Trump Seriously: On the Trail With the GOP’s Tough Guy
Though Fred lived and died a very rich man, he made his kids work like peasants. The three boys spent summers pulling weeds and pouring cement, learning the building trade from the subfloor up, while the two girls toiled in his real estate office in the bowels of Coney Island. Trump tells the story of being dragged by the nose to join Fred on his rounds collecting rents. “We’d go on jobs where you needed tough guys to knock on doors,” he says. “You’d see ’em ring the bell and stand way over here. I’d say, ‘Why’re you over there?’ and he’d say, ‘ ’Cause these motherfuckers shoot! They shoot right through the door!'”
Trump has raised his own kids in comparable fashion, disabusing them of any notions of unearned grandeur. “I was a dock attendant for a couple of summers, then went into landscaping,” says Don Jr., a company vice president running international projects, with an office directly below his father’s. “My brother and I are probably the only sons of billionaires who can operate a D-10 Caterpillar.” “I did less-than-glamorous internships in sweltering New York — the South of France wasn’t an option,” says Ivanka in her immaculate office next door to Don Jr. Together with Eric, the third of Trump’s kids by his first wife, Ivana Trump (he has two younger children by subsequent wives), his three grown offspring handle his vast portfolio of luxury hotels and resorts. Polished and restrained where their father is flamboyant, they’ve nonetheless paid him the highest praise by enlisting in the family trade. No less telling, none of them are train wrecks like so many children of billionaires. “We grew up with a lot of those kids and know them well,” says Don Jr. “But I guess we were pushed and motivated differently.”
It’s worth noting that Trump was nearly a train wreck himself as the son of wealth in Jamaica Estates, Queens. An indifferent student who was “mouthing off to everybody” and carrying around a switchblade in his pocket, he was yanked out of prep school by his disappointed parents and sent to the New York Military Academy upstate. “He thought he was Mr. America and the world revolved around him,” says Col. Ted Dobias, his former instructor and baseball coach, a barrel-chested man who’s now nearing 90 but whose memory is diamond-drill sharp. “I had a lot of one-on-ones” with the 14-year-old Trump, adds Dobias, some of which got physical, both men say. Whatever it took to seize the eighth-grader’s attention, Dobias seemed to turn him around. By ninth grade, Trump was a model cadet; as a senior, he made cadet captain, says Dobias, and was the star first baseman for Dobias’ varsity squad. “He was good-hit and good-field: We had scouts from the Phillies to watch him, but he wanted to go to college and make real money.”
After graduating from Wharton, where his academic laurels have been grossly overstated through the years (he didn’t finish first in his class or anywhere near it, and went altogether missing from the list of honors for the class of 1968), Trump began working for his old man in Brooklyn, but had little sustaining interest in low-rent units. What he wanted was to have his name writ large on the next iconic towers of Manhattan. It was the mid-1970s, when the city was swirling the drain of insolvency and structural collapse, but even from the boroughs, Trump could look ahead a decade to the gilded age of the 1980s. Seizing upon the collapse of the Penn Central railroad, the largest corporate bankruptcy in history at the time, he scooped up an option to redo the Commodore Hotel, a Beaux Arts colossus gone badly to seed as one of the troubled railroad’s minor holdings.
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Trump Seriously: On the Trail With the GOP’s Tough Guy, Page 6 of 13