The Art of the Donald by Christopher Bedford

Author:Christopher Bedford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Threshold Editions

RULE 15: Trust in Family

It’s both obvious and cliché to say that Donald Trump’s earliest influences were his family, so I shouldn’t.

But Donald Trump’s earliest influences were his family. His father, in particular, weighed heavily on the young man, and has throughout his life, from his work ethic to his mannerisms and focused drive.

Fred Trump never went to college—he didn’t have the luxury. His father—Donald Trump’s grandfather—was a hard worker but also a hard liver, and he passed when the kids were young. Shortly after high school, Fred started a company in his mother’s name, Elizabeth Trump & Son, or E. Trump & Son, because he himself was too young to sign checks.

He would build a small house, sell it, and put the profits toward building more houses, expanding all the while. He turned this into a lucrative life, sending his younger brother to study science in college, becoming a real estate lord of New York’s working-class burrows, and building a strong business to raise his children in.

He could also be demanding, according to the family’s oral histories.

“On Sunday mornings, he would drop all of his children off at the house of his sister, Elizabeth, and ask his brother-in-law, who worked six days a week, to check his books,” the New York Times reports. “To avoid Fred, the family started attending an earlier church service, said John Walter, his sister’s son, who eventually did his uncle’s books.”

In addition to his work-all-the-time approach to life, he was a sharp dresser and, while not as flashy as his son, did once literally rent a showboat to cruise Coney Island’s beaches blasting patriotic music and sending coupons for homes he’d built floating toward the shore. He called them “Trump Homes,” naming larger developments by the Trump name as well.

The whole time, Donald was watching. “I learned about toughness in a very tough business,” Donald writes in his first book. “I learned about motivating people, and I learned about competence and efficiency: Get in, get it done, get it done right, and get out.”

Donald also performed well under the pressure, acknowledging that it might have been his own contentment with a businesslike relationship with his dad that allowed the two to get along so well. Donald’s brother, Freddy, was eight years Donald’s senior and not made for the pressures Fred and Donald thrived in. Freddy’s eventually fatal battle with alcohol weighed heavily on his younger brother, and was likely influential in Donald’s order that his children not partake themselves.

Donald and Freddy’s father was old-school. He played the political games he felt he had to, but had no time for Manhattan or the fancy materials that built it. When he came out to look at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, Donald recalls, he asked, “Why don’t you forget about the damn glass? Give them four or five stories of it and then use common brick for the rest.”

“Nobody,” Fred asserted confidently, “is going to look up anyway.”

Donald Trump was looking upward—and outward—but he took the lessons he’d learned with him and instilled them in his own family.

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