From a very early age, my grandfather had a keen appreciation for the value of hype. ...was the Trump Show Boat, a massive yacht adorned with giant TRUMP signs. Every time the loudspeaker played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” sandy men and women would stand up at their beach towels and salute, according to The New York Times, putting the Trump company firmly on the side of American patriotism.
FREDDIE’S DEAD One day in the future, my uncle Donald would shock the world by winning an important election. But let me point out that he wasn’t the first member of the Trump family to confound the experts with a stunning victory at the polls. That would be me. And I have to give at least some of the credit to my restroom hand towels. The paper kind. The ones that roll out of a boxy metal dispenser on the lavatory wall. I knew all my opponents in the race for Student Council president. They were friends of mine. That’s what happens at a small school like Kew-Forest, where I’d been with some of my classmates for the full twelve years. But that didn’t mean our race for Student Council president wasn’t highly competitive. To have a chance, I knew I’d need to reach my fellow students in unexpected ways. Something more than colorful posters in the hallway. Something more than a promise of less homework or improved lunchroom cuisine. Brand-savvy me took a low-tech approach. After school, I unlocked the big rolls of paper towels in the student bathrooms. I took the rolls home and handwrote over and over on each of them, “FRED FOR PREZ… FRED FOR PREZ… FRED FOR PREZ.” I must have written that slogan a few hundred times. Such dedication. Early in the morning, I put the rolls back in before anyone noticed they were missing. All day long, my campaign rolled out… literally. To lock in the brand for the rest of the school, I got a couple of giant poster boards and placed them on the sixteen-by-sixteen-foot wall at the entryway, right where everyone came through the door. You couldn’t miss them. FRED FOR PREZ No exclamation points. Just clean, clear, very accessible.
Clearly, bashfulness was not a trait I was going to learn from my family or my city. Our neighbors were teachers, civil servants, salesmen, office managers, and small-business people… all white. We had Irish, Italians, Germans, Poles, a few Jews. Not any Blacks or Latinos and not too many Asians either. Not then. Over the years, racial steering would become a point of bitter controversy at some of my grandfather’s buildings and the subject of a sweeping Justice Department civil-rights complaint. The residents certainly knew what was going on. In fact, the singer Woody Guthrie, who lived in a Trump apartment in the 1950s, wrote a song called “Old Man Trump” about the discrimination he witnessed...
“Cracklin’ Rosie” by Neil Diamond is the song that sticks in my mind. It wasn’t like we actually did anything. But there were all these people, enjoying each other’s company, having a wonderful time. I’m not saying the Gelusos were a perfect family. I’m sure there’s no such thing. They probably had their issues like anyone. But I knew this much after one night of staying there: They couldn’t have been any more different from the Trumps. I got my wish, and stayed there until my parents got back on Sunday night.
Okay, maybe my slogan lacked the universality of Donald’s “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” a phrase that, by the way, had also been used by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton over the years. In any case, mine worked. When all the votes were counted, I came out on top. These people knew who I really was. They’d been with me for years. They’d seen me up close and personal, going through all kinds of stuff, good and bad. Kew-Forest hadn’t been able to tame my uncle Donald. But the people there gave me room to fly. Not too many people can say this, I know. But high school was a great time for me. It really was the culmination of all I’d been through so far, emphasizing the good parts and getting past some of the bad. Learning to navigate such a rambunctious extended family. Surviving my parents’ divorce. Being there for my mother and sister. Focusing on my father’s many good traits even as he had trouble taming his demons.
This was Queens in the early 1970s—Archie Bunker, the aftermath of the riots, the war on drugs, and a thousand ethnic punch lines. “Brown Sugar” and “Everyday People” were on the radio. Hip-hop was busting out of the Bronx from pioneers like DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash. The Ramones hadn’t officially assembled yet, but Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy had all graduated (or not) from Forest Hills High. Things were more out in the open then. More raw. Less PC. Back then, people said all kinds of crude, thoughtless, prejudiced things. I don’t need to list them here. In one way or another, maybe everyone in Queens was a racist then. Like many things in life, it was partly a matter of situation and degree. I never heard my grandfather use the N-word. Then again, he did sometimes say schvartze, the Yiddish slur for Black people, and his tenants were uniformly white. That had to mean something, didn’t it? This was a big company. My grandfather did not review every rental application. But the message filtered down clearly from above, starting at the central office on Avenue Z and landing with the building managers and rental agents in the field: These apartments were for white people. By the light of today, it’s impossible to defend any of that, and really, why would anyone want to try? But if we are truly going to understand these family members and their attitudes, they need to be evaluated in the context of changing times. Whatever you want to say about the Trumps who came before me, you also have to say about many others around them—their city, their nation, and their world. Those are the limitations of being from anywhere. Is that an excuse? No, it isn’t. But it also can’t be ignored. No matter what else was happening, the explosive subject of race was never far behind. So instead of making sweeping generalizations or tossing labels around, let me tell you what I know and what I saw. When I was growing up, I never heard that my grandfather had attended an anti-Black rally as a young man. That never came up at the family dinner table. He never mentioned it, and no one else in the family did, if they were aware of it at all. But if you google “Fred Trump” and “race,” which I have done, you can read all about Memorial Day 1927 and a violent demonstration in Queens. “KLANSMEN RIOT IN QUEENS,” declares a report in The New York Times. “KLAN ASSAILS POLICEMEN,” a second Times headline reads. “Fist Fights in Jamaica.” “SCENE AS POLICE AND KLAN CLASH IN QUEENS PARADE,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle announces above a dramatic photo of white-robed Klansmen with an American flag on Queens Boulevard. “Officer at left is about to swing his nightstick over the head of white-sheeted knight, whose friends rushed to assist, causing a free-for-all with two auto loads of policemen,” the caption says. According to the Times, among those who were arrested that day was one Fred C. Trump of 175-24 Devonshire Road, which the 1930 U.S. Census pinpointed as my grandfather’s home address. He’d have been twenty-one at the time. But all these years later, some important details are impossible to pin down. The Times doesn’t say if my grandfather was a member or supporter of the racist Ku Klux Klan. The Times doesn’t say if he was just a bystander or someone who was swept up in the crowd. It doesn’t say exactly what he was accused of, only that he “was discharged.” And the city police records from the incident can’t be found. Another article, in the long-forgotten Daily Star, says Fred Trump was detained “on a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so,” so that might have been it.
(Fred II)It wasn’t that he might already have developed the reflex of us-versus-them. It was that a young Fred Trump, who was work-work-work-all-the-time, would ever make the effort to attend a political rally as a twenty-one-year-old. Something must have motivated him to slip away from one of his construction sites. Normally, he wasn’t public-spirited enough to bother...
It’s surprising, isn’t it? Even people who are struggling, as my father was, can have a positive effect on those around them. My father certainly did on me. With a deep reservoir of patience, he taught me how to drive. I always felt welcome to stay with him, wherever he was living at the time. Though his pilot’s career failed to take off the way he dreamed it would, he shared his love of flying with me and delighted in watching me embrace the airborne thrills that he had. It started when we had that place out in Montauk, a long-ago casualty of the divorce. Back then, he had a Cessna 172. He taught me all about that plane. By the time I was fifteen, he was picking me up early in the morning at our apartment in Jamaica and driving me out to the airfield in Islip, Long Island, for lessons with a flight instructor he knew. The instructor put me through all my drills. He recorded everything I did in a leather-bound training log, carefully initialing each new milestone.
All of this felt profoundly important. I couldn’t imagine not doing everything possible to give my son the best opportunities, and anything I did, Lisa did that-times-ten. All of which is to say there were days that fighting with my family over money seemed like the least important thing in the world. I recognize that’s probably not the attitude to bring to a hard-fought legal battle, especially when the people on the other side had the last name Trump. I’m just describing how I felt.
One day, the instructor said to me: “Let’s fly out to Brookhaven.” Brookhaven was a decommissioned Navy base with long, broad runways. We took off. We landed. As usual, I handled some of it, and my flight instructor handled the rest. It was all going smoothly, when he said to me after the third or fourth landing: “Pull over there.” And he started to hop out. “Where are you going?” I asked him. “You’re going to solo,” he announced. That’s when it hit me. “Wait a second. Do you know I’m fifteen?” “What?” he said, incredulous. I guess he didn’t. “You’re fifteen? How did you get your medical clearance?” Actually, I knew exactly how that had happened. My dad knew a guy—the chief medical officer at the FAA, who also happened to own a horse ranch in Montauk. The FAA doctor signed something that put me in the cockpit, no more questions asked. My instructor didn’t like the sound of any of that. “Kid,” he said to me, suddenly sounding all serious and official, “let’s go back to Islip. We can’t do this now.” I was so disappointed. With those jumbo runways, Brookhaven would have been an ideal spot to solo for the first time, like learning to drive in a Walmart parking lot before the store opened for the day. And I certainly felt old enough. I’d done my drills. My father had taught me a lot. But I knew it would be only a few more months. I just needed to be patient, still not one of my greatest skills. I knew I’d be back. And I was
I had no vote on the escalator ride of June 16, 2015. No one in the family did. Donald had been talking about the need for him to jump into the race for president. But until he did it, I wasn’t totally sure that he would. Once he was in, he was in. He put on his show for America the same way he’d been putting on a show with The Apprentice for the viewers of NBC. He chose the timing. Midday on a Tuesday instead of Thursday night. He chose the locale. The lobby of Trump Tower instead of the boardroom. He chose the music. Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” instead of the Apprentice theme song, “For the Love of Money” by The O’Jays. (Neil Young would later sue the Trump campaign to stop using his music.) He chose his costars: Melania at his side on the down-flowing escalator. His kids at the bottom, waiting for him. Oh, and he chose the extras too: loyal staffers, reporters, and some out-of-work actors who were paid fifty bucks to wave Trump signs and make a lot of noise in the lobby, plus some tourists and New Yorkers decked out in MAGA gear. All of them were there for the spectacle. I don’t think too many of them thought they were looking at the next president of the United States.
After years of prodding from the family and his friends—and maybe some soul-searching of his own—my father decided to give rehab a try. Maryanne drove him out to the Carrier Clinic in Belle Mead, New Jersey, a supportive gesture she would find many occasions to mention in the future. The place sounded nice enough, “a safe, compassionate, respectful environment, set on a beautiful, 100+ acre country setting, in the foothills of the Sourland Mountains.” I got a postcard my dad sent the day he arrived, saying he was doing great, was enjoying the countryside and was ready to take a break from the booze. The very next day, he left the residential rehab facility and never went back. They say you have to be ready. My dad would never be ready. It was heartbreaking. It was like he had just given up. There weren’t many secrets in the Trump family. Who in our family had the self-control to keep a secret? Whatever people were thinking—about each other, about anything—it just came right out in the open. “Your dad couldn’t do it,” Donald said the next time I saw him. That was true, though I’m still not sure why his younger brother felt the need to rub it in like that. Not long after that, my father and I were in the car together. I was driving him back to my grandparents’ house, where he was staying at the time. We were just talking about stuff, nothing important enough that I can even remember. But I can recall exactly where we were—on Highland Avenue and 168th Street, a short walk from the F Train station—and as long as I live, I will never forget what my father said to me that day. “You know,” he said, “you have inherited a bad gene.” A bad gene? What was he getting at? He didn’t wait for me to ask. “You have to be very careful about drinking,” he said. “Never forget that.” I was still seventeen, but I knew everything he had gone through with alcohol. How it had drowned his dreams and narrowed his horizons and how hard it had been to shake.
It’s time to turn the page. Write a new chapter. Break the cycle. Pick whichever analogy you find most comforting. It’s time—long past time—to move beyond the past. It may be “the end of the world as we know it,” as the R.E.M. song goes, but I am ready for the line… “and I feel fine.” One Trump may not be able to redefine the brand that’s been breaking news for so long, but I won’t be changing my name, and I will no longer be the quiet private citizen. We have some things to be proud of in this family and so much left to do. A new generation is coming along. A promising generation. My children’s generation. Whether Maryanne was or wasn’t cruel, what Donald did or should have done, the fact that Grandpa looked down on Freddie’s high-flying dreams—those were the dramas that defined earlier decades. They don’t need to define our future. Enough, already. Let it rest. My generation and the ones that follow, we didn’t launch these hostilities. My children and their cousins, they weren’t even born yet. I appreciate whatever connections I have with my cousins. I am sure that keeping a balance of family and privacy is extremely challenging for Eric, Donnie, and Ivanka. They also know what it’s like to be responsible parents and how that becomes what you work to protect most. As a parent, we get to choose what we carry and what we bury. Over the past couple of years, I have made some changes in my life, many of them propelled by my role as a father. I have begun to face an issue I’d been avoiding, a challenge in my own life that had helped to wreck my father’s future, a challenge he had explicitly warned me about. Alcohol. I think my father was right: We really may have “a bad gene” in this family. I came to the conclusion that, like my father, I was drinking too much and I wasn’t always able to control it. In the fall of 2023, I decided I’d had enough. It wasn’t easy stopping. I thought about it for a long time. Lisa and my children had been encouraging me, sometimes quite forcefully. And I am proud to say I am sober. For all he went through, I believe my father would be proud of me. I make no vows about forever. I say what others have said who’ve preceded me down this road to recovery. I say, “One day at a time.” After almost four decades in the commercial real-estate world, I began winding down my career. I’d worked for terrific companies. Been part of some fascinating deals. Spent an awful lot of time and energy to build a nice lifestyle and support my family. All that was great. I am proud that my career reached such levels. At the same time, I was starting to reappraise what was most important to me. Did I really want to spend the next ten years making commercial real-estate deals? My focus, my passion, seemed to be shifting somewhere else, toward things that felt more gratifying and more important to me. As Grandpa told those people at the Horatio Alger gala: “You must like what you do.” That, ultimately, is the road to successful living. Wouldn’t we have all been better off if Grandpa had applied that rule without exception?
I never thought that drinking was my father’s main problem. His issues went deeper than that. There was all that stuff with his father and his middle brother and all the expectations inside the family. There was the way he was pushed into and then out of the family business. The fact that he’d never quite been able to find his own way. The drinking, I was convinced, started out as a way to suppress all that and to ease his fear and anxiety. But if you drink enough—and you’re inclined in that direction—the drinking can also become the problem all on its own. I still marvel at the courage it must have taken for him to say that to me, after the price he had already paid. “Thanks,” I told him simply. I would take his warning to heart. In the years to come, we’d have to see if I could also put it into action. There was no doubt what I’d be doing after high school. My parents expected it. My grandparents expected it. All my teachers expected it. In our senior class of twenty-nine at the Kew-Forest School, everyone was going to college. Harvard, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins—the fat envelopes came from all kinds of fancy places. My cousin David was already off at the University of Chicago. My great buddy Michael Siegel, who’d been in my class since first grade, was bound for Amherst. As I’ve mentioned, I certainly wasn’t the scholar in my immediate family—Mary had that all sewn up—or in my 1980 graduating class. But I was definitely going to college. I applied to a bunch of schools, and Rollins College was one of the ones that accepted me. Rollins had a beautiful campus amid the palm trees and red-brick walkways of Winter Park, Florida. Olympic swimming pool. High-dive platform. A campus where you could enjoy every imaginable sport under a blazing Florida sun. To me, Rollins was the Harvard of the South. Ah, there’s nothing quite like slalom runs around alligators or hitting the wake on trick skis on Lake Virginia. I had some really good professors there, who continued to encourage my love of reading and history, watering the seeds planted so painstakingly by my great teachers at Kew-Forest. I was thrilled to be on my own in Florida and thrilled to be at Rollins. In a way, it was like going to camp on Cape Cod, except that I spent time in the library and my stay could conceivably last for years. When I didn’t make the varsity soccer team my freshman year, my dad tried to soothe my disappointment. “You’re going from a small pond to a big pond,” he told me. Even though Rollins wasn’t that big a pond, it was a whole lot larger than Kew-Forest. Once I was away at college, my dad really began to deteriorate. The alcohol wasn’t only sabotaging his life plans now—it was also robbing his health. He was sick a lot, in and out of the hospital, and not feeling so hot even when he was back at his apartment. When he felt a little better, he did small maintenance chores at some of the family apartment buildings, but as the year rolled on, that became even more sporadic. I visited him whenever I was back in Queens for a long weekend or a holiday, and my dad always seemed excited to see me. Though his energy level was just above lethargic and his face was pale, he rallied whenever I appeared. We talked about all kinds of things. What I was studying in college. How I liked Florida. Any news about my grandparents. How the weather had been. As usual, we didn’t talk a lot of sports. He certainly had no interest in sports other than fishing and boating. Every way and every day, he remained his own person. The black sheep of the family. The adamant free speaker. Not a member of anyone’s tribe. At the same time, he certainly didn’t seem inclined to change the behavior that was so obviously destructive to him. Really, what incentive did he have? His marriage was over. His children were growing into adults. What exactly did he have to get straight for? His pilot dreams were ancient history. He’d already made clear how he felt about being part of the Trump family business. A lot of this was in his mind. But in his mind, he was truly trapped with no way out. He got occasional calls from his Lehigh fraternity brothers, but when I was there, I never saw anyone from the family stopping by. I got the strong impression that their visits were few and far between. He did mention Rob, which made perfect sense to me. Donald or Maryanne must have assigned that task to him. “You go visit Freddie.” That way, the other siblings could feel like they had discharged any duty and didn’t have to feel guilty about leaving their ailing brother alone. He asked about Mary, but I don’t think they were in much contact by then. She never said to me, “I’m going to see Dad,” and he never said, “I saw Mary.” They both missed out, but I didn’t press either one of them. By the start of that summer between my first and second years at Rollins, his hospital stays were getting more frequent. I visited him at Jamaica Hospital, the well-endowed medical center that for decades had been a favorite charity of my grandparents. That’s where Donald and several other family members were born. That’s where my grandmother went whenever she needed to. Jamaica Hospital even had a Trump Pavilion for Nursing and Rehabilitation. I’d driven past it hundreds of times when I was on the Van Wyck.
Now it felt different. My father was there in a battle for his life. But that didn’t mean my father had lost his spirit. He never did. Even at the lowest point, some part of that spirit still shone. When he wasn’t in the hospital, he was often staying at my grandparents’ house. Not in his childhood bedroom. In the attic. Where Mary and I used to stay sometimes as kids when we spent the night. There were a couple of twin beds up there that looked like army cots. To me, this felt like the low point. I visited him several times, but I’m not sure how many of my relatives climbed the stairs to look in on him. As far as I knew, the only other person who stayed in the attic was the housekeeper. Until my dad. He didn’t complain about it. Not to me, at least. But here he was, a grown man, living on and off in his parents’ house—and he didn’t even get one of the bedrooms. It was a big, fancy mansion, but these were not fancy accommodations, though later on as he deteriorated, he did move for a little while into Rob’s old room. To me, the scene did not feel right. And soon, he was back in the hospital. That’s where he was the next time I went to see him, which was January 1981. After we caught up, he handed me a bank withdrawal slip, already filled out. “Go to Chase,” he said. “Get this amount of money. I want you to buy a Polaroid camera.” I was thinking, Great, a camera… I could sure use one of those during the three weeks I’ll spend overseas as part of my second semester. I went to the bank like he asked me to. I found a store that sold Polaroid cameras. I chose one of the nicer models and brought it back to the hospital. My father seemed like he’d been waiting for me. “Okay,” he said, “there’s a young girl down the hall. She has cancer. I don’t think she’s going to last much longer. And she wants a camera. The nurse will show you her room. Give the camera to the girl.” Wow. Here I was, thinking, Oh, boy, I’ll be taking this camera with me to Europe. But my father’s gesture was so moving, I didn’t mind that he had a different plan. This was even better. Beneath all the pain and torment, yes, that indomitable spirit still shone. That told you everything you needed to know about Fred Trump Jr.
The life was slipping out of him. His biggest dreams had crashed and burned. He had every reason to feel bitter and disappointed and mad. And yet… and yet… he still had the deep-down instinct to care for someone else—the underdog, as he would say. There was no point at which he couldn’t take the time to be kind to another person. There was so much love and passion inside him. Despite it all, he was just a good, good guy. September 27, 1981. A couple of weeks into my sophomore year at Rollins. The phone rang in the common room of my dorm. It was 6:15 in the morning. “Trump!” a bleary voice called out. “It’s for you.” Mena Bonnewitz was my mom’s first cousin and my “surrogate mother” while I was at Rollins. She and her husband, Van, lived in Orlando, about twenty minutes from campus. I had known them and their kids all my life. They were a great Catholic family. When I came down to Florida for college, they kept a friendly eye on me. They often had me to their house for Sunday dinner. They tried to stay in touch. Still, this was unusual. They didn’t normally call at 6:15 a.m. “Hi, Fred. It’s Mena. There’s an art exhibition going on at Rollins this morning. Sheila and I are going to go over there. Can we stop by?” “Okay,” I said. “Sure.” Something was strange about all this. I hit the shower, took an aspirin, and drowned my eyes with eye drops. I didn’t overthink what was going on. I’d long since learned not to go looking for trouble. If trouble had my name on it, it would surely find me soon enough. Standing in the door of my dorm room, that’s where Mena and her daughter broke the news. “Fred,” Mena said right away, “your dad passed away last night.” Instead of telling me over the telephone, I guess my mom had asked her cousin to do it in person. If I needed an embrace or a shoulder or anything in that moment, Mom had made sure I’d be taken care of. I heard her words without really processing them. I just kind of let the message sink in. I took a hard breath and gritted my teeth. I wasn’t rattled exactly. I was numb. Okay, I thought, at least I won’t have to go to an art exhibit. After the time I’d spent with my father that year, I can’t say the news was a big surprise. Standing there in the door of my dorm room, all I really knew was that I had lost my father and my life would never be quite the same again. “We have a reservation on a flight for you. I know you’ll want to get up there.” I did. I wasn’t looking forward to anything that was about to happen, but I couldn’t imagine not being there. And then there was this: The flight from Orlando to JFK was on a TWA Boeing 707, the exact aircraft my dad had trained on. He loved the 707 and knew every inch of it, from its swept-wing design to its Pratt & Whitney JT3C turbojet engines to its six-abreast seating in economy. I spent the whole two hours and forty minutes thinking how sad it was that my father wasn’t in the cockpit. What might have been.
~~~
Writing this book was probably the hardest thing that Fred C. Trump III had ever done. Yet he did it so very wonderfully. This is a man I admire for a number of reasons; I think I would enjoy meeting him. In fact, I would enjoy meeting his sister, Mary, as well (see her book in the right column). From a personality standpoint, I am more like Mary, as displayed in her book and as well as Fred described her... We have both been hurt by family decisions and find it hard to do anything but withdraw... Fred, on the other hand, has continued to strive to maintain a relationship with his living family, looking toward the future. His grace surely has been given to him by God...
Or perhaps because of his love for his father and for his own family. One thing is clear. Fred Trump III loves and cares for people deeply. He has seen the worst of them and still strives to look to the future, whatever that might be.
In that respect alone, I highly recommend you read this surprisingly open and honest autobiography. Some of you may have seen him on the news... such as this one: There are others as well
"I don't know...he doesn't recognize you...maybe you should let him Die!!!!!"
