The Heir
The empire begins with a brothel. It stands, sturdy and square, at the heart of a gold-rush boomtown in northwest British Columbia, a monument to careful branding. The windows of the Arctic Restaurant have no signs offering access to prostitutes—even in a lawless Yukon outpost in 1899, decorum rules out such truth in advertising—but Friedrich Trump knows his clientele.
Curtained-off “private boxes” line the wall opposite the bar, inside of which are beds, and women, and scales to weigh gold powder, the preferred method of payment for services rendered. Word of the restaurant’s off-menu accommodations spreads fast. “Respectable women” are advised by The Yukon Sun to avoid the place, as they are “liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings.” But among lonely prospectors, the Arctic is a hit. Before long, Friedrich is boasting, with a hereditary penchant for hyperbole, that his establishment serves more than 3,000 meals a day.
It’s true that he has plenty of customers. A hundred thousand men have raced north in search of gold at the twilight of the 19th century, hypnotized by a shimmering mirage that Friedrich himself must have recognized. He was chasing a similar figment when he left his German hometown at 16, crossed the Atlantic in steerage, and disembarked on the shores of Manhattan, poor, dirty, and emanating the signature migrant’s stench—widely known then as “ship”—which would cling to him for days no matter how hard he scrubbed. He made a living for a while as a barber, but a living was not what he’d come for. So when he heard about fortunes being made in the Pacific Northwest, he gathered his savings and boarded a train.
Friedrich sees that he can get rich in the Klondike not by digging for gold but by servicing the gold rushers themselves. This is its own kind of extractive business—“mining the miners,” his biographer, Gwenda Blair, will later call it—and it requires a distinct skill set. Quiet and wiry, with a handlebar mustache, he bounces from boomtown to boomtown, conning his way onto scraps of land by pretending to find gold there. Once a claim is secured, he hustles to make as much cash as he can before the local bubble bursts and the miners move on.
A restaurant in Seattle’s red-light district. A boarding house in Monte Cristo, Washington. A trailside tent hawking horse meat and liquor to the men stampeding up Alaska’s White Pass. Each venture turns a profit, but the brothel is the one that makes him rich enough to return home to Germany and have his pick of pretty, much younger brides.
Friedrich and his wife consider staying in their native country, but he is a draft dodger—or so the government says—and his petition for residency is denied. Indignant, he takes his new family and his new money back to New York City, where he is free to pursue that shape-shifting mirage—is it starting to resemble respectability?—without the weight of a past. By the time the Spanish flu takes him at age 49, he’s amassed a modest fortune—the modern equivalent of half a million dollars—and a small portfolio of outer-borough properties. It isn’t Rockefeller money, but it’s enough, just barely, to launch a dynasty.
To keep the family afloat, Friedrich’s widow, Elizabeth, assigns each of her children a job in their fledgling real-estate business. But it’s Fred, the middle child, who has a knack for building, both houses and empires, and he takes charge shortly after high school.
Fred runs the enterprise in a clock-racing, corner-cutting scramble, selling each new house to cover construction costs for the last. He backslaps his way through Brooklyn’s political machine, cozies up to mobsters. One house in Woodhaven leads to two in Queens Village, then several more in Hollis. When the federal government starts offering loans to Depression-plagued developers, Fred is first in line—and soon he has an army of shovel-wielding workers digging 450 foundations out of the East Flatbush swampland.
As rows of mass-produced “Trump Homes” spread across Brooklyn and Queens, the papers call Fred the Henry Ford of home building. Later, when the scandals start to come out—the charges of profiteering, and fraud, and banning black tenants—the papers find other things to call him. Infamy attends each new triumph. By the 1950s, he has built thousands of houses and apartments, and become the kind of landlord Woody Guthrie writes songs about.
When the time comes to plan his own succession, Fred turns first to his eldest son and namesake. But Fred Jr. has no feel for the business—he’s soft and free-spirited, and wants to fly airplanes. Donald is the one with a taste for combat, and to him the great unconquered frontier lies across the East River. Donald sees more than money in Manhattan. He sees fame, status, entrée into elite society—things the Trumps have never had.
The market on the island is crowded and hostile, but Fred and Donald work closely to plot their invasion. Together, they cook books, fleece investors, and fool one regulator after another. Some of the scion’s schemes pay off. Others prove disastrous. But his signal achievement is forging the Donald Trump persona itself—that high-flying playboy, that self-made man, that larger-than-life titan the tabloids can’t resist. It’s a creation of both
