THE MOST IMPORTANT INFLUENCE on me, growing up, was my father, Fred Trump. I learned a lot from him. I learned about toughness in a very tough business, I learned about motivating people, and I learned about competence and efficiency: get in, get it done, get it done right, and get out.
At the same time, I learned very early on that I didn’t want to be in the business my father was in. He did very well building rent-controlled and rent-stabilized housing in Queens and Brooklyn, but it was a very tough way to make a buck. I wanted to try something grander, more glamorous, and more exciting. I also realized that if I ever wanted to be known as more than Fred Trump’s son, I was eventually going to have to go out and make my own mark. I’m fortunate that my father was content to stay with what he knew and did so well. That left me free to make my mark in Manhattan. Even so, I never forgot the lessons I learned at my father’s side.
His story is classic Horatio Alger. Fred Trump was born in New Jersey in 1905. His father, who came here from Sweden as a child, owned a moderately successful restaurant, but he was also a hard liver and a hard drinker, and he died when my father was eleven years old. My father’s mother, Elizabeth, went to work as a seamstress to support her three children. The oldest, also named Elizabeth, was sixteen at the time, and the youngest, John, was nine. My father was the middle child but the first son, and he became the man of the house. Almost immediately, he began taking odd jobs—everything from deliveries for a local fruit store to shining shoes to hauling lumber on a construction site. Construction always interested him, and during high school he began taking night classes in carpentry, plan-reading, and estimating, figuring that if he learned a trade, he’d always be able to make a living. By the age of sixteen, he’d built his first structure, a two-car frame garage for a neighbor. Middle-class people were just beginning to buy cars, few homes had attached garages, and my father was soon able to establish a very good new business building prefabricated garages for fifty dollars apiece.
He graduated from high school in 1922, and with a family to support, he couldn’t even consider college. Instead, he went to work as a carpenter’s helper for a home-builder in Queens. He was better with his hands than most, but he also had some other advantages. For starters, he was just a very smart guy. Even to this day, he can add five columns of numbers in his head and keep them all straight. Between his night courses and his basic common sense, he was able to show the other carpenters, most of whom had no education at all, shortcuts, such as how to frame a rafter with a steel square.
In addition, my father was always very focused and very ambitious. Most of his co-workers were happy just to have a job. My father not only wanted to work, he also wanted to do well and to get ahead. Finally, my father just plain loved working. From as early as I can remember, my father would say to me, “The most important thing in life is to love what you’re doing, because that’s the only way you’ll ever be really good at it.”
One year after he got out of high school, my father built his first home, a one-family house in Woodhaven, Queens. It cost a little less than $5,000 to build, and he sold it for $7,500. He called his company Elizabeth Trump & Son because at the time he wasn’t of age, and his mother had to sign all his legal documents and checks. As soon as he sold his first house, he used the profit to build another, and then another and another, in working-class Queens communities like Woodhaven, Hollis, and Queens Village. For working people who’d spent their lives in small, crowded apartments, my father offered a whole new life-style: modestly priced suburban-style brick houses. They were gobbled up as fast as he could build them.
Instinctively, my father began to think bigger. By 1929, aiming at a more affluent market, he started building much larger homes. Instead of tiny brick houses, he put up three-story Colonials, Tudors, and Victorians in a section of Queens that ultimately became known as Jamaica Estates—and where, eventually, he built a home for our family. When the Depression hit and the housing market fell off, my father turned his attention to other businesses. He bought a bankrupt mortgage-servicing company and sold it at a profit a year later. Next, he built a self-service supermarket in Woodhaven, one of the first of its kind. All the local tradesmen—butcher, tailor, shoemaker—rented concessions in the space, and the convenience of having everything available under one roof made the operation an immediate success. Within a year, however, eager to return to building, my father sold out to King Kullen for a large profit.
By 1934 the Depression was finally beginning to ease, but money was still tight and so my father decided to go back to building lower-priced homes. This time he chose the depressed Flatbush area of Brooklyn, where land was cheap and he sensed there was a lot of room for growth. Once again his instincts were right. In three weeks he sold 78 homes, and during the next dozen years, he built 2,500 more throughout Queens and Brooklyn. He was becoming very successful.
In 1936 my father married my wonderful mother, Mary MacLeod, and they began a family. My father’s success also made it possible for him to give to his younger brother something he’d missed himself: a college education. With my father’s help, my uncle, John Trump, went to college, got his Ph.D. from M.I.T., and eventually became a full professor of physics and one of the country’s great scientists. Perhaps because my father never got a college degree himself, he continued to view people who had one with a respect that bordered on awe. In most cases they didn’t deserve it. My father could run circles around most academics and he would have done very well in college, if he’d been able to go.
We had a very traditional family. My father was the power and the breadwinner, and my mother was the perfect housewife. That didn’t mean she sat around playing bridge and talking on the phone. There were five children in all, and besides taking care of us, she cooked and cleaned and darned socks and did charity work at the local hospital. We lived in a large house, but we never thought of ourselves as rich kids. We were brought up to know the value of a dollar and to appreciate the importance of hard work. Our family was always very close, and to this day they are my closest friends. My parents had no pretensions. My father still works out of a small, modest back office on Avenue Z in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, in a building he put up in 1948. It’s simply never occurred to him to move.
My sister Maryanne was the first born, and when she graduated from Mount Holyoke College, she followed my mother’s path at first, marrying and staying at home while her son grew up. But she also inherited a lot of my father’s drive and ambition, and when her son David became a teenager, she went back to school, to study law. She graduated with honors, began with a private firm, worked for five years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and four years ago became a federal judge. Maryanne is really something. My younger sister, Elizabeth, is kind and bright but less ambitious, and she works at Chase Manhattan Bank in Manhattan.
My older brother, Freddy, the first son, had perhaps the hardest time in our family. My father is a wonderful man, but he is also very much a business guy and strong and tough as hell. My brother was just the opposite. Handsome as could be, he loved parties and had a great, warm personality and a real zest for life. He didn’t have an enemy in the world. Naturally, my father very much wanted his oldest son in the business, but unfortunately, business just wasn’t for Freddy. He went to work with my father reluctantly, and he never had a feel for real estate. He wasn’t the kind of guy who could stand up to a killer contractor or negotiate with a rough supplier. Because my father was so strong, there were inevitably confrontations between the two of them. In most cases, Freddy came out on the short end.
Eventually, it became clear to all of us that it wasn’t working, and Freddy went off to pursue what he loved most—flying airplanes. He moved to Florida, became a professional pilot, and flew for TWA. He also loved fishing and boating. Freddy was probably happiest during that period in his life, and yet I can remember saying to him, even though I was eight years younger, “Come on, Freddy, what are you doing? You’re wasting your time.” I regret now that I ever said that.
Perhaps I was just too young to realize that it was irrelevant what my father or I thought about what Freddy was doing. What mattered was that he enjoyed it. Along the way, I think Freddy became discouraged, and he started to drink, and that led to a downward spiral. At the age of forty-three, he died. It’s very sad, because he was a wonderful guy who never quite found himself. In many ways he had it all, but the pressures of our particular family were not for him. I only wish I had realized this sooner.
Fortunately for me, I was drawn to business very early, and I was never intimidated by my father, the way most people were. I stood up to him, and he respected that. We had a relationship that was almost businesslike. I sometimes wonder if we’d have gotten along so well if I hadn’t been as business-oriented as I am.
Even in elementary school, I was a very assertive, aggressive kid. In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye—I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled. I’m not proud of that, but it’s clear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way. The difference now is that I like to use my brain instead of my fists.
I was always something of a leader in my neighborhood. Much the way it is today, people either liked me a lot, or they didn’t like me at all. In my own crowd I was very well liked, and I tended to be the kid that others followed. As an adolescent I was mostly interested in creating mischief, because for some reason I liked to stir things up, and I liked to test people. I’d throw water balloons, shoot spitballs, and make a ruckus in the schoolyard and at birthday parties. It wasn’t malicious so much as it was aggressive. My brother Robert likes to tell the story of the time when it became clear to him where I was headed.
Robert is two years younger than I am, and we have always been very close, although he is much quieter and more easygoing than I am. One day we were in the playroom of our house, building with blocks. I wanted to build a very tall building, but it turned out that I didn’t have enough blocks. I asked Robert if I could borrow some of his, and he said, “Okay, but you have to give them back when you’re done.” I ended up using all of my blocks, and then all of his, and when I was done, I’d created a beautiful building. I liked it so much that I glued the whole thing together. And that was the end of Robert’s blocks.
When I turned thirteen, my father decided to send me to a military school, assuming that a little military training might be good for me. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea, but it turned out he was right. Beginning in the eighth grade I went to the New York Military Academy in upstate New York. I stayed through my senior year, and along the way I learned a lot about discipline, and about channeling my aggression into achievement. In my senior year I was appointed a captain of the cadets.
There was one teacher in particular who had a big impact on me. Theodore Dobias was a former drill sergeant in the marines, and physically he was very tough and very rough, the kind of guy who could slam into a goalpost wearing a football helmet and break the post rather than his head. He didn’t take any back talk from anyone, least of all from kids who came from privileged backgrounds. If you stepped out of line, Dobias smacked you and he smacked you hard. Very quickly I realized that I wasn’t going to make it with this guy by trying to take him on physically. A few less fortunate kids chose that route, and they ended up getting stomped. Most of my classmates took the opposite approach and became nebbishes. They never challenged Dobias about anything.
I took a third route, which was to use my head to get around the guy. I figured out what it would take to get Dobias on my side. In a way, I finessed him. It helped that I was a good athlete, since he was the baseball coach and I was the captain of the team. But I also learned how to play him.
What I did, basically, was to convey that I respected his authority, but that he didn’t intimidate me. It was a delicate balance. Like so many strong guys, Dobias had a tendency to go for the jugular if he smelled weakness. On the other hand, if he sensed strength but you didn’t try to undermine him, he treated you like a man. From the time I figured that out—and it was more an instinct than a conscious thought—we got along great.
I was a good enough student at the academy, although I can’t say I ever worked very hard. I was lucky that it came relatively easily to me, because I was never all that interested in schoolwork. I understood early on that the whole academic thing was only a preliminary to the main event—which was going to be whatever I did after I graduated from college.
Almost from the time I could walk, I’d been going to construction sites with my father. Robert and I would tag along and spend our time hunting for empty soda bottles, which we’d take to the store for deposit money. As a teenager, when I came home from school for vacation, I followed my father around to learn about the business close up—dealing with contractors or visiting buildings or negotiating for a new site.
You made it in my father’s business—rent-controlled and rent-stabilized buildings—by being very tough and very relentless. To turn a profit, you had to keep your costs down, and my father was always very price-conscious. He’d negotiate just as hard with a supplier of mops and floor wax as he would with the general contractor for the larger items on a project. One advantage my father had was that he knew what everything cost. No one could put anything over on him. If you know, for example, that a plumbing job is going to cost the contractor $400,000, then you know how far you can push the guy. You’re not going to try to negotiate him down to $300,000, because that’s just going to put him out of business. But you’re also not going to let him talk you into $600,000.
The other way my father got contractors to work for a good price was by selling them on his reliability. He’d offer a low price for a job, but then he’d say, “Look, with me you get paid, and you get paid on time, and with someone else, who knows if you ever see your money?” He’d also point out that with him they’d get in and out quickly and on to the next job. And finally, because he was always building, he could hold out the promise of plenty of future work. His arguments were usually compelling.
My father was also an unbelievably demanding taskmaster. Every morning at six, he’d be there at the site and he would just pound and pound and pound. He was almost a one-man show. If a guy wasn’t doing his job the way my father thought it should be done—and I mean any job, because he could do them all—he’d jump in and take over.
It was always amusing to watch a certain scenario repeat itself. My father would start a building in, say, Flatbush, at the same time that two competitors began putting up their own buildings nearby. Invariably, my father would finish his building three or four months before his competitors did. His building would also always be a little better-looking than the other two, with a nicer, more spacious lobby and larger rooms in the apartments themselves. He’d rent them out quickly, at a time when it wasn’t so easy to rent. Eventually, one or both of his competitors would go bankrupt before they’d finish their buildings, and my father would step in and buy them out. I saw this happen over and over.
In 1949, when I was just three years old, my father began building Shore Haven Apartments, the first of several large apartment complexes that eventually made him one of the biggest landlords in New York’s outer boroughs. Because he built the projects so efficiently, my father did exceptionally well with them. At the time, the government was still in the business of financing lower- and middle-income housing. To build Shore Haven, for example, my father got a loan of $10.3 million from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The loan was based on what the agency projected as a fair and reasonable cost for the project, including a builder’s profit of 7.5 percent.
By pushing his contractors very hard, and negotiating hard with his suppliers, my father was able to bring the project in ahead of schedule and almost $1 million under budget. The term “windfall profits” was actually coined to describe what my father and some others managed to earn through hard work and competence. Eventually such profits were disallowed.
In the meantime, however, my father put up thousands of good quality lower- and middle-income apartments of the sort that no one is building today because it’s not profitable and government subsidies have been eliminated. To this day, the Trump buildings in Queens and Brooklyn are considered among the best reasonably priced places to live in New York.
After I graduated from New York Military Academy in 1964 I flirted briefly with the idea of attending film school at the University of Southern California. I was attracted to the glamour of the movies, and I admired guys like Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, and most of all Louis B. Mayer, whom I considered great showmen. But in the end I decided real estate was a much better business.
I began by attending Fordham University in the Bronx, mostly because I wanted to be close to home. I got along very well with the Jesuits who ran the school, but after two years, I decided that as long as I had to be in college, I might as well test myself against the best. I applied to the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania and I got in. At the time, if you were going to make a career in business, Wharton was the place to go. Harvard Business School may produce a lot of CEOs—guys who manage public companies—but the real entrepreneurs all seemed to go to Wharton: Saul Steinberg, Leonard Lauder, Ron Perelman—the list goes on and on.
Perhaps the most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials. It didn’t take me long to realize that there was nothing particularly awesome or exceptional about my classmates, and that I could compete with them just fine. The other important thing I got from Wharton was a Wharton degree. In my opinion, that degree doesn’t prove very much, but a lot of people I do business with take it very seriously, and it’s considered very prestigious. So all things considered, I’m glad I went to Wharton.
I was also very glad to get finished. I immediately moved back home and went to work full-time with my father. I continued to learn a lot, but it was during this period that I began to think about alternatives.
For starters, my father’s scene was a little rough for my tastes—and by that I mean physically rough. I remember, for example, going around with the men we called rent collectors. To do this job you had to be physically imposing, because when it came to collecting rent from people who didn’t want to pay, size mattered a lot more than brains.
One of the first tricks I learned was that you never stand in front of someone’s door when you knock. Instead you stand by the wall and reach over to knock. The first time a collector explained that to me, I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. “What’s the point?” I said. He looked at me like I was crazy. “The point,” he said, “is that if you stand to the side, the only thing exposed to danger is your hand.” I still wasn’t sure what he meant. “In this business,” he said, “if you knock on the wrong apartment at the wrong time, you’re liable to get shot.”
My father had never sheltered me, but even so, this was not a world I found very attractive. I’d just graduated from Wharton, and suddenly here I was in a scene that was violent at worst and unpleasant at best. For example, there were tenants who’d throw their garbage out the window, because it was easier than putting it in the incinerator. At one point, I instituted a program to teach people about using the incinerators. The vast majority of tenants were just fine, but the bad element required attention, and to me it just wasn’t worth it.
The second thing I didn’t find appealing was that the profit margins were so low. You had no choice but to pinch pennies, and there was no room for any luxuries. Design was beside the point because every building had to be pretty much the same: four walls, common brick façades, and straight up. You used red brick, not necessarily because you liked it but because it was a penny a brick cheaper than tan brick.
I still remember a time when my father visited the Trump Tower site, midway through construction. Our façade was a glass curtain wall, which is far more expensive than brick. In addition, we were using the most expensive glass you can buy—bronze solar. My father took one look, and he said to me, “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 is going to look up anyway.” It was a classic, Fred Trump standing there on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue trying to save a few bucks. I was touched, and of course I understood where he was coming from—but also exactly why I’d decided to leave.
The real reason I wanted out of my father’s business—more important than the fact that it was physically rough and financially tough—was that I had loftier dreams and visions. And there was no way to implement them building housing in the outer boroughs.
Looking back, I realize now that I got some of my sense of showmanship from my mother. She always had a flair for the dramatic and the grand. She was a very traditional housewife, but she also had a sense of the world beyond her. I still remember my mother, who is Scottish by birth, sitting in front of the television set to watch Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and not budging for an entire day. She was just enthralled by the pomp and circumstance, the whole idea of royalty and glamour. I also remember my father that day, pacing around impatiently. “For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he’d say. “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.” My mother didn’t even look up. They were total opposites in that sense. My mother loves splendor and magnificence, while my father, who is very down-to-earth, gets excited only by competence and efficiency.