Canadian Yukon territory.  With the news in 1897 of a major gold find there, Friedrich's properties skyrocketed in value ... and he was able to expand his 'restaurant business' considerably. Then he sold his share of the business to his alcoholic partner in 1901 ... just before the Canadian government clamped down on prostitution.  Trump scored big; his partner lost everything. A fairly rich man, Friedrich returned to his hometown of Kallstadt, married Elisabeth Christ in 1902, and then moved with her to New York City, where Friedrich again took up the occupation of barber ... as well as a restaurant and hotel manager.  But his wife Elisabeth dearly wanted to return to Germany, and in 1904 they moved back to Kallstadt.  But the stay was brief because the German authorities discovered that he had earlier left the country to avoid the draft ... and he therefore had forefitted his German citizenship. Thus in 1905 they were forced to return to the States ... where in the Bronx that year their son Fred was born.  Eventually Friedrich was able to open a barbershop on Wall Street and also take on work as a hotel manger ... buying up land in New York as he was able.  But the onset of World War One forced him to keep a low German profile (Germans were not popular with Americans during their brief participation in the war) ... and then just as the war was coming to a close (1918) he was hit with the Spanish flu and died immediately.   At his death he was able to leave behind a small fortune (about $500,000 in today's money) in land, corporate stocks and savings.  With this, his wife Elisabeth and his 13-year-old son Fred were able to continue to move forward in life - buying, developing and selling real estate. His father:  Fred Trump Frederick's son Fred followed at a very early age (15) in the footsteps of his recently deceased father in real estate development ... even while still enrolled in high school in Queens.  Young Fred was interested in carpentry, blueprints, and ultimately housing construction ... at age 18 building his first home on land he and his mother owned - and then selling it for a nice profit.  By 1927 (at age 22), in partnership with his mother, Fred moved to incorporate his expanding operations as Elizabeth Trump and Son.  By the late 1920s he was moving rapidly in building and selling middle-class homes in Queens.   He did so well at the business that he was able to send his younger brother John to Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, then for his master's to Columbia and his Ph.D. to M.I.T. to study engineering.  They would remain close ... though not essentially as business associates (John was too theoretical for Fred's practical ways!). The onset of the Depression did not seem to dampen his enthusiasm for development, Fred constructing a new supermarket in Queens, which he was able a year later to sell to a major supermarket chain.   In 1936 Fred married Scottish-born Mary Anne MacLeod and the following year their first child, Maryanne, was born (who would eventually become a Senior US Circuit Court Judge), then the year after that Frederick ('Freddy' would grow up to become a TWA pilot, but die at age 43 from his alcoholism), Elizabeth (born in 1942, eventually becoming an executive assistant at Chase Manhattan Bank) - then  Donald in 1946 - and finally Robert, born in 1948, who eventually would take over his father's property mangement company.   As a matter of great significance, Fred and Mary Anne would live in the same home in Queens that they brought their kids up in ... from 1951 onward.  Fred and Mary Anne were great believers of the notion current in those days (the post-war 1940s to the mid 1960s) that America's greatness rested on its robust 'middle class' culture (although their home in Queens was quite huge by middle class standards).  In any case this attitude would stand in sharp contrast with that of their son Donald, who would surround himself with symbols of vast wealth, materially and socially ... and target that world as his prime customer base in his construction business. When World War II hit, Fred jumped into the business of building army barracks and officer homes for the Navy ... not just in Queens, but in several major port cities along the East Coast.  Then after the war he moved into the business of building middle class homes - then whole apartment complexes - in Queens and Brooklyn, to house returned veterans (a total of some 2,700 units by 1950). A big part of Fred's commercial success was due to his close working relationship with Abe Beame (future mayor of New York City: 1974-1978) reaching back to the 1940s ... and with Bunny Lindenbaum, leader of a major Brooklyn political club.  These connections were vital in the acquiring of the land that Fred would develop beginning in 1960 as the 3,800 unit Trump Village.  Fred gained this land by elbowing aside a non-profit housing cooperative that had already acquired the land ... Trump securing the land by way of political connections that Beame had with then NYC mayor Robert Wagner.  In the end, Fred ended up with only two-thirds of the land (though still a huge piece of real estate) ... and the following year began construction of his Trump Village project. But the construction business in those days (as in any day) was one rife with lawsuits.  In 1966 Fred and Lindenbaum were investigated for submitting inaccurate figures to the New York State's affordable housing program in acquiring a $60 million construction mortgage - an overpricing of $1.2 million (which was used to buy nearby land for a shopping center) ... which had to be returned.  The event gave the tabloids much to chew on. Another brush with the legal lsystem occurred in 1973 when the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a suit against the Trump Organization (TO) - renamed from the Trump Management Company when his son Donald took the position as chairman of the company in 1971. The TO was accused of blocking Blacks from its 39-building housing operations in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. The case dragged on for two years, finally being settled out of court in 1975 ... with the TO requried to send weeky rental reports to the civil rights organization, the New York Urban League, giving preference to certain tenants at some of the locations.  On the other hand the TO was permitted (supposedly) to deny rentals to welfare recipients if they could not keep up certain living standards.  In other words, the TO was permitted to maintain 'middle class' standards in all its units ... but not racial discrimination itself.  The issue came up again in 1978 when the DOJ claimed that the TO was not living up to its side of the agreement ... with Donald Trump and his lawyer Roy Cohn responding in a $100 million countersuit (which they lost) that this was just harassment and that they had the right to expect people on welfare to be able to be as qualified as tenants as any other people. By the 1970s Fred Trump was doing more managing than construction (thus the Trump Management Company) buying up apartment buildings from troubled builders ... and bringing them to solvency through his strong managerial talents. Yet while Fred Trump (and also son Donald) was so very dedicatedly 'middle class' in his world view, seemingly strongly hostile to the idea of public welfare, Fred and his wife were very active in the world of charity, giving lavishly to hospitals, medical research foundations, Jewish and Israeli causes, the Boy Scouts, Salvation Army and other charity organizations. The Trump family was strongly Presbyterian (due to Many Anne's Scottish roots), were married in a Presbyterian church in Manhattan and raised their children in the First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens.  In later years (the 1970s) they would move their church affiliation to the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan where the famous 'power of positive thinking' pastor Norman Vincent Peale preached. Through all their years together father Fred and son Donald formed a tight and lasting bond ... with Donald decidedly dedicated to his father in every way ... except for his father's middle class world view! They would continue to work closely together in a number of ventures over the years. In the last half-dozen years of his life Fred Trump suffered from Alzheimer's Disease, dying in 1999 at age 93 of pneumonia, shortly after entering the hospital.  At his death his estate was valued in the millions of dollars (figures vary widely from $20 million to $300 million!).  It was estimated that he had built more than 27,000 middle class apartment and row house units over his lifetime.

Donald Trump's youth Donald was born in June of 1946 and grew up with his mother and father and four siblings in Queens, attending the fashionable Kew-Forest prep-school from kindergarten up through the seventh grade.  But in 1959, at age 13, he was sent to the New York Military Academy (NYMA) in an attempt to bring some of his wilder ways under strict discipline (he was hard to manage and was making frequent trips into Manhattan without permission).  At the NYMA he proved to be an outstanding athlete, competing in everthing from soccer, to baseball, to wrestling, to basketball ... and proving himself to be a leader in various student functions.   He graduated from NYMA in 1964 and entered Fordham University ... but transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia - to study the real estate business.  Like his father, Donald combined studies with business, working with his father's real estate company.  For instance during his college years he and his father were able to buy up the forclosed Swifton Village apartment complex (suffering from a huge non-occupancy rate) in Cincinnati, Ohio, and together put it back up and running to full occupancyy In 1968 he graduated from Wharton with a degree in economics.