As he got older, sports (and the competition they brought) dominated Donald’s attention. Baseball was number one with him as he played first base. Fred Trump knew the value of education and sent Donald to the private Kew-Forest School, a haven for affluent Queens families. But Donald was restless in school, a subject he’s not fond of recalling.
“When I look at what’s going on today, I think I was a beautiful child, a perfect child. What I did was a different level of misbehavior than what you see today—I would say really rambunctious as opposed to really big misbehaving.”
Suddenly, disaster strikes—an aide appears in the Air Force One office with a “Make America Great Again” hat. Bye-bye childhood discussion.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Did you ever see anything like this? So, is that hat one of the great symbols? You understand.
O’REILLY: Sold a lot of them.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Millions. Are you surprised by that?
O’REILLY: No, I mean you marketed well. You have a lot of fans. That’s just going to happen.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: And that came right out of me. That was like one of your book titles, right?
O’REILLY: Yeah.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Somebody said it was Reagan. I said no. He said, “Let’s Make America Great.” He didn’t use it much … But it wasn’t “Make America Great Again.” That’s just a wonderful phrase to use. And by the way, I don’t know if you want to use this, but for the next campaign, we’ve really lifted things up, created trillions of dollars in stock market value. Let me ask you a question: Would you keep this incredible MAGA phrase?
O’REILLY: I’d just change it to “keep.”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: You’d change it to “Keep America Great”?
O’REILLY: I’d say “keep.” You should move it forward.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: My new phrase would be “Keep America Great”? You like that better?
O’REILLY: I do. Let’s get back …
PRESIDENT TRUMP: It’s awfully hard to get rid of that phrase [MAGA] because it’s so good.
O’REILLY: But you might sell more hats.
At this point, I had completely lost the president on the look back. The hat thing had obliterated his childhood in Queens and how his early family life had shaped him. I had to jar him with something from his past to refocus him on how his upbringing had affected his political thinking.
But how could I do that when the most powerful man in the world was now looking at a gigantic television screen, homing in on a cable news program? We were about halfway to Palm Beach, and my interview time was slipping away. I had to think of something fast. Then it hit me.
Military school!
CHAPTER THREE
NEW YORK MILITARY ACADEMY
CORNWALL-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK
SEPTEMBER 1959
The soft life that thirteen-year-old Donald Trump was leading in Queens is over. Sensing a need for discipline, his parents pack up the Cadillac and drive their tall, good-looking son about sixty miles north from Jamaica Estates to a strict, expensive boarding school in the shadow of West Point. The mission: shaping the kid up.
The adolescent Donald was growing increasingly restless and defiant, something common in late 1950s America. It was the age of the greaser, when rebels like Elvis Presley, James Dean, and Marlon Brando made indelible impressions on young people with their sneering disregard for the conformity and convention that had taken deep root in America since the end of World War II.
In researching exactly why Fred and Mary Anne Trump decided their son needed to be shipped out of the home, I came upon a number of incredibly mean-spirited articles in publications like the New York Daily News and London’s Daily Mail, which despise Donald Trump and will say just about anything to hurt him and his family.
But here’s the truth as far as I can ascertain it. Donald was an aggressive, competitive child who did not bend easily to the rules. But I found no malice in his childhood. He did tease his shy younger brother, Robert, who was the opposite of Donnie, as they called him. But President Trump told the truth when he stated that he was rambunctious, not malevolent. However, he might have stretched it when he described himself as a “perfect” child.
* * *
THE TIPPING POINT for his parents seemed to be disobedience. Donald did not ask permission to go into Manhattan, where he was attracted to the garish streets of Times Square. Apparently, he bought some switchblade knives on his clandestine trips to the city, which he then hid in his room.
Fred Trump, in particular, was not happy upon the discovery of the knives. A stern father who insisted on formality, often wearing a tie in his leisure time, Fred expected good behavior from his children, and basically got it from the older three and the youngest. But the energetic Donald needed consistent discipline, which Fred could not supply because of his rigorous work schedule.
* * *
FOUNDED IN 1889, the New York Military Academy held that a strict structure provided the best environment for academic achievement. That meant cadets would do as they were told, or suffer punishment. The academy was all male, students could not leave on most weekends, and they could never be alone with a girl on campus.
Donald Trump spent five years there, almost his entire teenage life.
More than six decades later, as the Trump political story unfolded, NPR ran a report on his military school experience. Here is a partial transcript:
Back in Trump’s day, cadets would wake up near the crack of dawn, hurry into uniforms, and march in formation to breakfast. First-year cadets had to eat their meals squared off—lifting their forks in a right angle into their mouths. And after breakfast, they’d scurry back to clean their rooms for inspection.
* * *
SITTING BACK IN his desk chair on Air Force One, President Trump acknowledges that his parents were worried about his behavior and believes they made the right decision. Military school, he says, shaped his view of the world.
“It has a tremendous influence. So, I had a lot of tough military people at that school. There were ex-drill sergeants … They were very, very strong people out of central casting.
“And they were able to whip people into shape. And it was a very interesting period of time because I had never dealt with people like this before, so you had to acclimate. But we had some very rough military people there, and I really learned to respect the military very much.”
“Were they physical with you?”
“A little bit. Sometimes it was physical. That was not the age where pushing your weight around in a truly physical way would be unthinkable. Yeah, I would say they were physical. They were powerful people physically and emotionally and really mentally. They were strong people.”
“Did you resent that?”
“No, I didn’t resent it. I had to figure a way out of it. I had to figure out a way around it, and I ended up having a lot of friendships with those people.”
“So, you bought into the system and thought this was good for you?”
“I was able to buy into the system, and I did well militarily. It was a very different life for me, but I ended up doing well militarily from the standpoint of cadet captain.”
* * *
IN HIS SENIOR year at the New York Military Academy, Donald Trump did achieve the status of cadet captain, a high honor. He was also captain of the baseball team, playing first base. He played soccer as well.
By all accounts, the teenage Donald Trump succeeded at NYMA because he was ferociously competitive and focused on achievement. On October 12, 1963, the school’s student body marched in New York City’s annual Columbus Day Parade, with the young Trump leading the way. As the parade passed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on Fifth Avenue, Donald Trump was greeted by Cardinal Spellman, the first of many encounters with powerful people.
In 1964, the school yearbook portrayed Cadet Trump as a solid leader and a “Ladies’ Man.” The latter assumption was based on his parents having brought some girls Donald knew on weekend visits to se
e him. Apparently, he enjoyed squiring the ladies around campus, but the rule stood: they could never be alone together.
And so it was that Donald Trump graduated from high school a far different person than he was before entering. He had succeeded outside the family home, using guile, determination, and discipline. Now he would prepare for a career.
As his sister Maryanne, a recently retired federal judge, once said of her much younger brother, “[I] knew better even as a child than to even attempt to compete with Donald.”
Judge Trump’s words contain an explicit warning—one that many now wish they had heard.
CHAPTER FOUR
QUEENS, NEW YORK
SUMMER 1963
DINNER HOUR
To understand Donald Trump’s view of America, it is instructive to know about his early environment and family history. Much of that takes place outside the protective enclave of Jamaica Estates. In fact, one of Trump’s roots extends all the way to the Klondike.
In 1885, sixteen-year-old Friedrich Trumpf sails to America from Germany. Young Friedrich has had a tough life—at age eight his father died, leaving the Trumpf family deeply in debt. Friedrich’s mother literally could not support her six children so she sent him to a nearby town to apprentice with a barber. Friedrich hated it, saved some of his meager earnings, and eventually booked passage on a ship in order to live with his sister in New York City.
There he stayed for six years, but barbering did not cut it for young Friedrich. So, in 1891 he moved west to seek his fortune. The German immigrant was now twenty-two years old and wound up in the Wild West town of Seattle, where he purchased a share in a restaurant. The establishment was called the Poodle Dog and was located smack in the middle of Seattle’s notorious red-light district. Here the situation gets murky—some believe the Poodle Dog provided rooms for prostitutes. But there is no direct proof of that.
Anyway, Friedrich Trumpf made a pile of money in Washington State, which had just entered the union. Then, opportunity presented itself in the Yukon.
In the late 1890s, gold was discovered in northwest Canada. Friedrich Trumpf arrived there in 1898, almost immediately opening the Arctic Restaurant and Hotel. The establishment proved to be very popular, but again there are varying dispatches as to why. One Canadian reporter describes Trumpf’s property this way: “For single men the Arctic has excellent accommodations, as well as the best restaurant … but I would not advise respectable women to go there to sleep, as they are liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings—and, uttered to, by the depraved of their own sex.”
Perhaps based on that report, the Canadian authorities began to look at Trumpf’s enterprises and, in 1901, there was a crackdown on prostitution in the Yukon. Soon after, Friedrich sold his interests to a business partner. Subsequently, the Canadian Mounties seized control of the Arctic for past taxes due.
Gathering up his wealth, Friedrich returned to Kallstadt, in the Kingdom of Bavaria, where he married a young woman named Elizabeth Christ. The couple then moved back to New York City, changing their last name to Trump.
In 1905, Donald Trump’s father, Fred, is born in Queens. Thirteen years later, the flu pandemic, which killed perhaps as many as 650,000 Americans, strikes Friedrich Trump, who dies at the age of forty-nine.
In his will, Friedrich leaves his wife and family $31,640—the equivalent of $919,000 today. With that cash, Elizabeth enters the real estate business along with Fred, who apparently harbors a strong desire to make money just as his father had.
Thus, the Trump business dynasty is born.
* * *
FROM THE BEGINNING, the operation was a tight circle. With his mother signing checks, Fred Trump built mostly small, sturdy homes, then sold them to people of white, European descent. Fred also joined local organizations that disdained outsiders. His home business prospering, he started the Trump Market in Woodhaven, Queens, one of the first grocery stores in the city. Again, he made money.
But he also made enemies.
In 1927, when he was twenty-one years old and single, Fred was arrested at an anti-Catholic march in Jamaica. Members of the Ku Klux Klan were also taken into custody. Some reports had Fred Trump in KKK regalia, but the situation is unclear. At the time, many New York City police officers were Irish Catholics, and they had no use for the crew with whom Fred Trump associated.1
However, in an extensive obituary of Fred Trump, the New York Times does not mention the arrest, and it was apparently never spoken about in the Trump domain.
What is abundantly clear is that Fred Trump lived in a white, Protestant world at least until his operations later expanded to include Catholics and Jews. But Fred’s business life was largely kept from his family. Today, his father’s early activities are not a favorite topic for President Trump.
“Did you know about the Klan thing when you were a very young man?” I asked.
“No.”
“You never knew about it?”
“I never knew about it. I don’t think it’s true, by the way.”
“There were reports that he was in a group involved with an anti-Catholic demonstration. That he was involved. Did he ever raise religion or Catholics with you?”
“No, no, he wouldn’t have been against any of that. You know the story was never proven to be true … I just knew my father. There was no chance of that.”
“Was he a religious man? Your father and mother, were they religious?”
“I would say he was, modestly. My mother a little beyond modestly.”
“You guys are Protestant, right?”
“Presbyterian. My father was religious, but it was not the number one thought in his life. But he had a belief in religion and a belief in God.”
“And your mom?”
“Maybe a little bit more so.”
“Did they get you to say your prayers when you were a little kid?”
“My mother did. Come to think of it, my mother did. That’s right.”
“Did you go to church?”
“Yeah, First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens.”
“Every Sunday?”
“No, not every Sunday, but I went to Sunday school, actually.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, we went there on a Saturday. But I would not go to church every Sunday.”
“So, you were a secular family then?”
“We were a Protestant family, but we did not go to church every weekend.”
* * *
THE TRUMP FAMILY also was not very political. It is the summer of 1963, and President John F. Kennedy is presiding over Camelot. In Jamaica Estates, Donald Trump has just finished his junior year in high school and is home for the summer, soaking up his father’s success in business. His older siblings are now out of the house, leaving only Donald, Robert, and their parents.
Because JFK was such an icon, I wanted to discuss him with President Trump. I didn’t get far.
O’REILLY: So, Kennedy, because my mother’s people came from a line of Kennedys, was big in my house. Was he big in yours?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: No, he was not big. Respected but not big. It wasn’t a topic that would be discussed much. Not because my parents didn’t like him, but because he just wasn’t a front-line conversation.
O’REILLY: Back then the threat of nuclear war was big news. In my school … the kids had to go under their desks [in drills]. We all knew about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Did that touch your family?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: It was a huge event, but I don’t think even that event radiated [with my family] as much as it probably should have.
* * *
FROM WHAT I can gather, and to be completely fair, it seems that the Trump home was largely devoid of politics. It was all business—Fred’s booming real estate business. Besides sports, that’s what Donald Trump was drawn to as a young man. He loved his father and mother but lived independently at military school, where he competed and largely succeeded, gaining approval from his father.
Politics, religion, and current events were not “front-line” topics at home. But Fred Trump did do one consistent thing in the house: he and his wife watched the news.
“They watched the news religiously … they were usually tuned to CBS,” the president told me.
“Walter Cronkite?”
“The great Walter Cronkite. Very hard to replace Walter Cronkite. In fact, as time went by, he looked like my father. It was almost like your father was doing the news.”
“Did you watch?” I asked.
“I’d watch because my father would always watch. If I was in the room, I’d automatically be watching Walter Cronkite.”
“But for you, sports was bigger [than news].”
“For me, sports was everything. I was far more interested in sports than politics.”
Quietly, the seventeen-year-old was also absorbing his father’s work ethic, even if it wasn’t being openly discussed. Fred Trump worked hard for the money but lived rather modestly. Donald’s older brother, Fred Jr., wanted no part of real estate and eventually became a pilot for TWA. But Donald was fascinated by it.
Donald Trump with his father, Fred C. Trump.
“Was it just a profit thing for your father, or did he have another reason to build?”
“It was more than building. He would buy places in Virginia, in Brooklyn, and in Queens. He was a home builder and a good one. He was able to build things for less money. And when they were completed, they would cost less than the competitor across the street and they would look better, which is a great combination.”
“So, he just used his skills?”
“He was a very skilled negotiator, and he was able to build a house for less money and make it look better.”
“Did he teach you about capitalism?”
“He did. And when the person across the street couldn’t sell his house, my father would buy it at a discount, spend a little money, very little money, fixing it up, and he’d sell it at a higher price. He had a great grasp of this.”
The United States of Trump Page 2
