Everyone in my family experienced a strange combination of privilege and neglect. Although I had all of the material things I needed—and luxuries such as private schools and summer camp—there was a purposely built-in idea of uncertainty that any of it would last. By the same token, there was the sometimes dispiriting and sometimes devastating sense that nothing any of us did really mattered or, worse, that we didn’t matter—only Donald did.
Trump Management, which Donald often referred to as a “two-bit operation,” was doing fairly well. Fred paid himself more than $109 million between 1988 and 1993 and had tens of millions more in the bank. The Trump Organization, the company Donald ostensibly ran, was, however, in increasingly serious trouble.
Reduced to a monthly allowance—that a family of four could have lived on comfortably for ten years but still an allowance—and shut out by the banks, which finally refused to lend him more money, Donald fully believed that whatever was happening to him was the result of the economy, the poor treatment he received from the banks, and bad luck.
Nothing was ever fair to him. That struck a chord in Fred, who nursed his own grievances and also never took responsibility for anything other than his successes. Donald’s talent for deflecting responsibility while projecting blame onto others came straight from his father’s playbook. Even with the untold millions of dollars Fred spent, he couldn’t prevent Donald’s failures, but he could certainly find a scapegoat, just as he had always done when his missteps and poor judgment caught up with him, as when he blamed Freddy for the failure of Steeplechase. Donald knew that taking responsibility for your failures, which obviously meant acknowledging failure, was not something Fred admired; he’d seen where it had gotten Freddy.
It’s very possible that back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Fred didn’t know just how deep Donald’s ineptitude ran. Acknowledging weakness of any kind in the son on whom he had staked the future of his empire and for whom he had sacrificed Freddy would have been nearly impossible. It was much easier to convince himself that Donald’s talents were wasted in the backwater of Brooklyn; he simply needed a bigger pond in which to make a splash.
As the Commodore Hotel slowly transformed into the Grand Hyatt, Fred was so blinded by the success with which Donald manipulated and debased every part of the process in order to get his way that he seemed to forget how vital his own connections, knowledge, and skills were; neither the Hyatt nor Trump Tower would have seen the light of day without them. Even Fred’s head must have been turned by all of the attention Donald generated for two projects that, if developed by anybody else, would have been considered fairly commonplace occurrences in Manhattan.
Fred had known all along what games Donald was playing, because he’d taught Donald how to play them. Working the refs, lying, cheating—as far as Fred was concerned, those were all legitimate business tactics. The most effective game for both father and son was the shell game. While Fred kept churning out projects and solidifying his status as a “postwar master builder,” he was fattening his wallet with taxpayer money by skimming off the top and allegedly committing so much tax fraud that four of his children would continue to benefit from it for decades. While the rubes focused on the salacious details Donald kept generating for the tabloids, he was building a reputation for success based on bad loans, bad investments, and worse judgment. The difference between the two, however, is that despite his dishonesty and lack of integrity, Fred actually ran a solid, income-generating business, while Donald had only his ability to spin and his father’s money to prop up an illusion.
Once Donald moved into Atlantic City, there was no longer any denying that he wasn’t just ill-suited to the day-to-day grind of running a few dozen middle-class rental properties in the outer boroughs, he was ill-suited to running any kind of business at all—even one that ostensibly played to his strengths of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement and his taste for glitz.
When Fred bragged about Donald’s brilliance and claimed that his son’s success had far outpaced his own, he must have known that not a word of it was true; he was too smart and too good at arithmetic to think otherwise: the numbers simply didn’t add up. But the fact that Fred continued to prop Donald up despite the wisdom of continuing to do so suggests that something else was going on.
Because Fred did deny the reality on the ground in Atlantic City. He had already shown himself impervious to facts that didn’t fit his narrative, so he blamed the banks and the economy and the casino industry just as vociferously as his son did. Fred had become so invested in the fantasy of Donald’s success that he and Donald were inextricably linked. Facing reality would have required acknowledging his own responsibility, which he would never do. He had gone all in, and although any rational person would have folded, Fred was determined to double down.
There was still plenty of publicity to turn Fred’s head, and thanks to the banks that father and son maligned, the extraordinary financial reversal didn’t put a dent in Donald’s lifestyle. Finally, there was the slow-rolling toll that his as-yet-undiagnosed Alzheimer’s was beginning to take on his executive functioning. Already susceptible to believing the best of his worst son, it became easier over time for him to confuse the hype about Donald with reality.
As usual, the lesson Donald learned was the one that supported his preexisting assumption: no matter what happens, no matter how much damage he leaves in his wake, he will be okay. Knowing ahead of time that you’re going to be bailed
