The United States of Trump

by Bill O'Reilly

  “So did your grandmother.”

  “She was mostly not involved with the actual work. My father was fourteen years old when he started, unbelievably young. And he had to work to put his brother through MIT. His brother was a great student, Dr. John Trump … so he had to have my grandmother be involved with the company because he wasn’t old enough to sign checks.”

  “So, capitalism was basically rooted in your upbringing.”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “And you became a very successful capitalist.”

  “Yeah. Not because my father really wanted that, but because it was like that’s all I got to see.”

  * * *

  AND SO IT was that Donald Trump knew at a young age where his destiny would lie: in the brutally competitive real estate world of New York City. But first he had to deal with college, the looming war in Vietnam, and changing race relations in America.

  The last situation is still an issue for him as he sits in the White House.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LEVITTOWN, NEW YORK

  SUMMER 1963

  MIDDAY

  At the same time seventeen-year-old Donald Trump was in Queens preparing for his senior year at the New York Military Academy, a few miles away twelve-year-old Bill O’Reilly was playing on the streets in one of the largest housing developments in America: Levittown.

  Developers Abe Levitt and his sons William and Alfred eventually built 17,447 small homes in Nassau County and marketed them to working-class people, many of them veterans who wanted to get out of New York City and/or start families in houses they could afford.

  Levittown was about twenty miles east of the city and approximately fifteen miles east of Jamaica Estates, where Fred Trump was competing with the Levitts for the housing dollar.

  The elder Trump and the Levitts had a lot in common, including constructing military dwellings in Virginia and possessing the know-how to build homes quickly and economically. In 1951, my mother and father bought the O’Reilly family home at 11 Page Lane in Levittown for $8,000. They lived there the rest of their lives.1

  The other thing Fred Trump and the Levitts agreed upon was a marketing strategy. In 1963, they were reluctant to sell to African Americans. William Levitt openly admitted it.

  “As a Jew, I have no room in my heart for racial prejudice,” he said. “But the plain fact is that most whites prefer not to live in mixed communities. That attitude may be wrong morally, and someday it may change. I hope it will.”

  But William Levitt, his father, and his brother did little to foster such a change. They made millions selling houses to whites, so they sold houses to whites—despite President John F. Kennedy signing an executive order in 1962 banning racial discrimination in homes “built, purchased or financed with federal assistance.”

  If racial profiling was in, that meant buyers using the GI Bill were out. The Levitts tried to fight the federal order but lost. Eventually they cashed out, selling their company in 1964 to the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation for $90 million.

  Racial prejudice has a long history in southern New York, which includes Queens. On July 4, 1924, a reported thirty thousand people attended a Ku Klux Klan rally in New Jersey during the Democratic National Convention—which was being held in Manhattan at the time. The gathering would later earn a sarcastic reference as a “Klanbake.”

  In many neighborhoods, real estate agents and mortgage companies simply would not deal with blacks. As the civil rights movement picked up steam behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the mid-1960s, the feds became more aggressive in bringing housing discrimination cases. But locally, the fix was in—it was very tough for black Americans to buy into white neighborhoods in Queens and the two counties to the east.

  It was all about money and prejudice, of course. In 1963 Levittown, the population was one-third Catholic, one-third Jewish, and one-third Protestant. But it was nearly 100 percent Caucasian. If blacks moved in, some bigoted whites would move out, and home prices would drop. In Manhattan, ruthless real estate people would actually buy row houses in white neighborhoods and then turn around and sell them to blacks, hoping for “white flight” so other properties in the area could then be bought up cheap. (These people were called “block-busters.”) Those fleeing integrated city neighborhoods would often move to the white suburbs, where business was brisk for the Levitts, Fred Trump, and many others.

  In addition, white-only housing enclaves appreciated faster in value than mixed places. Total it all up, and you had a perfect storm of real estate discrimination. Back then, bias against blacks was called good business by just about everybody in the white real estate world. Few challenged the rigged system.

  To understand Queens and Levittown post–World War II, you must know the power that white ethnicity held. My friends were mostly Irish, Italian, and Jewish. We all pretty much got along, although Hebrew school was a problem. Our stickball games were regularly interrupted because the Jewish guys departed around 4:30 on selected weekdays.

  Like children all over the world, the Levittown kids aped their parents. So, many Irish kids didn’t like England. The Italians didn’t like anybody except other Italians. The Jewish guys didn’t say much but tended to be more liberal than the Irish and Italian kids.

  But we all liked sports, and I was a huge Willie Mays fan. Even though Willie had moved to San Francisco from New York in 1958, he was still tremendous to me. The Giant centerfielder was a legend in Harlem and revered in Levittown as well.

  On those occasions when I heard a kid disparage blacks, I’d point to Willie Mays. That pretty much stopped the blather.

  The truth is my crew never saw or discussed black people at all. They lived miles away. There was no interaction between the races. I never heard my parents speak about African Americans. They didn’t say anything bad because they didn’t say anything at all. My father might hammer white ethnic groups once in a while, but never blacks.

  My mother liked everybody. But her mother didn’t approve of blacks, even though she did not know any. I once asked my grandmother why she occasionally spoke harshly about African Americans. She had no answer. I then asked if she had ever spoken with one. She said no, she just didn’t like them.

  I finally figured it out: she was afraid. She watched the local New York City news and saw blacks routinely being arrested on the tube. She led an insulated life, in a white neighborhood where everyone thought as she did. Strangers of color were dangerous to her.

  By the way, when I told that story on The Radio Factor, I was branded a racist by the far-left extremist movement that uses race as a club to injure its perceived ideological enemies, an obviously despicable practice.

  I can safely say that most white families in my Levittown neighborhood had the same experience that I did regarding black Americans—that is, no experience. And apparently that extended to the Trump family, in Queens.

  * * *

  AS WE FLEW high above the East Coast on Air Force One, I brought the subject up with President Trump.

  O’REILLY: Was race ever an issue or a discussion point in the Trump household?

  PRESIDENT TRUMP: Literally, it wasn’t an issue. It probably was for many, but it wasn’t for this family. It was never an issue, and I wasn’t exposed to it in a tremendous way. My father was very open-minded. I could actually say he was a man that didn’t see the color of skin.

  O’REILLY: Yet he was accused by some newspapers of being anti-black, not selling real estate to blacks.

  PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yeah, you’d have a building in a certain area, and those areas were very different then. You would have white areas, you’d have African American areas. It was a very different kind of city then. You’d have white buildings and black buildings all throughout the city.

  O’REILLY: There was segregation in the city.

  PRESIDENT TRUMP: It was a societal segregation.

  O’REILLY: So, race wasn’t a big topic of conversation?

  PRESIDENT TRU
MP: Race was rarely a topic, if ever. I can’t even remember talking about it. But I will tell you, in my family—and this goes for me—the color of skin was not a factor, and that was true for my father.

  * * *

  ONCE AGAIN, IT is hard to nail down what Fred Trump was thinking in terms of racial justice. Evidence suggests his business plan overrode any wider view of the issue, but that’s just speculation.

  What I can say for certain is that in thirty years, I have never heard Donald Trump say anything negative about a group of people, black or otherwise. And I’m making that statement about a man who uses negativity like a flyswatter. He’ll verbally crush perceived individual or media opponents, but at least in my presence, he has never slurred anyone using race.

  The Hate Trump media has branded the president a racist and repeats the vile charge on a regular basis. And in fact, there are two racially charged situations regarding Donald Trump that deserve a hearing.

  In July 1972, Fred Trump’s organization, Trump Management, owned about fourteen thousand apartments throughout Queens and Brooklyn. One day a black woman applied for housing at the Shorehaven Apartments in Brooklyn. She was told that no vacancies existed.

  A short time later, a white woman approached the same Trump-owned building with the same request. She was shown two unoccupied units.

  Both women were undercover activists.

  More than a year later, the Justice Department filed a civil rights suit against Trump Management, charging that it had violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968. At the time, twenty-six-year-old Donald Trump was president of the company, his father chairman.

  The Trumps fought the case hard, asserting they had not knowingly done anything wrong. They hired the notorious Roy Cohn, who had been counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, to defend them, and a bitter legal brawl began.

  Two years later, a settlement was reached. The Trumps agreed to become more compliant with the Fair Housing Act and paid for newspaper advertisements telling minorities they were welcome to rent at Trump properties. There was no financial settlement and no admission of guilt.

  Both sides claimed victory.

  * * *

  THE SECOND HIGHLY charged race controversy, one that has angered many African Americans, is the so-called “birther” accusation lodged against Barack Obama.

  The allegation is that the former president was not born in the United States, that his Hawaii-issued birth certificate is a fraud.

  To put this stupid theory to rest, my staff investigated the charge, circa 2008. We found that two Honolulu newspapers, the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin, ran birth announcements for baby Barack shortly after his birth on August 4, 1961.

  Now, that is impossible to fake or contrive. Barack Obama was born in Honolulu. Period.

  But Donald Trump continued to question President Obama’s birth certificate long after the issue should have been buried. I told Donald to his face on national TV that the conspiracy was total BS. Far too late, Mr. Trump issued a statement saying he had changed his mind, that he now believed Barack Obama’s birth certification was real.

  But no apology.

  That situation is still a source of bitterness in many African American precincts. Despite the fact that the Trump economy is beneficial to blacks in general, polls show that President Trump’s support among African Americans remains tepid, to say the least. Most blacks hate the birther thing.

  So, why did Donald Trump do it? Perhaps the best analysis comes from his son and close adviser Donald Trump Jr.:

  O’REILLY: I scolded him for the birther stuff … I thought that was mean-spirited and unnecessary.

  TRUMP JR.: It’s the way he fights. He will fight hard and push back.

  O’REILLY: But why did he do that? He wasn’t running against Obama. Why did he even bring the issue up and risk being called a racist?

  TRUMP JR.: Listen, I don’t think accusations that are nonsense mean anything to him … I mean, he can dish it out and take it with the best of them, and actually enjoys some of that. I think he’s seen and learned that the other side is not going to give him any quarter for admitting something. He would just rather move on and ignore it.

  O’REILLY: Did you ever pull him aside and say, “Dad, the Obama birther stuff, that’s not a winner”?

  TRUMP JR.: I think we had conversations about some of those things. But he has an innate ability to understand things through a different lens that I don’t think anyone else has. So, I can question something, but I don’t second-guess because there’s always a method to the madness with him.

  * * *

  AND THE METHOD was this: Donald Trump used the bogus birther issue to galvanize the support of those who despised President Obama. As he did with illegal immigration, Trump inflated an issue to gain approval from a select audience. No other Republican candidate swam in the waters of controversy like Donald Trump. He quickly separated himself from the pack with his outrageous claim about the birth certificate and became the “anti-Obama” candidate.

  Is that racist? There is evidence that it was a pure political play, not designed to denigrate skin color.

  But millions of Americans, of all colors, do not see it that way. In fact, an argument can be made that by questioning Barack Obama’s nationality, you are actually denigrating his race. To this day, the debate continues to rage.

  President Obama put forth the audacity of hope. President Trump replaced “of hope” with the audacity “of me.”

  And the audacity worked. Against all odds, he’s the president.

  * * *

  BACK IN THE summer of ’64, little did Donald Trump or anyone else know that his personal journey to the White House would soon begin when he started college.

  It was an ominous time, with America still suffering from the assassination of its young president. Added to that was a distant fire just beginning to get out of control.

  Vietnam.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE BRONX, NEW YORK

  SEPTEMBER 1964

  MORNING

  The drive from Donald Trump’s house in Queens to Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus takes about forty minutes, unless there’s traffic—which there always is. It is an urban ride, across the Grand Central Parkway to the Triborough Bridge (where the toll is a quarter), then up the Deegan roadway north into the Bronx, another working-class part of the mammoth New York City landscape.

  The eighteen-year-old Donald is a commuting student, preferring to live with his parents and younger brother than in the Fordham dormitories. Sometimes he rides to school with his pal Roger Gedgard, who will become his closest friend at the Jesuit-run Catholic university.

  According to the 1965 Maroon, the school’s yearbook, Donald Trump was on the squash team at Fordham and was considered a good athlete. He also joined the ROTC but did not participate in the military training program his sophomore year.

  That may be because ROTC rules say students must commit to at least two years in the actual military if they participate in two years of college ROTC. With the Vietnam conflict heating up, many students had doubts about serving.

  Donald Trump studied economics at Fordham and distinguished himself from other freshmen by always wearing a well-tailored suit. Jackets were required in the classroom, but suits were rare.

  After Trump entered the presidential sweepstakes, the campus newspaper, the Fordham Ram, sent out 150 emails to alumni who had attended Fordham at the same time Donald Trump did. As it turns out, few even remembered he was on campus for two years. Those who did recall him generally said positive things, but one description stood out: loner.

  Apparently, the young Trump was a B student. Fordham does not give academic transcripts to the public, citing privacy, but that seems to be the consensus. Some classmates remember him participating in classes and being an accessible guy socially, despite the expensive suits.

  In his junior year, Donald Trump transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. Little is known about his time at t
he Wharton School, a business program within the Ivy League institution, other than that he took some real estate classes and lived in an apartment off campus.

  Trying to research Donald Trump’s time at Penn is just about impossible because of the hatred he now engenders there. School administrators have been ordered not to talk about him, even though he has donated major money to the university—by some accounts, more than a million dollars.

  Three of his children also attended Penn: Don Jr., Ivanka, and Tiffany. The college did give Donald Trump a distinguished alumni award before he entered politics. But now the liberal campus does not embrace President Trump, to say the least.

  The motivation for Donald to transfer from Fordham to Penn coincides with his decision to join his father’s real estate company. Living at home full-time after five years of military school awakened Donald to the world of moneymaking. Those nice suits were just a part of it. By 1966, Fred Trump had a chauffeur and millions in the bank. His older three children wanted no part of the real estate business, but Donald did—only, not in Queens.

  A number of nasty things have been said in print about how Donald Trump was actually admitted to Penn. All that seems to be bogus. From the best available evidence, Donald and his father decided that Penn offered the finest business degree in the Northeast, and the student could work for his father on selected weekends. Philadelphia is just ninety minutes from New York. I could find no evidence of anything sinister about Trump’s move to the Ivy League.

  Throughout Donald Trump’s college career, he received deferments from the draft because he was in school. Just about every college student did. In fact, half of the twenty-seven million American men eligible to be drafted in that era got out of it one way or another.