When I finally realized that my grandfather didn’t care what I accomplished or contributed and that my own unrealistic expectations were paralyzing me, I still felt that only a grand gesture would set it right. It wasn’t enough for me to volunteer at an organization helping Syrian refugees; I had to take Donald down.
After the election, Donald called his big sister, ostensibly to find out how he was doing. Of course, he thought he already knew the answer; otherwise he wouldn’t have made the call in the first place. He merely wanted her to confirm very strongly that he was doing a fantastic job.
When she said, “Not that good,” Donald immediately went on offense.
“That’s nasty,” he said. She could see the sneer on his face. Then, seemingly apropos of nothing, he asked her, “Maryanne, where would you be without me?” It was a smug reference to the fact that Maryanne owed her first federal judgeship to Donald because Roy Cohn had done him (and her) a favor all those years ago.
My aunt has always insisted that she’d earned her position on the bench entirely on her own merits, and she shot back at him, “If you say that one more time, I will level you.”
But it was an empty threat. Although Maryanne had prided herself on being the only person on the planet Donald ever listened to, those days were long past, which was illustrated not long after, in June 2018. On the eve of Donald’s first summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Maryanne called the White House and left a message with his secretary: “Tell him his older sister called with a little sisterly advice. Prepare. Learn from those who know what they are doing. Stay away from Dennis Rodman. And leave his Twitter at home.”
He ignored all of it. The Politico headline the following day read “Trump Says Kim Meeting Will Be About ‘Attitude,’ Not Prep Work.” If Maryanne had ever had any sway over her little brother, it was gone now. Aside from the requisite birthday call, they didn’t speak much after that.
While they were working on the article, the Times reporters invited me to join them for a tour of my grandfather’s properties. On the morning of January 10, 2018, they picked me up in David’s SUV, still adorned with its antlers and red nose, at the Jamaica train station. We started at the Highlander, where I’d grown up, and over the course of the day we traversed snow drifts and patches of ice in an effort to visit as much of the Trump empire as possible.
After nine hours we still hadn’t managed to see all of it. I had traded in my crutches for a cane by then but was still exhausted, mentally and physically, when I got home. I tried to make sense of what I’d seen. I’d always known that my grandfather owned buildings, but I’d had no idea just how many. More disturbing, my father had apparently owned 20 percent of some of the buildings I’d never heard of before.
On October 2, 2018, the New York Times published an almost 14,000-word article, the longest in its history, revealing the long litany of potentially fraudulent and criminal activities my grandfather, aunts, and uncles had engaged in.
Through the extraordinary reporting of the Times team, I learned more about my family’s finances than I’d ever known.
Donald’s lawyer, Charles J. Harder, predictably denied the allegations, saying: “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory. There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone.” But the investigative reporters laid out a devastating case. Over the course of Fred’s life, he and my grandmother had transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to their children. While my grandfather was alive, Donald alone had received the equivalent of $413 million, much of it through questionable means: loans that he had never repaid, investments in properties that had never matured; essentially gifts that had never been taxed. That did not include the $170 million he had received through the sale of my grandfather’s empire. The amounts of money the article mentioned were mind-boggling, and the four siblings had benefited for decades. Dad had clearly shared in the wealth early in his life, but he had had nothing left to show for it by the time he was thirty. I have no idea what happened to his money.
In 1992, only two years after Donald’s attempt to attach the codicil to my grandfather’s will, effectively cutting his siblings out, the four of them suddenly needed one another: after a lifetime of their father’s playing them off against one another, they finally had a common purpose—to protect their inheritance from the government. Fred had refused to heed his lawyers’ advice to cede control of his empire to his children before his death in order to minimize estate taxes. That meant that Maryanne, Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert would be responsible for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of estate taxes. In addition to dozens of buildings, my grandfather had amassed extraordinary sums of cash. His properties carried no debt and brought in millions of dollars every year. The siblings’ solution was to establish All County Building Supply & Maintenance. At that point, my grandfather was effectively sidelined by his increasing dementia—not that he would have objected to their scheme. And since my father was long gone, Maryanne, Donald, and Robert could do whatever they wanted; they were our trustees, but there was no one to force them to fulfill their obligations to Fritz and me, and they could easily keep us out of the loop.
My aunts and uncles detested paying taxes almost as much as their father did, and it seemed the main purpose of All County was to siphon money from Trump Management through large gifts disguised as “legitimate business
